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 <\/em>, director Nic Roeg\u2019s 1985 adaptation of Terry Johnson\u2019s 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\u2019s new fictionalized movie about her life (an adaptation of the Joyce Carol Oates novel). <\/p>\n\n\n\n Like Blonde<\/em>, Roeg\u2019s film approaches its real world icons\u2014along with Monroe and Einstein, Insignificance <\/em>also features retired baseball star and Monroe\u2019s second husband Joe DiMaggio (Gary Busey) and redbaiting senator Joseph McCarthy (Tony Curtis)\u2014as the symbols they became, rather than the people they actually were. As with several of the characters in Blonde <\/em>(including Arthur Miller and John F. Kennedy, as well as DiMaggio), Insignificance <\/em>credits its four leads not by name, but profession: The Actress, The Professor, The Ballplayer and The Senator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s <\/em>release as any of that film\u2019s 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\u2019s been the main approach taken by artists long before Dominik\u2019s adapted Blonde<\/em>\u2013which isn\u2019t even the first adaptation of the novel. (I mean, Andy Warhol, anyone?)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Although not at all a biopic of Monroe, Insignificance<\/em> does feature several flashbacks to her and other characters\u2019 upbringings, and ultimately it zeroes in on the same key experiences as Blonde <\/em>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 <\/em>more concensual and far less graphically than in Blonde<\/em>), and her debilitating and emotionally devastating gynecological ailments (as in Blonde<\/em>, she suffers an unwilling abortion in Insignificance<\/em>, though again, it\u2019s far less graphic). Insignificance<\/em>\u2019s bravura opening\u2014a kaleidoscopic staging of the instantly iconic publicity stunt for The Seven Year Itch<\/em> 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 <\/em>that I would be shocked if Dominik didn’t use it as a visual reference when staging his version.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Playwright Johnson, who hadn\u2019t even seen The Seven Year Itch<\/em> (or most of Monroe\u2019s films) when he began writing Insignificance<\/em>, hit upon his central conceit while researching Stanislavky\u2019s 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\u2014he\u2019s in town to give a speech at a World Peace Conference\u2014and 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 <\/em>demonstrates the concept to him <\/em>with the help of some plastic toys. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019t actually understand it. For all of Blonde\u2019s <\/em>many, many sterling qualities\u2014including an incredible lead performance from Ana De Armas\u2014the 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 <\/em>than the entirety of Blonde<\/em>, even though the latter movie clocks in almost twice the runtime.<\/p>\n\n\n\n It\u2019s very easy to see why Roeg\u2014the 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\u2014responded 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\u2019s play, heavily laden with the type of Fruedian\/Jungian archetypes, mystic spirituality, and overheated sexuality found throughout Roeg\u2019s ouvre, also examines one of the great overriding obsessions of his work: the cult of celebrity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n From Roeg\u2019s very first film as director\u2014the infamous British cult classic Performance <\/em>(197), which he co-directed with Donald Cammell\u2014he liked to mess with viewers\u2019 preconceived notions of stars by casting them in sticky roles that mirrored their public image while simultaneously subverting or even perverting it. In Performance<\/em>, 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\u2014after he\u2019s swapped psyches, Persona<\/em>-style, with a conservative gangster \u2014 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<\/em> (1976) and Bad Timing<\/em> (1980), respectively. He adds a similar meta-narrative twist to Insignificance<\/em> by casting Curtis\u2014Monroe’s co-star in 1959\u2019s Some Like It Hot<\/em> and, according to him, her one-time lover\u2014as 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\u2019s Curtis who viciously assaults her in the movie makes an already upsetting scene even more unsettling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Released in the middle of Reagan\u2019s presidency, a period in which a movie star president presided over a new wave of communist hysteria and mounting nuclear anxieties, Insignificance<\/em> was as much a movie about its era as it was about the \u201850s. 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\u2014with Monroe, ironically, standing as the symbol for said dead\u2014it is also very much a movie about right goddamn now. “Insignificance” is now streaming on the Criterion Channel.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2022\/10\/Insignificance-2-1024x694.jpg\")
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