The Blonde cast and crew seem surprised at the film’s NC-17 rating. It’s pretty clear to anyone who has seen it that one specific scene is the reason why.

Now that it’s finally had its premiere, there’s a lot to discuss in Andrew Dominik’s Blonde, and surely we’ll be talking about it more once people outside of Venice can finally see it. But there is one scene in particular that got people talking yesterday at the festival. During the press tour, the cast and crew had expressed some surprise as to why the film was rated NC-17. It’s pretty clear to anyone who has seen it that this scene is the reason why.

Blonde, which is based not on Marilyn Monroe’s actual life but on Joyce Carol Oates’s 2000 novel about her, charts the many indignities and horrors visited upon the actress over the course of a career that saw her become one of the world’s most desired women. (You can read my review here.) During the final third of the 166-minute film, we see Marilyn — played by Ana de Armas and by this point, so heavily into booze and pills that she tries to take a nap at the exit to her airplane — taken to see John F. Kennedy in a hotel room in 1962. She’s told that the president needs to fly back to D.C. that night for an “emergency situation,” so there’s an unreal sense of rush to the whole sequence. Two Secret Service goons actually lift Marilyn off her feet as they lead her to the president’s suite. “Am I meat to be delivered?” she asks, half-jokingly. Which, of course, is exactly what she is in the context of the scene.

In the president’s bedroom, outside of which his staff hovers, he’s lying in bed wearing a back brace, watching TV news, and talking to a man on the telephone. He doesn’t sit up or stand as Marilyn sits next to him on the bed. As he continues talking on the phone, we see the telltale motions of a handjob being given. The man on the other end of the line is talking to the president about how “the bureau” has uncovered evidence of someone’s sexual improprieties — at first, it seems like they’re talking about someone else, but it quickly becomes clear that this is most likely FBI director J. Edgar Hoover talking about Kennedy’s own affairs. Throughout, Kennedy often looks distractedly at Marilyn and says, repeatedly and impatiently, “Baby, come on,” as if what she’s doing is not enough.

He then guides her head down. The camera settles on a close-up of her confused face. We mostly see her eyes — wide, almost shocked — but occasionally, a sliver of flesh is visible against her lips. At first, it looks like … well, what we might expect it to be. But as the scene goes on, we realize that it’s really the edge of her hand, presumably gripping Kennedy.

To be clear, this is not a titillating scene at all. It’s incredibly tense and disturbing. But it also has a stated pornographic quality. The close-up goes on for about a minute and a half. If it feels leery or exploitative, it’s meant to: As the shot continues, the image pulls back and we see the scene playing out on a movie screen, watched by a darkened theater filled with people. Blonde regularly reflects on our own spectatorship of the film as it shows us how public adoration can be a menacing, prying, destructive force. To do so, it breaks the fourth wall in sly ways. Even the fact that I am here writing about this scene feels like I’ve played myself right into the movie’s hands.

As this aforementioned and extremely uncomfortable close-up continues, we begin to hear de Armas’s voice-over speculating about this scene, talking about “playing the part of a famous blonde actress,” and even wondering if she’s found herself in a porn movie. This could, of course, be Norma Jeane herself, dissociating from the character of Marilyn Monroe that she has created. Or it could be de Armas, stepping outside her own picture for an instant. There are occasional voice-overs in Blonde that do not sound like de Armas’s Marilyn impersonation; they sound like her own voice, with her accent, commenting not just on the phenomenon of Norma Jeane becoming Marilyn but on de Armas becoming Norma Jeane becoming Marilyn. In the grotesque and gripping essay on celebrity and desire that is Blonde, the distance between these two ideas is not that great.

Then, as if stepping back into character, the voice-over adds, “Just don’t puke. Don’t cough. Don’t gag. You have to swallow.”

The distracted Kennedy starts yelling out, “You dirty slut!” Finally, a TV montage of missiles firing and old black-and-white movie images of flying saucers crashing into buildings and American monuments suggests that he’s achieved orgasm. The camera cuts to a wide shot — and we see that, all along, the door has been open, with Kennedy’s staff hovering outside, casually ignoring what’s happening in the bedroom.

And then, one last even more disturbing moment follows. As Marilyn looks at Kennedy and tries to smile, we see a hand that looks like his grab her mouth and quickly yank her out of frame, and a body (again, presumably his) jumping on her, to rape her, before the image fades to black. We see her wake up sometime later, and she vomits and struggles to pee.

Blonde is, as many have noted in their reviews, a brutal film. And it features scenes that are, in some ways, more graphic than this one — including several moments of domestic violence and an abortion. It’s a movie filled with vomit and blood and screaming and bruises. But I’m starting to think that the most brutal scene in the movie might be this one, which seems to show nothing, but in fact, shows just about everything.

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See All About That Blowjob Scene in Blonde