Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe

Feminist film scholar Molly Haskell admits that Marilyn 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 the sexpot, even as their directors exploit the image, through exaggeration” I agree with Haskell, but attend in more detail to Monroe’s performances to demonstrate how she resisted the sexpot character. Molly Haskell and Marjorie Rosen published their reflectionist studies of women in film in the 1970s. 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. 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. Professor of Film History Matthew Solomon calls attention to Monroe’s “metaperformances,” in which “she often plays two separate but not entirely distinct roles nested within one another.” Similarly, the analyses of Kristen Pullen (Female Performance in Classical Hollywood) and Ana Salzberg (Beyond the Looking Glass: Narcissism and Female Stardom in Studio-Era Hollywood) have challenged us to see Monroe as a more complex figure. 

Marilyn Monroe exerted considerable control over the outcome of her performances, a little-known fact that encourages careful attention to her films. Although her star persona was largely “manufactured” through her new name, new look, and extensive acting and diction lessons, Ty Burr asserts that “she became big enough to understand that she was bigger than her studio, and that someone that big should be the author of her fame rather than its victim.” In 1954’s River of No Return (Otto Preminger) she demanded Jack Cole as choreographer (after working with him on Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and chose Robert Mitchum as her leading man. She also discussed script revisions with Preminger, thereby shaping her role in many ways. More importantly, Monroe was an actress who dictated her own performances. She improvised scenes and created her character as she saw fit for the first time in 1956’s Bus Stop. Director Josh Logan confirms that screenwriter George Axelrod considered Monroe’s “feeling about the whole story” when rewriting her scenes. “Only very rarely have actors had the opportunity to influence a film so directly,” insists Carl Rollyson, “and Logan’s supreme trust in Monroe, built on his belief that she was ‘one of the great talents of all time,’ has been occasionally matched by other directors but never surpassed.”

Because fans recognized more than the sexpot in Monroe’s offscreen persona, they were likely primed to read more than the sexpot for which she was scripted into her film roles. And these fans’ desire to protect Monroe from herself still resonates with audiences today. Monroe’s portrayal of the sexpot was not a parody (like Jayne Mansfield), nor was it an agonizing portrayal of the woman torn between desire for pleasure and desire for security (like Kim Novak). Neither was Monroe a sultry, femme fatale type like Lana Turner—Marilyn subverted the type of repressive ideology around postwar gender roles, marriage, and female sexuality. In Bus Stop (1956) Marilyn as Cherie says to Don Murray's character: “Bo, I just wanted to tell you something kinda personal and embarrassing, too. But, I ain’t the kind of girl you thought I was. I guess a lot of people’d say I led a real wicked life.” When Cherie says she’s had “quite a few” previous boyfriends, Bo admits, “I guess I just didn’t know anything about women, ’cause they’re different from men.” Cherie’s response, “Well, naturally,” shows us that Cherie knows about both women and men, making her an appropriate teacher of how men should respond to women. Through Cherie, and by extension, Monroe’s sexual but not wanton persona, Bus Stop bespeaks a cultural shift in which sexually active (unmarried) women were seen with respect.

“Seeing as how you had all them other boyfriends before me,” Bo states, “and seeing as how I never had one single gal friend before you, well, between the two of us, it kinda averages out to things being proper, and right.” Bo’s stubborn desire to marry Cherie, despite her past, leads him to finally accept her. Cherie avoids making eye contact with Bo as she waits for him to explain if he feels the same, but an extended close-up two-shot illustrates, through the shot composition and editing, how they come to a mutual understanding. “I’ve been thinking about them other fellas, Cherie,” Bo says, his face dominating the frame such that only one of Cherie’s eyes is visible as she glances hopefully up at him. “I like you the way you are, so what do I care how you got that way?,” he continues, as the camera gradually tilts down to show her full face only when Bo has accepted her sexual experience. In this shared shot, “with Cherie’s upper body lying along the bottom of the frame and Bo leaning above her,” as Ana Salzberg points out, “the two merge in a body-landscape, a panorama of passionate recognition”.

