“For we are not who we are told we are…:” three interpretations of Marilyn Monroe
The first time I can remember encountering the image of Marilyn Monroe was when I was maybe seven years old. My family was eating out at an Applebee’s — this was back when the chain restaurant featured nostalgic movie posters and kitschy artwork on its walls. We were seated at a table, and I looked up to see a tall photograph of a woman in a shimmering gold dress. In the photo, she is posing against a black background, lit from above, the neckline of her gown a plunging V-shape that nearly reaches her bellybutton. Her face is angled slightly to the left (her right), her heavy eyelashes downcast and her full lips arrested in a suggestive part… Her eyebrows are raised to indicate that she knows someone is looking.
I asked my mother who it was. “That’s Marilyn Monroe,” she told me, and while there must have been some further explanation of who or what she was, I can only remember being told one other bit of information: “She died young.”
Even then, at such an early age, it unnerved me to learn that this woman was dead. It was a contradiction of facts: here, from this photograph, emerged perhaps the most present, powerful, alive person I’d ever seen. Who could argue with her confidence, her beauty? She was so sure of herself, untouchable and yet accessible. The sexualized nature of Monroe’s photographs usually distracts us from the sheer generosity of spirit with which she lends herself to the camera. How could death ever impinge on such generosity, such warmth?
Curiously, it is this very question that fuels the prelude of Joyce Carol Oates’ novel, Blonde (2000), an epic reimagining of the star’s inner consciousness and a poeticizied interpretation of her life. “There came Death hurtling along the Boulevard in waning sepia light,” Oates writes — imagining the Grim Reaper as a delivery boy (“Adolescent bumps and blemishes on his face… chewing gum”) bringing a package to Monroe’s doorstep. The package is labeled : “‘MM’ OCCUPANT, 12305 Fifth Helena Drive, Brentwood California, USA, ‘EARTH,’” and when Monroe answers the door, Oates’ text switches to italics, indicating her subject’s personal voice:
From Death’s hand I accepted the gift. I knew what it was, I think. Who it was from. Seeing the name and address I laughed and signed without hesitation.
“Without hesitation.” Oates writes the first few pages of her book with immense creativity, but these two simple words are what stick in the mind. Partly because, as a description, they match the confidence Monroe exhibited in her photographs — critic and professor David Thomson has ruminated that, in still photos as opposed to films, the star might have felt safer because stillness “protected [her] against being” — but also because what is most apparent from any knowledge of Monroe’s life is that she frequently did hesitate. The barbiturate overdose that took her life was the final escape from years of drug abuse, mental health crises, and the conflicting desires of various men; originally married when she was just sixteen, Monroe subsequently wed two of the most iconic men of the mid-twentieth century, baseball legend Joe DiMaggio and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Arthur Miller, and her career was dictated by appeals to the egos of Hollywood producers and executives.
So for Monroe to not hesitate — at the hands of Death, no less — suggests a disarming ease with disruption. Maybe she felt safer when she wasn’t being still.
Immediately following the prelude, in her novel’s first chapter, Oates imagines Monroe going to a movie, where she watches the action in a de-contextualized fashion — taking it in as she had as a small child, “before she’d been able to comprehend even the rudiments of the movie story” — while also recalling the moment she came to understand the patterns of movie storytelling:
…There was a day, an hour, when she realized that the Fair Princess, who is so beautiful because she is so beautiful and because she is the Fair Princess, is doomed to seek, in others’ eyes, confirmation of her own being. For we are not who we are told we are, if we are not told. Are we?
These two succeeding portraits amount to a subversively literary estimation of Marilyn Monroe: here is a woman who understands her own mortality, and who participates in the narrative of her life by impulsively contradicting it. She is impatient to be thought of as one thing, immediately urgent to become something else.
It’s an urgency that she imparted to her onlookers. So much of not just the mythology, but the phenomenon of Marilyn Monroe is grounded on a kind of spectatorial disbelief: disbelief, first of all, that such a person could exist — that so much charisma and energy and magic could exude from one human being — but equally, just as her audience grapples to accept her reality, so too does this audience disbelieve that such a person could conceivably die. (The Kennedy-laced conspiracy theories, for instance, that surround Monroe’s demise are a spiritual outrage at the thought that her death could’ve been “accidental.”) The endurance of Monroe as a cultural icon speaks to the emotional friction that dictates our perception of her: she cannot be, and therefore cannot have been.
Just before writing this essay I watched The Misfits (1961), the last film Monroe completed before her death. Written by her then-husband, playwright Arthur Miller, the movie is set in Reno, Nevada, and follows a saddened woman named Roslyn (Monroe) over the weeks and months following her divorce. Along with her landlord, Isabelle (Thelma Ritter), Roslyn takes up with an aged cowboy, Gay (Clark Gable), and his friend, Guido (Eli Wallach) — driving to the country to try and locate some sense of personal fulfillment.
The film is loaded with tragic irony, given the fact that it was Monroe’s final work, and that the supporting characters constantly rhapsodize over the precarious force of Roslyn’s existence. Early on, Guido observes: “You have the gift for life, Roslyn. The rest of us, we’re just looking for a place to hide and watch it all go by.” I’ve long resisted seeing this movie because it was written by Miller — a narcissist whose work post-Monroe’s death regularly exploited the famed woman’s memory: After the Fall (1964), Finishing the Picture (2004), and even The Crucible, which was written before the two had officially started dating — but the playwright actually treats his wife’s character with sensitivity and intelligence, granting her lines of dialogue that border on the proto-feminist.
