Say what you will about the way Marylin Monroe is treated in Blonde, that film never drops an A-bomb on her.
The image of Monroe twirling around in her famous white Travilla dress while engulfed in flames may only be part of a climactic hallucination in Insignificance , director Nic Roeg’s 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson’s long dark night of the cosmic soul comedy, which imagines a meeting between Monroe (Theresa Russell) and Albert Einstein (Michael Emil) in a New York City hotel room on a hot and muggy night in the summer of 1954, but it is merely an externalization of the infernal torment the doomed actress suffers throughout Andrew Dominik’s new fictionalized movie about her life (an adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel).
Like Blonde, Roeg’s film approaches its real world icons—along with Monroe and Einstein, Insignificance also features retired baseball star and Monroe’s second husband Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey) and redbaiting senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis)—as the symbols they became, rather than the people they actually were. As with several of the characters in Blonde (including Arthur Miller and John F. Kennedy, as well as DiMaggio), Insignificance credits its four leads not by name, but profession: The Actress, The Professor, The Ballplayer and The Senator.
As such, neither movie is interested in presenting a biographically accurate portrayal of Monroe (nee Norma Jean Mortensen) the person, but Monroe as she exists in our collective conception. This has brooked as much controversy and anger in the wake of Blonde’s release as any of that film’s brutal depictions of sexual violence or conceptually ambitious moments (such as a conversation between Monroe and her would-be child in utero), even though it’s been the main approach taken by artists long before Dominik’s adapted Blonde–which isn’t even the first adaptation of the novel. (I mean, Andy Warhol, anyone?)
Although not at all a biopic of Monroe, Insignificance does feature several flashbacks to her and other characters’ upbringings, and ultimately it zeroes in on the same key experiences as Blonde in its understanding and representation of her: her orphaning as a child, her sexual exploitation at the hands of studio heads (here presented as slightly more concensual and far less graphically than in Blonde), and her debilitating and emotionally devastating gynecological ailments (as in Blonde, she suffers an unwilling abortion in Insignificance, though again, it’s far less graphic). Insignificance’s bravura opening—a kaleidoscopic staging of the instantly iconic publicity stunt for The Seven Year Itch in which Monroe poses above that famous sewer grate and has her skirt blown up around her legs in front of a crowd of of salivating men (and one very angry DiMaggio) is so similar in its blocking to its analog in Blonde that I would be shocked if Dominik didn’t use it as a visual reference when staging his version.
Playwright Johnson, who hadn’t even seen The Seven Year Itch (or most of Monroe’s films) when he began writing Insignificance, hit upon his central conceit while researching Stanislavky’s techniques for actors, of which Monroe was a devotee. He stumbled upon a piece of trivia about how, when people went through her possessions following her fatal overdose in 1962, they discovered a signed photograph of Einstein. This led him to imagine a meeting between the two. At first, he came up with the idea of Monroe barging up to Einstein’s hotel room—he’s in town to give a speech at a World Peace Conference—and offering her body in exchange for him explaining the Theory of Relativity to her. This morphed into a far more interesting scene in which she demonstrates the concept to him with the help of some plastic toys.
The scene, the most famous in both the original play (in which Judy Davis starred as Monroe) and film, is a visually and conceptually inventive, arousing, and joyously comic tour de force ultimately suffused with sadness when Einstein discovers that although Monroe has so perfectly memorized the theory that she can explain it better than he can, she doesn’t actually understand it. For all of Blonde’s many, many sterling qualities—including an incredible lead performance from Ana De Armas—the criticisms that its torturous depiction of Monroe as an anguished victim comes off as one-note are entirely fair, and this bit alone does more to make her a three-dimensional character in Insignificance than the entirety of Blonde, even though the latter movie clocks in almost twice the runtime.
It’s very easy to see why Roeg—the English auteur best known for his feverishly elliptical and damn near cubist editing style (an aesthetic that Dominik also employs in his film) and penchant for rococo, grotesque and surreal psychosexual fantasias—responded to the material so much. Along with providing a showcase for his then-wife and muse Theresa Russell (arguably the most underrated actress of her day), Johnson’s play, heavily laden with the type of Fruedian/Jungian archetypes, mystic spirituality, and overheated sexuality found throughout Roeg’s ouvre, also examines one of the great overriding obsessions of his work: the cult of celebrity.
From Roeg’s very first film as director—the infamous British cult classic Performance (197), which he co-directed with Donald Cammell—he liked to mess with viewers’ preconceived notions of stars by casting them in sticky roles that mirrored their public image while simultaneously subverting or even perverting it. In Performance, he casts Mick Jagger as a burnt-out and reclusive rock star living in squalor. Hardly that far removed from the real Jagger at the time, but the fact that Roeg ends up blowing his brains out by the end of the film—after he’s swapped psyches, Persona-style, with a conservative gangster — certainly complicates things. The same is true for the way Roeg would use fellow music superstars David Bowie and Art Garfunkle in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) and Bad Timing (1980), respectively. He adds a similar meta-narrative twist to Insignificance by casting Curtis—Monroe’s co-star in 1959’s Some Like It Hot and, according to him, her one-time lover—as the brutish and repugnant McCarthy stand-in, who pines for Monroe only to not recognize her as the real thing when he finally meets her. The fact that it’s Curtis who viciously assaults her in the movie makes an already upsetting scene even more unsettling.
Released in the middle of Reagan’s presidency, a period in which a movie star president presided over a new wave of communist hysteria and mounting nuclear anxieties, Insignificance was as much a movie about its era as it was about the ‘50s. Viewed today, amidst fresh fears of nuclear apocalypse being levied by the President of the former Soviet Union, an American rightwing once again seeing communists hiding in every shadow, the threat of a disasterous celebrity Presidency looming both behind and potentially ahead of us, and a raging cultural debate about what, if any, moral obligation art owes to the dead—with Monroe, ironically, standing as the symbol for said dead—it is also very much a movie about right goddamn now.
“Insignificance” is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.