The “degrading” movies Margot Robbie can’t stop watching: “Parts of it make my blood boil”
If you’re watching a certain kind of film and you don’t like what you’re seeing, then conventional wisdom would suggest that you’d switch it off. Margot Robbie can’t seem to do that, though, with one of her preferred viewing experiences leaving her caught between a rock and a hard place.
It wouldn’t exactly be difficult for the three-time Academy Award winner and powerhouse producer to stop watching them, but she can’t bring herself to do it. Why? Because it’s a form of cinema that she’s always been obsessed with, even when she knows some aspects don’t hold up through a modern lens.
Robbie channelled that spirit herself in Damien Chazelle’s Babylon, the filmmaker’s wildly ambitious misfire that was declared dead on arrival at the box office, even if the lead remains adamant that one day, years from now, the ode to ‘Old Hollywood’ excess will be reappraised as a masterpiece.
The period piece is set in the late 1920s, but the star’s personal preferences hail from a couple of decades later. Some of her favourites include Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart’s The Philadelphia Story, Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove, Hal Ashby’s Harold and Maude, and Bob Fosse’s Cabaret.
Clearly, Robbie has a deep affection for both the ‘Golden Age’ and ‘New Hollywood’ eras, but one iconic figure who helped define the latter era and a transformative picture that was instrumental in ushering in the latter have left her feeling conflicted, because they’re things she loves with things she hates in them.
“I love old films, but my heart breaks when I watch Marilyn Monroe’s, because the characters she plays are so misogynistic and degrading that it’s mind-boggling that was the norm,” she told Stylist in 2018. “The same with Bonnie and Clyde; parts of it make my blood boil.”
Unfortunately, you can’t do much but write them off as ‘the way things were’. Few stars have ever been placed under as much intense scrutiny as Monroe, who spent her entire professional life trying to prove that she was more than just a pretty face, something the majority of the mainstream media didn’t give a shit about when they were happy to paint her as a bombshell and nothing more.
Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde was also a product of its time, and was treated as a breath of fresh air in the late ’60s for subverting established gender dynamics by having Faye Dunaway’s character as the strong, assertive counterpoint to Warren Beatty. It still makes Robbie’s blood boil, though, not that it’s sworn her off classic cinema.
Hollywood was hardly known as the most progressive place in the world during the ‘Golden Age’ and beyond, and as much as she adores the films, Robbie still has her issues with how the female characters are often portrayed.
