I like the movie Blonde. This is a bad opinion, according to many people I know. I should not have this opinion, Andrew Dominik’s film of Joyce Carol Oates’s biographical fiction being a desecration of a real person: Norma Jean Baker—or is it Norma Jeane Baker? or Norma Jeane Mortenson? The film is a telling of Marilyn Monroe’s life, fascinated by the horrors she endured, but filtered entirely through popular cultural memory, a perversion of her being. Blonde is a further distortion, deliberately so. It invades that cultural memory, and the spirit of the once-living person behind it, unsettling our relationship to both at once. Dominik’s film made many, many people angry. Uncouth, combative interview responses seemed to confirm his lack of respect for his subject—a beleaguered, talented star—but Dominik is not interested in respect as such. Indeed, his view of art and history and the figures who populate our cultural memory assumes all of it is a heresy by definition, a contortion of reality for the needs of individuals and the collective. Amid the morass, where do we witness humanity? Is there any at all? These same questions animate Chopper and The Assassination of Jesse James, but in Blonde, they penetrate deeper into the fabric of the film’s being, suffusing the film with an ugliness beneath the surface beauty, a sickness. Whether this reflects something about the person at the heart of the story or merely Dominik’s masturbatory, misogynistic misanthropy is debatable. Not debatable is his intention to provoke both visceral unease and moral outrage.
Blonde is constructed from countless photos of Marilyn Monroe. Scenes from her life—real, exaggerated, invented—as photographed, lodged in the cultural firmament, now animated, their meaning irrevocably altered onscreen by actors and production designers and costume artists and cinematographers. And a motion picture camera. What if we dispensed with the camera and all the rest? What if the photos were the beginning and end?
Today, Nick Cave debuted a new music video for his classic Bad Seeds song “Tupelo” to mark its fortieth anniversary. The video was made by Dominik—though we’ll get to what “made” means in a moment—unprompted, sent to his friend for consideration. Cave wrote about receiving the video from Dominik in his latest post on his blog, The Red Right Hand:
“It’s a film to accompany your song, Tupelo,” he said.
I had no idea he was making such a thing.
“I’ve taken a series of still archival images and brought them to life using AI,” he said.
Another desecration courtesy of Andrew Dominik. Cave went on to address the AI of it all, explaining, “For anyone reading these files, it will be clear that I have serious reservations about AI, particularly regarding writers using ChatGPT and other language models to do their creative work. I also have concerns about song-generating platforms that reduce music to a mere commodity, by eliminating the artistic process and its attendant struggles entirely.” Asked to “suspend your prejudices” by the filmmaker, Cave watched the video and found himself eating his words.
“Tupelo - 40th Birthday,” as it’s called on YouTube, is a music video—or short film—composed of still images of Elvis Presley and other scenes from the archive, animated using AI tools. It is an act of morally questionable resurrection. Perhaps morally reprehensible. That is Dominik’s provocation.
I watched Andrew’s film, then watched it again. I showed it to Susie. To our surprise, we found it to be an extraordinarily profound interpretation of the song – a soulful, moving, and entirely original retelling of ‘Tupelo’, rich in mythos and a touching tribute to the great Elvis Presley, as well as to the song itself. The AI-animated photographs of Elvis had an uncanny quality, as if he had been raised from the dead, and the crucifixion-resurrection images at the end were both shocking and deeply affecting. Susie and I were blown away.
As Cave explains it, while watching the film, his strong feelings against AI as an artistic tool began to “soften.” He continues with something like pablum about the value of being able to change one’s mind, and finally writes, “I’ll be interested to see what you all think of Andrew’s film.”
I suspect most people (with a brain or a heart) will hate “Tupelo - 40th Birthday.” I suspect most people will be disturbed by the reanimated corpse of Elvis and others onscreen. Most will surely be outraged by the use of AI, for aesthetic, creative, and ethical reasons. I felt the same things watching it, yet I kept watching it, fascinated, perhaps not unlike Cave.
The song “Tupelo" is about Elvis Presley. It is about the world Presley arrived into, and the one he shaped in his image, and was shaped by. It is itself a reworking of a John Lee Hooker song of the same name. Both are about floods. In Cave’s rendering, Presley is a messiah born during a biblical rainstorm. It’s a song captured by dark religious fever, like something out of a Pentecostal sermon.
Well Saturday gives what Sunday steals. And a child is born on his brothers heels. Come Sunday morn the first-born dead. In a shoe-box tied with a ribbon of red. Tupelo-o-o! Hey Tupelo! In a shoe-box buried with a ribbon of red.
“Tupelo” is Cave’s reckoning with the body of the man who defined rock ‘n roll in much of the public imagination. Elvis was the sacrificial lamb, born in a storm to die in tragedy, leaving behind a legacy of salvation, but never really understood in his full humanity. Because how could he be? What then of the image?
O ma-ma rock you lil’ one slow. O ma-ma rock your baby. O ma-ma rock your lil’ one slow. O God help Tupelo! O God help Tupelo! Mama rock your lil’ one slow. The lil one will walk on Tupelo. Tupelo-o-o! Yeah Tupelo! And carry the burden of Tupelo. Tupelo-o-o! O Tupelo! Yeah! The King will walk on Tupelo! Tupelo-o-o! O Tupelo! He carried the burden outa Tupelo! Tupelo-o-o! Hey Tupelo! You will reap just what you sow.
Like in Blonde, Dominik’s video for “Tupelo” at once literalizes and malforms the images of Elvis that exist in the public record. These moments that were captured live in one instant, now long divorced from their momentary context, are revived by unholy tools to interrogate their holy status. Desecration in its most clear meaning. The “footage” is uncanny, and sometimes disturbing in that AI way. Faces morphing momentarily into mush, unsettling physics, and a general feeling of tension inherent in their creation, compounded by the tension of the music. In some shots, Presley begins to levitate. His being, now a collection of computer bits, is unmoored, untethered to reality. He rises as a messiah for a then-modern age, and there, too, lies tension. Generations pass, and Presley’s figure becomes only more mythic, even as our understanding of him becomes more academically informed and complicated. Time creates distance, so all we have in The King to attach to as a living, breathing man is the archive. Photos, films, recordings. But these are not a story. These are a collection of evidence. Exhibits from which to draw meaning. The person of Elvis Presley matters less and less. Dominik’s film takes the next leap, confronting this relationship. Inhuman tools put to work for inhuman ends to express deep, human concern about the dehumanization of images themselves. Worship of a man, devolving into worship of an image, in an age when images are no longer tethered to reality. Who is our god, now?
Further writings to pique your interest:
