It’s been said that the movie stars of Hollywood’s golden age were our version of the Greek gods. That’s how much they towered over our imaginations (and still do). Humphrey Bogart was the god of cynical valor, Bette Davis the goddess of tough love, James Stewart the god of aw-shucks decency, and so on. But you might say that Marilyn Monroe stands apart from those stars as much as they stood apart from the rest of us. For the universe endowed Marilyn with a special quality: Before she was anything else, she was our goddess of sex, of bedazzled erotic enchantment. And 100 years after her birth, that’s part of why we’re still obsessed with Marilyn, still trying to pin down who she was and what she meant to us.
Sex, the very lifeblood of that thing we call movies, will always be a force as mysterious as it is primal. And Marilyn, who died in 1962, was on the cusp of the sexual revolution; she was its herald. Just before the age of liberation brought about by the birth-control pill, Marilyn was already a new kind of heightened erotogenic star. The long-dark-lashed eyes that would pop open in a daze of wonder and then half-close, as if caught in a carnal reverie. The smile that was a lipstick bomb of bliss. The cooing, teasing voice of sugary flirtation and seduction. And let’s not forget the sparkly nightclub splendor of those curves.
If you watch her movies now, it’s clearer than ever that Marilyn was an actress of bewitching skill, with a blithe spirit that was really her instinctive way of putting her entire being in quotes, winking at the power she had over the world. Yet any consideration of Marilyn must start with the incandescence of her image. Even within a Hollywood of unimaginable beauty (Louise Brooks, Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh), she stands as the most beautiful woman of the 20th century, and the most mythological in her aura.
Diamonds figure heavily into the Marilyn mystique, notably in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” where her dreamy hauteur elevated “Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend” into one of the greatest musical sequences on film. In a Marilyn movie, diamonds were a 1950s way of equalizing the male-female power dynamic (men had the power because they had the money; diamonds were a woman’s way of getting the money). But a perfect diamond was also the jewel that Marilyn identified with, because a diamond’s luster is literally the white light of a sparkling rainbow, and Marilyn’s beauty had every color in it: the doe-like innocence, the luminous desire, the lost-girl fragility, the inviting warmth. All those aspects played on her face at once, creating a singular glint.
That her image was so layered is part of what made her a magical actress. When Norma Jeane Baker, the brunette starlet, made herself over into Marilyn Monroe, the platinum-blonde icon, she was as transformed as Cinderella at the ball. Before she had even stepped into a character, the personality of “Marilyn Monroe” was a pure performance, a role. And it was anything but one-note. Just look at the contrast between her working-class sharpness in “Clash by Night” and her teasing avarice in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” and her velvet softness in “The Seven Year Itch” and her distraught romantic fervor in “The Misfits.”
Offscreen, she read Joyce and Dostoyevsky and Walt Whitman and was a devoted associate of the Actors Studio and had the temerity and independence to establish her own production company. Yet so triumphant was her performance as Marilyn that the world treated her intelligence and sensitivity as if it were a funny footnote, as if the “real” Marilyn could only be the bombshell of our dreams.
The layer that undergirded all of this was her trauma. For despite her celebrity and success, and for all the pleasure and devotion she poured into her work, the arc of her life bent toward tragedy. Her troubled, haunted, famously difficult personality (expressed in her turbulent marriage to playwright Arthur Miller and, on set, in her chronic lateness and insecurity) made Marilyn, in her lifetime, the original reality show, and it became central to her mythology after she died. Her trauma was tied to the dysfunction of her upbringing, but also to the world she was navigating: a world that gawked but refused to see her sexuality as spiritual, and so it forced her into boxes. That doesn’t mean that we need to view Marilyn as some eternal victim, the way the overstated biopic “Blonde” did. But what it does mean is that now, after the earthquake of the sexual revolution and the revelations of #MeToo, we might view Marilyn differently than we did before.
To this day, her character in “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” is often described as a “dumb blonde” (because she’s so fixated on landing a rich man), but if you actually look at Lorelei Lee, she’s anything but dumb; the wit of Marilyn’s line deliveries is whip-smart. But that’s just one instance of how the power of her image can blind us to reading her with empathy — looking at what she was really doing. It might appear that her characters had less agency than those played by, say, Barbara Stanwyck or Lana Turner (domineering goddesses who had ruled the decade before). But Marilyn was up to something highly stylized. For a dozen years, her presence onscreen added up to a larger-than-life projection of what it means when a woman of transcendent allure, who wants to be loved for who she is, navigates a predatory world. And the fact that the Marilyn persona was such a performance is key to that. She was dramatizing the way that women have too often felt like they needed to perform, simply to be seen.
In “Some Like It Hot,” Monroe’s Sugar Kane, a character as sweet as her name, is in thrall to a “millionaire” (Tony Curtis, doing a daffy Cary Grant impersonation), which is that film’s version of “give me diamonds.” Chasing this wealthy mirage of a man is what Sugar thinks she’s supposed to be doing. Yet she’s wearing a mask as much as he is. And beneath her cockeyed pursuit, the sheer adoration with which she gazes at him becomes its own form of conquest. Marilyn was our goddess of sex, because that’s how the world viewed her and still does: as an image to covet. But she was really our goddess of love, because what projected out from the sunbeam of her beauty was her yearning to be loved. And maybe that’s what was so special about her — that the sublime desire Marilyn Monroe created in us is the force that completed her.
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