Some Kind of Mirror

Creating Marilyn Monroe

Amanda Konkle

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781978802636
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Arts de la scène

Although she remains one of the all-time most recognizable Hollywood icons, Marilyn Monroe has seldom been ranked among the greatest actors of her generation. Critics have typically viewed her film roles as mere extensions of her sexpot star persona. Yet this ignores both the subtle variations between these roles and the acting skill that went into the creation of Monroe's public persona. Some Kind of Mirror offers the first extended scholarly analysis of Marilyn Monroe's film performances, examining how they united the contradictory discourses about women's roles in 1950s America. Amanda Konkle suggests that Monroe's star persona resonated with audiences precisely because it engaged with the era's critical debates regarding femininity, sexuality, marriage, and political activism. Furthermore, she explores how Monroe drew from the techniques of Method acting and finely calibrated her performances to better mirror her audience's anxieties and desires.Drawing both from Monroe's filmography and from 1950s fan magazines, newspaper reports, and archived film studio reports, Some Kind of Mirror considers how her star persona was coauthored by the actress, the Hollywood publicity machine, and the fans who adored her. It is about why 1950s America made Monroe a star, but it is also about how Marilyn defined an era.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

PLAYING “MARILYN MONROE”

A story about Marilyn Monroe’s 1954 performances for the troops in Korea concludes her autobiography, My Story.1 Monroe, as the narrator, says the officer in charge of her Korean tour asked her to change the way she sang the George Gershwin song, “Do It Again,” because her performance was “too suggestive.” Although Monroe insists that she “hadn’t sung the song with any suggestive meaning,” she agrees to change “do it” to “kiss me,” because she sees no point in arguing. She explains, “People had a habit of looking at me as if I were some kind of mirror instead of as a person. They didn’t see me, they saw their own lewd thoughts” (183). With Monroe, this story suggests, sex appeal was wholly conspicuous, even if she intended her performance to be subdued or even classical. Eventually, when the individual formerly known as Norma Jeane Mortenson looked in the mirror, she would see not “herself,” but Marilyn Monroe looking back at her. That she was “some kind of mirror” aptly describes Monroe’s role in postwar culture, for, as I argue throughout this book, Monroe’s star persona united many of the contradictory discourses of the postwar period. Her performances, onscreen and off, despite having been crafted to showcase her status as a sexpot, were more complex in that, at the same time as they acknowledged and resisted the conventions of the sexpot, they also mirrored, or reflected, the concerns and anxieties of many postwar Americans. Monroe played the sexpot role, but she also challenged that role with humor, sensitivity, and cultural relevance.

In fact, the sexpot role Monroe played—a performance of being consistently and conspicuously desirable and available—made Monroe’s engagement with debates about postwar gender roles, female sexual desire, and the labor undertaken by actresses more palatable to audiences and critics—and thereby also obscured the range of cultural work undertaken by Monroe’s star persona in the postwar period (as well as today). The very sexiness that is part of her persona has made it difficult for many writers to take her seriously as an actress, and yet, playing “Marilyn Monroe” meant not only being sexy, but also incorporating nuances of vulnerability and humor into her roles. Playing “Marilyn Monroe” meant not only being sexy, but also reflecting and advancing debates about women’s roles in marriage and women’s sexuality. Playing “Marilyn Monroe” meant not only being sexy, but also taking herself seriously as an actress, even when few others did. Playing “Marilyn Monroe” meant exposing and resisting many of the contradictions of the postwar era. How she did that is the subject of this book.

In spite of, or perhaps because of, Monroe’s early, tragic, mysterious death, Monroe reflects what others want to see to this day; she figuratively, and sometimes literally, remains “some kind of mirror.” For example, according to staff and guests at Hollywood’s Roosevelt Hotel, where Monroe was photographed for her early modeling gigs, Monroe’s reflection still occasionally appears in the full-length mirror that had once been in her hotel room. The hotel has since moved the mirror to the gift shop, where it can attract revenue. Monroe’s films are still screened, both on television and in movie houses, and thus her screen image also persists.2 Her offscreen image is nearly unavoidable: despite being dead, Monroe appeared in a Snickers Super Bowl ad (2016), a Coke campaign (2015), campaigns for Chanel No. 5 (1994, 2013) and J’Adore Dior (2011), campaigns for Levi’s (1968, 1998), Gap (1993), and Max Factor cosmetics (1999, 2015), as well as campaigns for several automobiles, beers, and jewelry companies, among others (Gray).3

Monroe is useful to advertisers and exhibitors because she remains “some kind of mirror,” reflecting viewers’ desires and suggesting that our problems can be solved with easily attainable consumer goods. Monroe died while she was still young and beautiful, in the middle of production on Something’s Got to Give (1962, dir. George Cukor), when she had not faced the dilemma of leaving Hollywood or acting only in “mature” roles. Indeed, Monroe never receded from the limelight in her lifetime, and her brief career and our memories of it, and her, have thereby escaped the vicissitudes of aging. She remains, to today’s audiences, the same vibrant, fascinating woman she was when she died. (Aging might have been the necessary component for Monroe to escape the dumb blonde sexpot image to which she was bound. Ruth Barton argues that Hedy Lamarr “had to ‘lose’ her body” in death before her interest in invention could be reconciled with her star image [84].) Monroe has never “lost” her body, and while fans invested in her biography often remark on her intelligence, sensitivity, and curiosity, she remains a sex symbol.

