| By Wendola | pg 1 of 8 |
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Opening disclaimer: "Although the following film depicts some actual persons and events, it is a work of fiction." Got that? This Joyce Carol Oates lady couldn�t sleep so she just sat down and wrote this novel, and maybe five or six others or so that night. It's just a book. So don't get on me about the facts of Marilyn Monroe's life here, because this work is not really about the facts; it's about the nature of the self. There are lots of metaphors here, and also lots of close-ups of Marilyn Monroe's butt. Although it's not really her butt. Was it ever her butt? And did anyone ever know her REAL butt? This movie asks those sort of questions.
Fade-up on a beach; "I Want To Be Loved By You" plays. Dawn. Seagulls. There's a blonde in a red dress lying passed out in the sand. Close-up on the woman as she opens her eyes. I'm pretty sure this is the blonde to whom this whole movie refers.
Voice-over: "When I was born in the charity ward of the Los Angeles County Hospital, my mother wasn't there. Where my mother was, no one knew." Okay, those opening sentences are way too good for a TV movie. Anyway, at the hospital her mother is all freaked out, and she hides in the supply room until a nurse comes and finds her. "Mrs. Mortenson, aren't you even going to have look a at your beautiful little girl?" "Are you sure I'm the mother?" she asks. Okay, the mom's crazy, we get that, but those must have been great drugs, too. The nurse hands her the baby, and Mrs. M., heretofore known as The Nutty Mother asks, "What if I drop it?" and then just stands there holding the baby as one would hold a cake covered with maggots. Nice instincts, Mom. Say what you will about social workers, but this is kind of why they invented them.
Cut to some shadowy never-never narrative land from which characters sometimes talk directly to the camera. "I named her Norma Jean Baker," says Nutty Mother. She's smoking a cigarette, and explains that "Norma" was for Norma Talmadge, "Jean" for Jean Harlow, and Baker "was the husband I hated the least." Then young Norma Jean is playing on the beach with her grandmother. To give you an idea of what Norma Jean's family is like, her grandmother is played by Ann-Margret, while Nutty Mother is played by the actress who was the mom on Home Improvement. You hope that Grandma's Reasonably Classy Old-School Minor Movie Star influence will be good for the child, but you just know that mom's Sitcom Actress Chewing The Scenery In A Dramatic Television Movie schtick will totally warp poor little Norma Jean's psyche.
"My crazy daughter was unfit to be a mother," says Gran-Margret, speaking from The Narrative Beyond. She explains that she tried to raise her, but Nutty Mother sometimes got her way. Cut to Norma Jean's birthday, where Nutty Mother saunters off with Norma Jean and ditches Gran-Margret. Nutty Mother's apartment has movie pin-ups, feather boas, a framed studio photo of Clark Gable, who she claims is Norma Jean's father -- you know, the usual Unfit Mom decorating touches.