She was symbolic of something. She was the Aphrodite of the 20th century, the American goddess of love. And she killed herself. So what does that mean? (Andrew Dominik 2022)
[S]he was the last, and probably the greatest, female superstar. (Laura Mulvey 2017)
In The Misfits, she looks like a real person for the first time. (Karina Longworth 2017)
One fascinating fact of life is that Marilyn Monroe once acted in a film by Fritz Lang, Clash by Night (1952), which I happened to re-watch the other week. It’s a film rarely mentioned, and a performance mentioned as rarely, but it’s one of my favourite performances by her, on par with Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953) and The Misfits (1961). I always like her, but these would be my favourites.
But I’m not here to rank her performances. I want instead to talk some more about Clash by Night, and The Misfits, as they could be sibling films. You could see her character in Clash by Night turn into her character in The Misfits, it’s a natural progression, and the power of both performances are enhanced by this, as they provide a context to them that, at least when Clash by Night was made, wasn’t available to her or to the filmmakers.
While the other main actors in Clash by Night, Barbara Stanwyck, Robert Ryan, and Paul Douglas, as well as some others in smaller part, seem to aim deliberately to make “meaningful art” and struggle with the often overwrought dialogue by Clifford Odets and Alfred Hayes, Monroe comes across as a local girl who happened to walk onto the set and was immediately hired by Lang to add to his ambition to give the film some real documentary feeling. (He did have that ambition, as it was shot on location and he and the cinematographer Nicolas Musuraca spent a lot of time filming fishing and fishermen, which is included in the film, as if they were competing with Rossellini.) Even though Monroe is famous for being a glamorous blonde bombshell, she’s about the only actor in the film that feels like they belong in that setting and that milieu, playing the young factory girl with uncanny conviction.
She wears jeans in both Clash by Night and The Misfits, not skirts or dresses, and that’s part of the importance of the films in relation to common ideas of her stardom, and to how she’s been discussed and remembered. It’s not her wearing jeans that people remember or talk about, but they and Monroe are a natural fit. They provide a counterexample to the idea of her; of her being synonymous with a tight-fitted dress.
She’s often said to have primarily played the role of the dumb blonde, and quite a few seem to have confused that alleged part with the real person of Marilyn Monroe. People confusing parts played with the actual person playing them is of course not something only Monroe is a victim of, but with her it almost seems like the rule. But it’s illustrative that in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she very pointedly is not dumb at all, she only pretends to be because she knows that that’s what men prefer. In the film she can, and does at times, outsmart any man, but she saves it for when it’s necessary.
This confusion about how she is regarded is apparent in a lot of the writings and discussions about her. Earlier this year Andrew Dominik, the director of Blonde, a new film about Monroe with Ana de Armas in the lead, was interviewed in Sight & Sound and he came across as ignorant and boorish, and confused. The quote at the top of this post is an example. That people commit suicide even though they are rich and beautiful is not strange or interesting, it will only appear so if you think that money and looks are the only things that matter. Being clinically depressed is for example unrelated to money and beauty, as is loneliness or sadness or illness or existential despair. I’m not saying Monroe suffered from all these things, maybe she did, maybe she didn’t, I don’t know. But there are any number of reasons why a person might kill themself. But we don’t know whether Monroe committed suicide. It might’ve been an accident for example. Either way, her death doesn’t “mean” anything. Dominik is talking cliches and nonsense. His belief, expressed elsewhere in the interview, that she played “whores,” and his bewilderment that people still watch and like her films, are also examples of his ignorance and confusion. But he’s not alone in that. Pauline Kael, who was not impressed by Monroe’s acting abilities, wrote once in New York Times (July 22, 1973) that “she was best at demi-whores” and that she exemplified “shrill sluttiness.” I don’t know what to make of that. Kael is often said to be good at writing about actors, but maybe she too was confused by Monroe’s physical appearance.
Laura Mulvey’s essay, published in Screen 58:2 Summer 2017, that I also quoted from at the top is an example of another tiresome convention, to not talk about Monroe as a person or actor but as a symbol, an allegory. In Mulvey’s essay Monroe is a symbol of the fall of the Hollywood studio system: “But by 1954–55 the emblematic nature of her image becomes more allegorical, extending into the narrative of Hollywood’s decline.”
It’s stretching the symbolism to breaking point, and also confused. And why was Monroe, as Mulvey claimed in the essay, the last female superstar? What disqualifies, for example, Elizabeth Taylor or Julia Roberts from being female superstars?
Karina Longworth’s three-part podcast about Monroe is good, and more grounded. But the quote from it also quoted at the top still points to this confusion. The Misfits is not “the first time” that she “looks like a real person.” whatever that means.
The problem with our collective ideas and discussions about Monroe is that her “mediated persona,” to be academic, seems to have completely taken over and the actor and person behind it forgotten or diminished. She’s become a symbol or a cause, a meme, which can easily become abusive in one way or another.
In the end of the interview with Andrew Dominik he says about his film that “it’s just a movie about Marilyn Monroe. And there are going to be a lot more movies about Marilyn Monroe.” But it isn’t a film about Marilyn Monroe. It’s a work of fiction, inspired by the real Monroe. It seems like most of the talks, writings, and musings about her are as fictional. If I were to do a TL;DR summary of this post it’d be that I wish people would let Monroe be Monroe instead of a symbol of whatever cause they’re engaged with.
Maybe "ordinary person" would be closer to what Longworth meant.