But she also means much more to today’s fans, hundreds of whom visit Monroe’s grave every year,4 and thousands of whom engage in lively conversation on fan social media pages, such as Marilyn Remembered, Marilyn Monroe Forever in Our Hearts, and Immortal Marilyn. Fans desire to honor the star, to save her from those who would exploit her image and story, and to bask in her beauty and glamour. But why should fans still have such strong feelings about a star who died over fifty-six years ago? S. Paige Baty argues that “rememberings of her end breathe life back into the dead star, casting her in roles and histories that relate her to the ‘legitimate and illegitimate’ bodies politic of the last several decades” (7). Baty focuses on Monroe as a figure that can cross “high” and “low” culture, and argues that her rich biography makes it possible for her to be used to continually refigure American identity (25–26; see also Ebert xvii–xviii). Although many do engage in activities designed to remember Monroe’s death, such as visiting her grave, many fans prefer to remember her work through discussing the merits of her films, sharing photos of her from throughout her career, and purchasing merchandise bearing her image in order to imagine her as one of their dear friends.5

Much has been written about Monroe’s biography, and I do not intend to delve into who she “really” was or her complex personal life here (although it will, at times, be necessary to mention select details).6 Instead, I focus on Monroe’s career, which is unique in a number of ways that have nothing to do with her biography. For example, Monroe was obviously “built up” by her studio, Twentieth Century-Fox, to be a sexpot. That is, she conspicuously emphasized her sex appeal and sexual availability (including the “Mmmm Girl” campaign to promote Love Happy [dir. David Miller] in 1949, as well as such stunts as being photographed wearing a potato sack), was frequently cast in roles that were little more than decorative, and always played some version of the sexy blonde. And yet, she became a huge star, in a manner that differed from the blondes who copied her as well as from the few other sexpot actresses who had achieved similar stardom (e.g., Jean Harlow, whom I discuss later in the chapter). What’s more, because Monroe’s major film roles fell between 1949 and 1961, we can think of her career as a product of the 1950s, a decade in which many shifts in American cultural life took place, and in which, certainly, many changes in American women’s lives occurred. It is perhaps counterintuitive that a sexpot should speak to American women’s concerns, and yet, as subsequent chapters show, that is exactly what she did.

Playing “Marilyn Monroe” meant encompassing (at least) two meanings at once. The double entendres that filled reporting on her from the beginning of her career were so central to her persona that they became known as Monroeisms: for example, “In bed, she claims, she wears ‘only Chanel No. 5,’ and she avoids excessive sun bathing because ‘I like to feel blonde all over’ ” (“Something” 88).7 Monroe’s double meaning was not limited to her offscreen publicity—her double entendres call attention to how she can say one thing while meaning another, and why should we think this differs in her film performances? And yet many writers, both then and now, doubt her acting skill. But encompassing at least two meanings at once, in a performance, has been praised, for example, in male Method actors, who have been described as delivering performances that, by expressing psychic conflict, “compet[e] with” the film as scripted (Wexman 174). Monroe has never been given the respect given to acclaimed Method actors, and yet, I argue that Monroe’s performances always challenged the film as scripted, both resisting the sexpot role and referencing cultural debates about women’s roles in marriage, sexuality, and acting.8 Monroe was more than a sexpot—she was a star.

MONROE THE STAR

Monroe’s performances simultaneously fulfill the expectations of a sexpot and a serious film star.9 What do I mean by the designation “serious film star”? During the days of the studio system, all potential stars were given the studio buildup from the moment they stepped onto the lot, and even the studio wasn’t sure which potentials would actually become favorites. More who were given the star buildup are forgotten than remembered, and so one aspect of being a star must be becoming well known enough to be remembered. In fact, predicting which “stars” were “Stars-of-Tomorrow” had been the subject of a Motion Picture Herald poll from the publication’s beginnings in the 1930s. In 1952, the poll named Monroe the “Number One Star-of-Tomorrow” despite the fact that she had not yet had any major starring roles (Weaver 12). But, as Esther Sonnet points out, “the uncertainty and unpredictability of even Monroe’s position at this point is historically confirmed by the lack of comparable historical impact of other Stars-of-Tomorrow actors that are named alongside her such as Danny Thomas, David Wayne, Marge and Gower Champion, and Forrest Tucker” (66). Studio publicity, then, succeeded in interesting audiences in Monroe, but her film performances had to complement that publicity to maintain audience interest and transform her into an enduring star.

