On September 23, Andrew Dominic’s much-anticipated adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ bestselling “Blonde”, about the desperate life of Norma Jane Baker, who plays Marilyn Monroe, will be released on Netflix and likely to be shown to the world. Premiere before that at the Venice Film Festival. Oates had already seen the film and agreed to it, as she revealed during a discussion at 21st Neuchâtel Intl. The wonderful film festival in Switzerland.
“Andrew Dominic is an absolutely wonderful director. I think he manages to show the Norma Jean Baker experience from her perspective, rather than from the outside, where the man is looking at a woman. He immersed himself in her perspective,” Oates said.
In her novel, published in 2000, Oates explored the phenomenon of Norma Jean Baker losing her own identity to Marilyn Monroe’s, an identity entirely made up, by becoming a product exploited by the film industry. “She gained fame in the world, but that is not an identity you can live with. He is the one who made a lot of money for many men, but not much for herself. When she died at the age of 36, she didn’t have enough money for a proper funeral,” said Oates. “.
The teaser for “Blonde” shows Norma Jane Baker working by her makeup artist, waiting for Marilyn Monroe to arrive at her mirror, afraid she won’t come. “The transformation into Marilyn always took hours,” Oates said. “Anna de Armas, the gorgeous actress who plays her, I think it took four hours of makeup. So when you see them on screen, they don’t really exist. It’s like a great picture, but to make it a livelihood means taking on a great deal of pain. As Marilyn progresses At the age, she was still given these roles that a young star would play, and she was offended. You can’t continue playing this stupid blonde near the age of 40. Some people say she committed suicide. I don’t necessarily think so. I think she probably died of something like despair severe.”
Joyce Carol Oates
Courtesy of Dustin Cohen
Oates, who attended the festival to be president of the international jury, has written more than 150 novels and stories in a career spanning more than 60 years. She has been a multiple Pulitzer Prize finalist, five-time Bram Stoker winner, and has established herself as a ruthless observer of American society. She is very active on Twitter, with over 136,000 tweets, and is a fierce opponent of Donald Trump.
Next month, her new work “The Babysitter,” based on a serial killer who lived in the Detroit area when she lived there, will be on shelves. The novel explores the feelings of fear and anxiety that I felt in the middle of the experience, rather than when looking at them. “I wanted to chart emotions and how people relate and relate to each other during the period of time when there is a state of hanging anxiety before you reach the end of something.”
At NIFFF, the prolific writer gave an insight into her way of working. At the age of eighty-four, she was still studying creative writing at Princeton University. “Before you really start writing, think, daydream, meditate, take long walks on your own to think about what you’re going to work on,” she advised.
She herself begins writing every day in the early morning, after running or walking for an hour. “When I run, I think of the scenes unfolding, I imagine the interactions. You can build the whole novel that way before anything is written.”
Another tip she gives her students is to start with short texts. “Every time you finish a text that you know is good, you get a feeling of happiness, a sense of completeness. A novel can be a burden because years and years can pass before you finish it and somehow it can drag you down. Many writers have depression and a tendency toward depression, so You have to be aware of that.”
She told Variety how saddened there were that there were so many untold stories she feared not being able to write them. “Like most writers, I have folders and drawers full of outlines, drawings, and thousands of pages of notes. I have novels that look very promising to me, and they’ve all been planned in great detail, but I don’t have time to write them. I can only work on one at a time. I have a lot.” More work to write than I will live to write, and it makes me feel bad.”
Noting that this was her first trip to Switzerland, she said: “I am impressed and happy to be in Switzerland, first of all because it is a civilized country, and that is kind of amazing and original for someone who lives in the United States, especially since 2016 with such fierce campaigns for the presidency. And our entire community was very polarized,” Oates said.
“Since 2016, it has been very clear that there are two Americans, so the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court in June was not at all surprising,” she told Variety. America has been very tough and very punitive towards women. There is a history in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries of seeing women as second-class citizens and not entirely human. There has always been a bias against women, so passing laws to control it is very normal in the United States. But some thought we had gotten past that since the 1960s, that we were more educated, but that we have a complicated situation in the country, where a minority of evangelical Christians have unequal power.”
This elderly minority is on the decline, she said, which is why it has become so aggressive lately. Oates is very optimistic about the younger generation: “There is a great deal of bigotry in the United States in some quarters against liberals, blacks, women, immigrants, transgender people, gays and lesbians, a large group that white minority evangelical Christians fear. That’s why I feel optimistic about the future: There will be more Immigrants and there will be more children born to educated people, and more education. Education is the key! So in the end, I think the majority will get stronger, and will swing toward more liberal policies again. This will happen in the coming decades, maybe 20 years or so.”
The Catholic writer-turned-atheist was equally outspoken when asked about religion: it interests the inherently skeptical writer only as a psychological and historical phenomenon. “As I got older, it seemed to me that organized religion was a way to control and manipulate people’s minds so that they would accept something about reality that should not be accepted.”
In The Book of American Martyrs, published in 2017, Oates, herself a pro-choice, skillfully addressed the topic of abortion, revealing the opposing views of anti-abortion evangelist Luther Dunphy and abortion doctor Augustus Voorhees, respectively the killer and his victim as well as their daughters. Deftly putting herself in the skin of her characters is one of the many talents of the New York-born author.
“There is no difference between writing from the perspective of a man or a woman, a child or an elderly person,” she tells Variety. “The challenge for a writer is to find language that is original enough to interest the writer. The challenge for the artist is to challenge himself, so I have to find a specific language for each different novel. Language is the challenge.
Oates has often described herself in interviews as a person with no personality, saying that she is “as transparent as a glass of water.” In her work, she explores different points of view and refuses to write from her point of view. “I’m interested in holding a mirror in front of the world, observing others and exploring what’s inside experiences. I don’t judge. I don’t care about putting my shadow on things. I’m more interested in reversing the complexity of reality,” she said in Neuchâtel. From just one perspective of mine.”
In the same way, there is no doubt that she wrote the story of her life. “I don’t have a story,” she insisted. “We just don’t have one. One day or one hour in your life can be a whole story. I’ve never felt like I wanted to write about myself. I care more about others.”
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