 Marilyn, The Dream Woman
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Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe offered men the fantasy of sex without guilt, responsibility or threat, always on offer, with no sexual needs of her own beyond the grafication of men.
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Stars are important to us because they act out aspects of life that matter to us, and though we may tend to think of the things that matter to us as immutable and enduring, they are nonetheless only ever encountered in a culturally and historically specific context.
The fifties hardly invented sexuality as a talking pint, but it was a period characterized by a particular, widely disseminated, and intensely popularized discourse on sexuality. Monroe's image, and Monroe herself to the extent that she identified herself with it, both expressed and were in turn overwhelmingly determined by that discourse. She was charismatic, a center of attraction, who seemed to embody what was taken to be a central feature of human existence at that time.
In stressing the importance of sexuality in Marilyn Monroe's image, it might seem that I am just another commentator doing to Monroe what was done to her throughout her life, treating her solely in terms of sex. Perhaps that is a danger, but I hope that I am not just reproducing this attitude toward Monroe but also trying to understand it and historicize it.
Monroe may have been a wit, a subtle and profound actress, an intelligent and serious woman. I have no desire to dispute these qualities and it is important to recognize and recover them against the grain of her image. But my purpose is to understand the grain itself, and there can be no question that this is overwhelmingly and relentlessly constructed in terms of sexuality. Monroe's sexuality is a message that ran all the way from what the media made of her in pin ups and movies to how her image became a reference point for sexuality in the coinage of everyday speech.
She started her career as a pin-up girl, and one can find no type of image more singlemindedly sexual than that. Pin-ups constituted a constant and vital aspect of her image right up to her death, and the pin-up style also indelibly marked other aspects of her image, such as her public appearances and promotions for her films. The roles she was given, the way she was filmed, and the reviews she got do little to counteract this emphasis.
She plays, from the beginning, "the girl," defined solely by age, gender, and appealingness. In two films, she does not even have a name, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) and Love Happy (1950), and in three other films, her character has no biography beyond being "the blonde," Dangerous Years (1948), The Fireball (1950), and Right Cross (1950). Even when any information about her character is supplied, it serves to reinforce the basic anonymity of the role. For instance, when her character has a job, it is a job that, while it may be genuinely useful, like that of a secretary, is traditionally (or cinematically) thought of as being a job where the woman is on show, there for the pleasure of men.
These jobs in Monroe's early films are chorus girl in Ladies of the Chorus (1948) and Ticket to Tomahawk (1950); actress in All About Eve (1950) (the film emphasizes that the character has no talent); or secretary in Home Town Story (1951), As Young As You Feel (1951), and Monkey Business (1952). There is very little advance on these roles in her later career. She has no name in The Seven Year Itch (1955); even in the credits she is just "the Girl." She is a chorus girl in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953), There's No Business Like Show Business (1954), The Prince and the Showgirl (1957), and Let's Make Love (1960), and she is a solo artiste of no great talent in River of No Return (1954), Bus Stop (1956), and Some Like It Hot (1959). She is a model (hardly an extension of the role repertoire) in How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and The Seven Year Itch (1955), and a prostitute in O. Henry's Full House (1952).
Thus even in her prestige roles, Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl, the social status of the person she plays remains the same. The tendency to treat her as nothing more than her gender reaches its peak with The Misfits (1961), where, instead of being the "girl" from the early films, she now becomes the "woman," or perhaps just "Woman"—Roslyn has no biography, she is just "a divorcee"; the symbolic structure of the film relates her to nature, the antithesis of culture, career, society, history.
There is no question that Monroe did a lot with these roles, but it is nearly always against the grain of the way they were written, and the way they were filmed too. She is constantly knitted into the fabric of the film through point-of-view shots located in male characters—even in the later films, and virtually always in the earlier ones, she is set up an an object of the male sexual gaze. Frequently too she is placed within the frame of the camera in such a way as to stand out in silhouette, a side-on tits and arse positioning found equally in the early Monkey Business and As Young As You Feel and the prestige production, The Prince and the Showgirl.
It is not surprising that Monroe became virtually a household word for sex. What is equally clear is that sex was seen as perhaps the most important thing in fifties America. Certain publishing events suggest this—the two Kinsey reports (on men in 1948; on women in 1953), the first issues of Confidential in 1951 and Playboy in 1953, both to gain very rapidly in circulation; best-selling novels such as From Here to Eternity (1951), A House Is Not a Home (1953), Not As a Stranger (1955), Peyton Place (1956), Strangers When We Meet (1953), A Summer Place (1958), The Chapman Report (1960), Return to Peyton Place (1961), not to mention the thrillers of Mickey Spillane.
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