Although there are many excellent articles that analyze specific films and Monroe’s role in them, not enough emphasis has been given to the cumulative effect of her performances in shaping the interpretation of the films. The field of academic star studies boasts a number of useful approaches; P. David Marshall summarizes the ways film stars have been studied as, variously, “the economic heart of the culture industry,” “a form of spectatorial pleasure and identification,” and “a sociological phenomenon that exits the film roles and plays an active symbolic role in the lives of audiences” (12). Monroe has been examined, at least briefly, from all of these perspectives. I will incorporate what has been written about her films in later chapters, but an overview of the vast body of work on Monroe as a star is in order before proceeding.

Monroe often served as evidence of far-reaching patriarchy and Hollywood misogyny in the work of early feminist film scholars, and some of that persists even into the twenty-first century. Early feminist critics described Monroe as a product of “Mammary Madness” (Rosen 291), the “butt of all fantasies” (Rosen 287), or “breast fetishism combined with Lolita lechery” (Haskell 255). Molly Haskell admits that Monroe “was giving more to idiotic parts than they called for—more feeling, more warmth, more anguish; and, as a result, her films have a richer tone than they deserve” in that they “suggest the discrepancy between the woman (and young girl) and the sexpot, even as their directors (Wilder and Hawks) exploit the image, through exaggeration, more than they have to” (256). I agree with Haskell, but attend in more detail to Monroe’s performances to demonstrate how she resisted the sexpot character. Haskell and Marjorie Rosen published their reflectionist studies of women in film in the 1970s, paving the way for further consideration of actresses, a task begun by psychoanalytic theorists of the late 1970s and early 1980s. Nevertheless, foundational feminist film scholar Laura Mulvey, in her early work, reads Monroe as a prime example of the passive female as “erotic object” in Hollywood films (“Visual” 40).10 Even into the twenty-first century, Jessica Hope Jordan, in her otherwise engaging study of the particularly feminine power of Hollywood “sex goddesses,” isolates Monroe as the sole powerless Hollywood sex goddess, whose “true helplessness and desperation” disempower her (157). But Jordan does not acknowledge that while Monroe’s film characters may have appeared helpless and desperate, they also challenged the expectations others had of the sexpot. When critics refuse to concede that Monroe was an empowered woman whom other women admired, they objectify her in just the manner of which they are critical. Directors did exploit Monroe as the sexpot, but we should not let that stop us from seeking signs of Monroe’s resistance to that exploitation.

Complicating the insights of early feminist film scholars has provided later film scholars with tools to better understand Monroe’s appeal as a star. By theorizing spectator desire and identification, psychoanalytic theory usefully illuminates the specific problems involved in discussing female stars. Mulvey’s indispensable “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” posits that the camera and the other characters within the film have either a voyeuristic (watching the private without permission) or fetishistic (building up the beauty of the female star into a satisfying object to disavow castration anxiety) relationship to female stars. In either case, the filmic situation objectifies the woman (“Visual” 43).11 Although Mulvey does not account for the pleasures of female stars for female viewers, nor for the camera’s objectification of male stars, she has paved the way for subsequent theories regarding the kinds of pleasure viewers experience when watching Hollywood films, drawing at various points on notions of, as Gaylyn Studlar and Mary Ann Doane discuss, voyeurism, fetishism, masochism, and the masquerade.12 Although such notions maintain rigid gender dichotomies, they nevertheless provide useful heuristics for considering the relationship between stars and viewers.

In contrast, by thinking of film as a fantasy structure housing a number of shifting identificatory positions, theorists such as Elizabeth Cowie and Judith Mayne propose that viewers respond to stars in ways that are not driven by gender binaries.13 The work done toward disproving the hegemonic influence of the patriarchal gaze has resulted in a richer understanding of the ways female stars generate meaning for audiences. While female stars sometimes seem to embody the workings of patriarchy, at other times they demonstrate avenues of resistance to patriarchy, making these forms of resistance accessible to audience members. At still other times stars oscillate between being subjected to and resisting society’s mores in a way that resembles the viewer’s own experience of social existence. Thus, Lucie Arbuthnot and Gail Seneca use the principle of identification to argue that Jane Russell’s and Monroe’s performance of friendship in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953, dir. Howard Hawks) encourages “the female viewer to join them, through identification, in valuing other women and ourselves” (113). Considering the sexpot’s appeal to female audiences, then, challenges rigid understandings of viewer...