“Our technology forces us to live mythically…” — Marshall McLuhan
I recently wrote this review of Andrew Dominik’s BLONDE, which also responds to some of the moral outrage surrounding the film. In the piece, I read Blonde as a horror film about the creation of the image of Marilyn Monroe, and more broadly about the creation of images in general.
Mercury is the magical messenger god and the ruler of Gemini, Norma Jeane’s star sign, which gets mentioned in Blonde. Mercury, ruler of writing and all technology, is in crisis, overdrive. The ancient astrologers/astronomers tell us that Mercury rules over practical knowledge, language, communication, poetry, travel. We’re all messengers now. When everything seems to shimmer, tech-drenched, what then? A crisis of reading, of poetry, an intolerance of ambiguity or an oppressive liquidity. But also, of course, new possibilities. Mercury itself is ambivalently double, just like the tech it rules. Noise and signal, public and private, able get into the weirdest crevices of the ecliptic because of its small size and quickness.
The hysterical and very SPLIT reaction to Dominik’s trance-like film makes sense in light of the fact that it’s about the ambivalence of images, of camera technologies, of the eye itself. As I was writing that piece, I made quite a lot of more, um, esoteric notes on the film, technology, and Mercury, which I’ll share here, in slightly edited form, with you…