Gentlemen Prefer Blondes

Before talking about Gentlemen Prefer Blondes’ iconic female duo of showgirls Lorelei and Dorothy, can we start by mentioning the Olympics US athletics team musical scene that introduces us to the film’s main act: a cruise ship on its way from New York to Paris? Set in a Greek-themed gymnasium along a pool with a wonderful glass slide, the naked, muscular sportsmen exercise a choreography to the tune of Dorothy’s coarse voice and equally masc moves. Academic classicism, hairy chests, and skin-tone slips with black outlines, recalling butt-cheek harnesses: the scene is worthy of the psychedelic punk homoeroticism of filmmaker Kenneth Anger. To me, this scene sets the film’s mood, between an endearing comedy and a witty social critique, but also its legacy, not only as a high point of Hollywood cinema but also of feminism and queer culture.

The film’s most enduring, perhaps radical, gift, however, might be something much simpler and more tender. Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is, above all, a film about female friendship. Not the messy, oftentimes bickering and backstabby female friendship represented in contemporary media—which says much about portrayals of women’s behaviours to this day—but rather an almost idealistic friendship, where differences of attitude and goals not once erode Dorothy and Lorelei’s bond. And true enough, on the surface Lorelei Lee (played by Marylin Monroe) and Dorothy Shaw (played by Jane Russel) appear to be quite different women: one splashily materialistic: the other helplessly romantic.

Engaged to a wealthy nepobaby, to use contemporary parlance, the girls travel to Paris for Lorelei’s wedding. Suspicious of Lorelei’s gold digging intentions, the nepobaby’s father, however, hires a private detective—and soon enough a “comedy of errors” ensues, with Lorelei’s love of diamonds putting her through the ringer. In more strained hands, the girls would fight each other for the male attention and their wealth, or hastily judge each other’s ambitions or lack there-off. They would disagree and part ways, only to reunite at the end. Not so. Dorothy defends Lorelei when detective Malone, who she’s unwillingly falling in love with, judges her friend as vain: a dumb blonde. This continues throughout the film, with Dorothy protecting Lorelei from all incriminations, to the point of cosplaying her in court, in the film’s last, deliciously tongue-in-cheek act. Theirs is a friendship that comes from below—“we are just two little girls fro Little Rock and we lived on the wrong side of the tracks”—accepting of each other’s faults, and bound by the prejudicial violence imposed on them by a misogynistic world. In this regard, if the film is the first in a long line of aspirational female stories, from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to Sofia Coppola’s The Bling Ring, it also recalls the recent, and more depressing, Anora.

Thinking of Coppola’s filmography, the glamour is a character itself here, and the duo’s shopping spree through Dior, Schiaparelli, Lucien Lelong, and Balenciaga’s Parisian stores a treat. Which leads me to the unforgettable “diamonds are a girl’s best friend” scene, with its human candelabra (Anger again), the pink on red art direction, its affirming lyrics, and Monroe’s unique superior expressiveness. Let’s start with the opening sequence of “nos” uttered by Monroe, each no accompanied by a slap of a fan on the face of a male contender. The men each hold a cardboard heart and, once refused, shoot themselves. Meaningfully, the scene comes after a musical act on lost love and female feelings of abandonment. Lorelei’s nuances, which refuse her portrayal as a basic gold digger dumb blonde, are at their height here, openly expressed: with wit and poignancy, she reminds her pretenders and all of us spectators, including women quick to let their internalised misogyny cloud their judgement, “Men grow cold, as girls grow old, and we all lose our charms in the end, but square-cut or pear-shaped these rocks don’t lose their shape, diamonds are a girl’s best friend!” Just like men want a beautiful woman so as to feel forever young, why shouldn’t women like Lorelei find in wealth a means of survival beyond the male gaze? Lorelei’s female materialism reflects back the materialism of men with a vengeance. Her politics might sound shortsighted and outdated, but it is smart, not dumb.

In the end, it is rather the men in the film, two of which Lorelei and Dorothy end up marrying, who are “dumb,” outwitted at every instance by the two girl’s cunning charm. They are completely irrelevant and replaceable; the object of satire, but not of contempt, as is tragically common, and in my view socially unproductive, in today’s “feminist” Hollywood and mainstream film and television. Revisiting Gentlemen Prefer Blondes I couldn’t help but wonder, like a cinephile Carrie Bradshaw, why are sympathetic characters, much less friendships, so hard to find in today’s media? In other words, since when did we convince ourselves that faulty characters and the realistic portrayal of vices are the only, truest and most inspiring way of being political? To quote Dorothy Shaw, whispering to her dear friend Lorelei Lee at their wedding, “Remember honey, on your wedding day it’s alright to say yes.”