For instance, when Guido talks about his dead wife, he claims that she “wasn’t like any other woman. Stood by me one-hundred-percent, uncomplaining as a tree.”
“Maybe that’s what killed her,” Roslyn responds. “I mean, it helps to complain sometimes.”
The final sequence of the film drives home Monroe’s contradictory placement among her fellow misfits: Gay, Guido and their friend, Perce (Montgomery Clift), bring the animal-loving Roslyn out to the desert to watch as they capture a small herd of wild stallions, neglecting to mention until it’s too late that the horses will be sold and butchered to make dog food. Outraged, Roslyn has no choice but to ride along as the men lasso the horses via truck bed. Financially, though, the small number of horses — six total — doesn’t really justify the effort to capture them, and after tying up a particularly old mare and her colt, Gay bashfully suggests to the other men: “What do you say we give her [Roslyn] these horses?”
At that moment, Roslyn steps out of the truck. “How much do you want for them?,” she asks, shaking with rage. “I’ll pay you. I’ll give you two hundred dollars, is that enough?”
With these words, Roslyn undercuts the pacifying implication of Gay’s gesture: she emphasizes the transactional nature of all human relationships — at least, of all the relationships she’s known — and claims an agency that steps outside the bounds of a woman’s role as the receiver. She offers her own money. It is her way of saying: “I don’t accept your condescending generosity. I will claim and possess life of my own volition, because I have power.”
This is the same power, the same undeniable self-ownership that Monroe exhibited in her photographs. It’s humbling to consider that a woman so reduced to sexual pantomime was perhaps compelled to do so because her very existence, her will to life was itself so radical. The woman who was Marilyn Monroe had more of herself to give, to assert than the gendered mores of mid-century America were willing to permit: she became a “sex symbol” because that’s the only kind of power a woman was permitted to display.
It is a result of this heady mix of patriarchal desire and resentment that so many men since Monroe’s death have sought to claim or possess her as their own. This was true of Arthur Miller, and it was true of Harvey Weinstein — who produced My Week with Marilyn (2011), the first major theatrical film to depict the star, played by Michelle Williams. Based on a memoir by Colin Clark, the film, despite its title, traces several weeks in Clark’s (Eddie Redmayne) life when he was a personal assistant to Monroe during the filming of The Prince and the Showgirl (1956). Though vigorously tasteful in its presentation, the movie functions less as an inquiry into Monroe’s personhood and more as a pastiche of schoolboy fantasies involving her: Clark recounts skinny-dipping with Monroe, cradling her in bed, and when Adrian Hodges’ screenplay isn’t ripping off bits from Pretty Woman and The Philadelphia Story, it offers pat, misogynistic advice from older, leering men, like: “Be careful not to get in too deep, son.” Or, “When it comes to women, you’re never too old for humiliation.”
Given what we now know of Mr. Weinstein’s monstrous behavior, My Week with Marilyn can only be read as a predatory executive’s daydream rendezvous with history’s most objectified woman. Even its title sounds like an imagined barside brag: “Don’t forget the time that I had her! The time that she was mine.”
But time is something that Monroe has always dominated — both when she was living, and now in death. One thing that the Weinstein film documents avidly is Monroe’s chronic tardiness on set; she was often hours late, citing her need to “prepare,” or otherwise sleeping off bad pill combinations. A behavior that usually inspired fury from her male collaborators, it takes an incisive feminist reading to understand just why Monroe refused to appear when she was supposed to: in Blonde, Joyce Carol Oates muses that the actor, overwhelmed by the demands (i.e., of men) in her life, was “defiant of time.” “For what is time,” her Norma Jean wonders, “but others’ expectations of us?”
Unable to determine how others saw or interpreted her, Marilyn Monroe chose to dictate when and how often they could see or interpret her — and it is this physical defiance that has survived in the emotional push-and-pull of our collective relationship to her. We are even now, sixty years after her death, unwilling to accept Monroe’s absence: a film adaptation of Oates’ book is due to be released later this year. Its director, Andrew Dominick, whose past credits include The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) and Killing Them Softly (‘12), has commented on what it was like to make his first film with a woman protagonist: “It's a different thing for me to do… My films are fairly bereft of women, and now I'm imagining what it's like to be one.” As a rule, I hope that most men’s first time thinking about women’s experiences comes before they make a movie about Marilyn Monroe — but no bother: Oates has granted her approval, and Ana de Armas, who plays Monroe in the film, called working with Dominick the most “collaborative” relationship of her career, explaining that he would regularly call her in the middle of the night to talk about the project.
I applaud this director’s devotion to Monroe’s character — clearly, he was trying to give de Armas a sense of what it’s like to work with someone with no personal boundaries.
Because, indeed, Marilyn Monroe did not have good boundaries. Any proper appraisal of her is going to have to emphasize the reality that, despite her resistance, despite her depth, Monroe never successfully appraised herself. It’s very difficult to tell the story of a person who was always seeking definition, always imploring someone else to take over, even as she insisted on contradicting whatever it was she was told to do. I, as a young boy, recognized this raw energy, and felt immediately at home with it. Though the suggestion of sex still eluded, confused and intimidated me then (I remember having those exact feelings as I glanced at the photograph in Applebee’s), I also witnessed in Monroe’s sensuality a kind of self-actualization — a fullness of presence that is often associated with sex, but which speaks more elementally to a person’s capacity to be, to live to their fullest.
That’s what makes Monroe an immortal: she is, and therefore cannot ever “end.” Because there she is — gold on black, holding out against the void. A dying star dawdling before the enormity of oblivion.
