Marilyn Monroe would have turned 100 this month, and it’s already hard to approach her life like an archaeological project. The actress exists in the public imagination as a surreal collection of objects. We remember them all without knowing why; none have any particular focus or utility. Warhol’s silk screen paintings of her face stand next to the white dress by The seven-year itchnotorious Playboy centrifold, and the famous dance routine from Gentlemen prefer blondesall date from the decade between 1953 and 1964, just within the world’s living memory.
In popular culture, the feeling is that the best response to Monroe on screen is to dignify an off-screen Norma Jeane – since she was born on June 1, 1926, in Los Angeles. The juxtaposition of the real and the fake is meant to lead us to an ultimately liberating truth. We imagine we can understand her by interrogating the intimate remnants of her relationships with baseball star Joe DiMaggio, to whom she was married for nine months in 1954, and playwright Arthur Miller, from 1956 to 1961. Or by looking at the fabled picture of her reading Joyce’s Ulysses. But these parts of reality are as random and accidental as the parts of fiction. They lead nowhere and do not constitute a visible whole.
The BFI’s Marilyn Monroe season hardly helps. While her studio-era predecessors played versions of the same archetype on and off screen, Monroe may be the first major actress whose filmography stands at a considerable distance from her life. This predicament was an accident of history: our greatest symbol of Hollywood decadence was really a creation of Hollywood austerity.
Between, and during, the world wars, the most successful studios produced over 40 films each year. Their most important assets were their actors, and especially their leading women. Publicists and executives collaged history, fiction, and reality to create believable star stories. These lavish practices were only economically viable because the major studios also had a monopoly on film exhibition. The most popular owned their own movie theater chains and could force independent exhibitors to sign franchise contracts, “blocking the booking” of hundreds of films at once.
This was the world in which Monroe came of age. She spent a significant part of her troubled childhood in inner-city Hollywood, but dreamed of being in the Hollywood industry. After a stint in modeling, she spent 1947 on a low-level contract at 20th Century Fox, fell into a brief period of freelance exile, and then landed at Columbia, where she had her first leading role in the 1948 musical. Ladies of the Choir. Unfortunately, she became a star just as the Hollywood star apparatus collapsed: film historians tend to point to 1948 as the beginning of the end. The United States Supreme Court destroyed Hollywood’s theatrical monopoly, which made its business model unsustainable. Audiences moved from the cities to the suburbs, where neighborhood cinemas were useless. Television threatened to upend the entire industry, offering cheaper entertainment and a more attractive home for its popular entertainers.
Studios cut movies and talent. Columbia let Monroe go; Fox signed him, this time for seven years. She borrowed her sultry, bubbly screen persona from Jean Harlow, a 1930s sex symbol, whom she later cited as her favorite childhood actress. Actresses of this era had to be smart and self-aware. Harlow and her contemporaries sold sophisticated lifestyles to their female audience, wearing the latest clothes and smoking the newest cigarettes while digging the men in their lives. But Hollywood’s desperate economic conditions called for a new kind of star. By the early 1950s, those female audiences had gone home to watch television, and Monroe and her peers were on billboards selling sex.
The 1953 Technicolor extravaganza Niagara it was an explosive role; Monroe starred as a femme fatale, in various stages of nudity. In cartoons Bus station (1956), she played an Arizona showgirl with Hollywood dreams. IN The Prince and the Showgirl (1957) she played the same role, this time in Edwardian London. “Not acting polyamorous-perverse,” said film critic Pauline Kael, alluding to Freud’s theory of “polymorphic perversity,” which includes the ability to find erotic pleasure in “multiple forms.”
