Alyssa Farah Griffin Calls out ‘Blonde’ for Lack of Trigger Warnings on ‘The View,’ Says Film Is “Exploiting” Marilyn Monroe

Blonde certainly doesn’t have any fans at the Hot Topics table. The controversial Ana de Armas biopic about Marilyn Monroe debuted back in September, but the discourse continues thanks to director Andrew Dominik, who said critics of his film are wrong to want an “empowered” version of Monroe. On today’s episode of The View, the co-hosts reacted to Dominik’s words, with Alyssa Farah Griffin taking shots at both him and his movie.

Sara Haines kicked off the convo, asserting that Blonde is so “awful” she “couldn’t even get through it.” Her Blonde bashing made Griffin chime in to describe the movie as “uniquely bad” before calling out its lack of “trigger warnings.”

“Honestly, it’s one of the worst movies,” Griffin said. “I turned it off. There’s rape scenes that it goes into without warning you that this is going to come up.  She had a tragic life, but also an incredibly accomplished life, and it felt like they just dwelled on the negative.”

When Joy Behar pointed out that there are other, more flattering films about Monroe — including 2011’s My Week with Marilyn — Griffin agreed, but insisted that Blonde “felt like a male director exploiting a woman.”

Dominik (who we’re pretty sure doesn’t care what audiences think, and probably never will) has heard all the criticism before, and referenced the Blonde backlash while speaking recently at the Red Sea International Film Festival in Saudi Arabia.

Conceding that U.S. viewers “hated” his movie, Dominik said people were “upset” with his depiction of Monroe before adding, “Which is kind of strange, because she’s dead. The movie doesn’t make any difference in one way or another,” per The Hollywood Reporter.

“What they really mean is that the film exploited their memory of her, their image of her, which is fair enough. But that’s the whole idea of the movie,” Dominik continued. “It’s trying to take the iconography of her life and put it into service of something else, it’s trying to take things that you’re familiar with, and turning the meaning inside out. But that’s what they don’t want to see.”

In a September interview with Decider, Dominik seemed to anticipate the varied audience responses to his movie, noting that people watch a film with their own experiences influencing what they see.

“The fundamental idea of the movie is that we don’t see reality. We’re seeing reality through the lens of her own personal fears, desires, prejudices, and traumas,” he said at the time. “People are looking at Blonde through their own lens.”

The View airs weekdays at 11/10c on ABC. Blonde is now streaming on Netflix.