William McMaster Murdoch was born to a long line of mariners in 1873. Then, at the turn of the century, he followed in their footsteps. He joined a shipping company, White Star Line, earning a positive reputation and popularity amongst his peers. He married in 1907 to a New Zealand schoolteacher named Ada Banks, whom he met seafaring. Five years later, he would be dead—one of over a thousand people lost to the sinking of the Titanic.
Murdoch’s legacy is complicated by James Cameron’s film, Titanic, where he appears shooting passengers as they board lifeboats. He then turns the gun on himself. None of these events is corroborated by eyewitnesses. Murdoch’s misrepresentation in Titanic, as you might expect, enraged his family. Cameron himself expressed regret for his own script’s treatment of Murdoch, justifying: “I was being a screenwriter. I wasn’t thinking about being a historian…”
Was it Cameron’s moral duty to represent Murdoch in Titanic? If so, what about the ship’s other two thousand two hundred and twenty-three passengers? Werner Herzog said “facts do not constitute truth—there is a deeper stratum”. So, how do we select which incomplete pictures to put our faith in? Where do we choose to find our truths?
Moonage Daydream is a new film about David Robert Jones (David Bowie). It was written, produced, edited and directed by Brett Morgen (who previously released Cobain: Montage of Heck). The film is both a tribute to Jones, and an attempt to resurrect the energetic currents of his live shows. It bombards the audience with noise and colour almost to the point of sensory overload. It is the “definitive” documentary on Jones to most critics—but Morgen disagrees. He claims such a thing is “a fool's errand”; the implication being that you can’t cram a subject of such richness into two hours.
Morgen must have had to make some difficult editorial decisions. He would have compared hundreds of different aspects of Jones to decide on those essential to creating a portrait. Some omissions are quite interesting. There is, for instance, no mention of Jones’ statements in support of fascism and Hitler. There is no mention of Lori Maddox or Sable Starr, two fourteen-year-old L.A. groupies that Jones bedded in his mid-twenties. There is at least lip service to Jones’ interest in the occult—but little more than a brief image of Aleister Crowley.
Many of these angles would serve to create a more complete picture of Jones. His interest in Nazi imagery, for instance, clarifies some lyrics of ‘Oh! You Pretty Things’. His obsession with Kabbalah and magic provides richer meaning to the albums Station to Station and Blackstar. But Morgen’s film kicks all this sleaziness from its shoes, and chooses the reductive—but comfortable and familiar—a portrait of “Bowie”. It does not attack Jones’ image, or challenge or reframe the man’s legacy in any way. It is a psychedelic, seductive, mesmerising puff piece. This is part of the reason for its positive reception: it permits our continued indulgence in a comfortable lie.
A belief in exceptionalism simplifies the world. It legitimises capitalist structures, which are very comforting to trust. It allows us to idolise superheroes, and to objectify celebrities and project our own values onto them. “Bowie” is a poster child for this mentality—a chameleon who has emblemised a different brand of social revolution for every new generation. And so Morgen never really attempts to work out who David Jones was. He doesn’t want to shatter the myth.
Andrew Dominik’s Blonde is reductive in a different way. It’s a biopic focused on the hardships of Norma Jeane Mortenson (Marilyn Monroe) as she danced in the spotlight of Hollywood fame. It sidelines Mortenson’s philanthropic work and robs her of agency, will, courage, and wit. She is a tear-soaked, infantilised punching bag who passively stumbles from one sexual assault to another, vainly grasping for a father figure. Assaults are staged in an explicit and disinterested manner which has challenged mainstream audiences.
Mortenson’s celebrity in Blonde is not a source of awe, but of terror. As Dominik presents it, her death and fame were synonymous. “Marilyn Monroe” is an occupying force, a bodysnatcher who steals and destroys Mortenson’s life. We witness a total subsuming of identity, a woman reduced to nothing but a void in a smiling shell.
Blonde has proven to be the year’s most controversial film. It has a (completely undeserved) NC-17 rating in the U.S. and has provoked spirited discussion from an array of both champions and detractors. Dominik faces accusations of exploiting his subject, and indulging in a leering male gaze which fetishizes rape. Others contend he presents the stark reality of physical, sexual and emotional abuse.
In truth—it’s a bit of both. Conversations surrounding Blonde would have you believe it’s a gauntlet of pornographic misery. But while Dominik’s film does too often become distracted by the naked body of star Ana de Armas, and makes set-pieces of its rape scenes, it is not dominated by these excesses. It is actually a rewarding and thought-provoking piece. Dominik himself put it better than I could: “If I look at an episode of Euphoria, it’s far more graphic than anything going on in Blonde”. The real discomfort is coming from elsewhere.
Dominik is not interested in the woman behind the myth. Blonde is adapted from an openly fictional account of Mortenson’s life. Instead his focus is on how and why certain people are mythologised—and how these myths obliterate the people within them. A previous Dominik work, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, positions Jesse James as America’s first celebrity. On the occasion of his death, James’ body was displayed as a curio. A photograph of the body was so widely circulated that, years before dying in the Titanic, William McMaster Murdoch may have seen it. He would have been nine.
Dominik’s film presents James in a way that directly confronts his myth. James is paranoid, maudlin, and multi-faceted. He is not the gregarious protagonist of a dime novel, but a human being like any other. To say “there was little exceptional about Jesse James” is uncontroversial. The same is not true of Norma Jeane Mortenson. We still live in the mass hallucination which surrounded her—and she is still an image which can be repurposed, reprinted and shoehorned to fit any fashionable contemporary talking point (despite Andy Warhol’s best efforts). Nobody will accept the idea that it could’ve been any of us.
Our mythical dysfunction worsens as we further blur the line between image and reality. Celebrities manufacture authenticity and parasocial relationships to maximise reach. We increasingly worry about our own identities being fractured or erased, even as we produce and project an unprecedented number of images of ourselves. The idea of there being nothing behind the face of Norma Jeane Mortenson touches a very modern nerve. Have we sacrificed our personhood to data, to ether, to meaninglessness?
When people criticise Blonde, they claim it betrays Marilyn Monroe. It’s revealing that they always use the stage name. Their real discomfort is this image of “Marilyn” being disrupted and challenged. Norma Jeane Mortenson is a corpse in Westwood Memorial Park. She has been dead for six decades. Within the next two, the soft collagen in her bones will deteriorate and the bones will crumble. There is nothing of her to betray.
If you feel outraged by Blonde, ask yourself: where is the outrage on behalf of Lori Maddox and Sable Starr? Moonage Daydream chose not to tell their story—a story very similar to Mortenson’s—yet we are happy to let history bury them, because they were not icons. Nobody will mobilise en masse to defend the legacy of William McMaster Murdoch. These people were supporting characters. There was nothing special about them—so say whatever you want. You have nothing to lose.
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“There would be no eulogies for Bob. No photographs of his body would be sold in sundry stores. No people would crowd the streets in the rain to see his funeral cortège. No biographies would be written about him, no children named after him. No-one would ever pay twenty-five cents to stand in the rooms he grew up in. The shotgun would ignite, and Ella-Mae would scream, but Robert Ford would only lay on the floor and look at the ceiling, the light going out of his eyes before he could find the right words.”
Andrew O’Keefe