Monroe’s screenwriters were doing it wrong. Much of her output relied on studied displays of naivety. This didn’t make her any less of an actress—her comedic timing barely wavered—but it hindered her development as a consistent screen persona. The “dumb blonde” is rarely an active agent in her own life; her desires are generally dependent on those of the man in front of her. The situation is not favorable for an exciting three-act scenario. The seven-year itch (1955) is about as boring as a movie can be with his level of comic talent. Monroe’s unnamed character is the opposite of an interesting woman. She comes from nowhere, makes few decisions of her own, and exists to affirm the common man’s ideas about himself. It’s almost a surprise when it’s lifted from a subway grate, but the famous image goes almost unnoticed.
Monroe’s screen archetype is now shorthand for wasted potential. To be a “dumb blonde” is to be damned, off screen and off. Monroe had already put herself on thin ice imitating Jean Harlow, who outlived a particularly tragic husband but didn’t make it past the 1930s. Actress Jayne Mansfield imitated Monroe’s image, parodied her in several cartoons, and died in a car accident five years after Marilyn’s suicide. Sharon Tate’s murder was random, senseless, and marked the spiritual end of the 1960s. The examples continue into the present. Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion provided the public with an endless supply of Monroe-style blondes, including Anna Nicole Smith, who died of a parallel overdose before she turned 40. EUFOR may be Sydney Sweeney’s last successful project for a mass audience: the actress came to inhabit the dumb-blonde archetype, with all its attendant sexual indignities, just as she lost her audience to politics.
Hollywood’s disdain for women at mid-century has followed us to this day; if you can’t live a full life in fiction, you won’t have one in reality either.
A quick study of Monroe’s filmography will make you wonder how much more she could have achieved had she been born 20 years earlier. Her most successful films took cues from the fast-paced, cosmopolitan comedies of the 1930s.
The Screw Caper by Billy Wilder Some like it hot (1959) is almost a penance for Inch Seven Years: Monroe is portrayed to her advantage because she’s never the funniest person in it. IN Gentlemen prefer blondes (1953), originally a novel by screenwriter Anita Loos, Monroe appears alongside Jane Russell, another victim of the suppression of sex symbols. The film takes its comedy seriously by immersing them in a world of equal eccentricity; the two women are more believable as co-conspirators than as objects of fantasy. There are early threads of Sex and the City in the subsequent romantic comedy How to marry a millionaire.
Monroe’s last film, The Misfitsa western directed by John Huston in 1961, is being re-released in the UK. It belongs to a school of cinema that you can call Middle Hollywood. It filled the gap between the 1950s and 1960s, giving mainstream American cinema its first hints of an independent aesthetic and ethic. It was the domain of the jazz soundtrack, the method actor and the craft script (this one by Arthur Miller). His dominant narrative preoccupations were disappointment and frustration. A wave of Tennessee Williams adaptations would soon seek horror in rural America; a related trend of “hagsploitation” showed the decline of Hollywood by torturing its aging stars.
The Misfits combines both elements: Clark Gable stars opposite a horrified Monroe as a hapless cowboy, killing horses for meat. It’s hard to watch him without seeing a worn-out version of Rhett Butler, the antihero Gable he plays. Gone with the wind. Monroe plays her stock-girl role with a new depth, the result of years of training. Its sensitive performance is highlighted in classic soft focus. These last two hours in the film are also the only two hours for which her entire career makes sense. Her real-life pin-up photos decorate the interior of a closet. A character tells her that he wants her to live forever. “You started out just wanting to dance, didn’t you?” someone asks him. “But little by little it turns out that people aren’t interested in how well you danced – they’re looking at you with something completely different in their minds and it turns sour, doesn’t it?” It is a belated attempt to create the metafiction of Monroe.
A shot, 18 minutes later, shows Monroe standing in the doorway of a darkened house. We see it from behind, in the dark; the Nevada desert shimmers before her. There’s a parallel take on John Ford’s cowboy epic Searchers. A decade ago, in vivid CinemaScope, he represented the pioneer ethos of possibility and exploration. Here it can mean desolation, boredom and exile. It can also mean heaven.
Retrospective season Marilyn Monroe: Self-Made Star it’s at the BFI until 31 July
(Further reading: Lola Young is no slouch on stage)
