'SNL' Skewers Andrew Dominik's Negative Take on Marilyn Monroe with 'Blonde' Sketch

The discourse surrounding Andrew Dominik's "Blonde" has infiltrated pop culture so deeply that even "Saturday Night Live" has taken notice.

A new skit from this week's episode poked fun at the film's overwhelmingly negative take on the life of Marilyn Monroe. Chloe Fineman plays the iconic star (technically, she's playing Ana de Armas playing the iconic star) wearing the iconic pink dress from "Gentlemen Prefer Blondes." She's nervous about filming a big scene, so two studio workers (Brendan Gleeson and Heidi Gardner) are brought in to cheer her up by reading her fan mail.

But, in true "Blonde" fashion, this quickly turns into a scolding session. "Marilyn, you're a whore," reads Gardner's first letter. “A blond tramp. No one will ever love you, you filthy tramp. Things only get worse from there, as the letters become increasingly caustic and misogynistic, reflecting what many believe to be the film's attitude towards Marilyn Monroe.

Related Related

The "SNL" writers aren't the first to notice the film's excessive cruelty. In IndieWire's recent Triple Take on the film, Kate Erbland wrote that “Dominik's film isn't just cruel because the world was cruel to Marilyn; his cruelty is deeper than that. It's not just a question of returning this pain to the public, but of doubling it on the Marilyn avatar of de Armas. There is nothing more: she hurts, so you will hurt too."

And in her IndieWire review of the film, Sophie Monks Kaufman wrote that "it's not that Andrew Dominik made an implausible film about the experience of a poor young beauty haunted by the fear of madness that was chewed up by the Hollywood machine, the problem is that he made a film inspired by Marilyn Monroe where she is monotonously referred to as a victim.To watch one of his films is to feast on a luminous performer whose intelligence is sublimated beneath a cleverly hypnotic physical affect His legacy is best preserved through his talents, rather than through a film that might as well be another factory-printed face of Andy Warhol - a version x-rayed, so instead of bright pop art colors, the stencil is simply of a skull."

Look at the "SNL" sketch below.

Sign Up: Stay up to date with the latest film and TV news! Sign up for our email newsletters here.