Film aficionado Alex Ho makes a strong point connecting the Netflix movie Blonde starring Ana De Armas and Olivia Wilde’s Don’t Worry Darling to video essays’ critical impulses of subverting mainstream media’s power to revisit and create over history.
GENTLEMEN PREFER BLONDES (remix remixed 2013) by Laura Mulvey: http://mediacommons.org/intransition/2014/03/04/intransition-editors-introduction
Andrew Dominick’s “Blonde” (2022) is often hyper-focused on minuscule moments of Marilyn Monroe (played by Ana de Armas) in states of pose (and some times repose). In these moments, Dominick seems to be covering some of the same territory as thinkers, like Laura Mulvey and Richard Dyer. Laura Mulvey in “Death at 24x per Second” (2006) reflected on how the technological age since the advent of the VCR has reanimated cinephilia, affording one the power to revisit, retime, and freeze old media. Prolific videographic scholar and Internet film studies advocate Catherine Grant helped Mulvey publish her experimentation with a 30-second clip of the opening number of “Gentleman Prefer Blondes”, focusing on the precision with which the original Marilyn was able to freeze herself into an ecstatic expression that is her instantly recognizable signature.
What Mulvey describes as a Barthes-ian “death…
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