After this, a series of shot/reverse-shot close-ups alternately isolates each of their faces as they realize their affection for each other, and signals how Bo’s acceptance of Cherie’s past enables her to “go anywhere in the world” with him. The series of close-ups in this sequence, rather than two-shots, indicates that Bo and Cherie are individuals before they are a couple, and, contrary to the advice of postwar marriage counselors, that their past experiences must be accepted before they can begin a successful relationship. But what does Cherie gain when she agrees to marry Bo? Most obviously, she gains a way out of the saloon circuit and a spouse, despite conventional warnings that men don’t marry loose women. As the couple stands outside the bus, Bo recognizes that Cherie must be “freezing” in the thin coat she has been wearing since he forced her onto the bus to Montana, and offers his heavy coat. The shot lingers on her as she wraps herself in its luxury. While Carl Rollyson reads Cherie’s enjoyment at this moment as “recognition of what she has won,” he doesn’t say what that is, but implies it is the security of marriage.

If we focus on Cherie as a sexpot, a more significant gain for her is reciprocity—both in terms of sexual pleasure and respect. The film’s final moments make clear that Cherie can expect more than the security of marriage in the form of the “deep freeze” Bo had promised, “or an electric washer, or any other major appliance you want.” As Cherie wraps herself in the coat, she turns her head from left to right, lingering in the sensation of the coat’s fur trim against her skin, displaying the closed eyes and open mouth associated with Monroe’s signature expression of sexual pleasure. Cherie’s visible pleasure indicates that Bo will work to satisfy her sexual needs, just as he does her more immediate physical needs. After this exchange, Cherie gives Bo her scarf, hinting at a reciprocal relationship, a gesture that makes him whoop as he considers her needs again and helps her board the bus ahead of him. In short, Bo finally makes Cherie “hot” for him by thinking of her needs, demonstrating that he has learned the lessons indicated by Kinsey’s findings regarding female sexual pleasure.

Marilyn Monroe’s offscreen life also informs the role of Cherie in Bus Stop, who is eager to find “respect” on Hollywood and Vine, but who instead finds respect for her sexual experience. Those of Monroe’s films that most blatantly capitalize on her sex appeal draw on the transgressive elements of her offscreen life. As The Girl in The Seven Year Itch, Monroe most clearly plays a version of herself—she has posed nude, she is single but not virginal, she is an actress. The Girl demonstrates how Monroe’s offscreen transgressions embodied the kinds of female sexual behavior that Kinsey reported, the validity of which many Americans were debating at the time.  Finally, in Some Like It Hot, Sugar has been “used” like a tube of toothpaste, much like Monroe herself, whose affairs were gossip fodder, but she aggressively pursues a man and wins him in the end. This series of films from Monroe’s canon demonstrates her unique contribution to the postwar moment. Although Monroe was a sexpot, she credibly combined compliance and independence, seeming submissive while making her right to self-satisfaction axiomatic.

When Marilyn as Roslyn in The Misfits (1961) dances aimlessly across the yard, self-absorbed, spinning and hugging herself, she demonstrates her unavailability. With her back to the camera, her straps fall from her shoulders, and she finally embraces a tree. Roslyn’s self-motivated dance acknowledges her sexpot appearance and subverts it by making it possible that her body exists for herself rather than for men: she controls her sexuality. As Richard Dyer notes, The Misfits breaks with the rest of Monroe’s oeuvre in that it “begins to hint at a for-itself female sexuality as formlessness. The men in the film look on, unable to comprehend her sensuality; grasping a tree she looks out at them/us with a hollow expression of beatitude, straining to express what is already defined as inexpressible.” J. M. Coetzee allegorizes Monroe’s “resistance to the highly focused and even regimented models of sexuality purveyed not only by Hollywood and the media but by academic sexology. Roslyn is dancing out a diffuse and—in the light of the rest of the film—forlorn sensuality to which neither Guido’s predatoriness nor Gay’s old-fashioned courtliness is an adequate response.” Roslyn is a mercurial force—although she causes the men’s unraveling, they also look to her for healing. 

Marilyn Monroe’s delivery mode made it seem unlikely that she was consciously using her sex appeal to manipulate others. Monroe certainly was an imperfect wife and her offscreen life inflected the meanings of her films. Her imperfections, however, endeared her to postwar men and women, who were also struggling with the radically reconfigured social landscape of the postwar period. Onscreen, she played a pageant queen wife in We’re Not Married! (1952, dir. Edmund Goulding), a murderess in Niagara (1953, dir. Henry Hathaway), and gold digger in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How to Marry a Millionaire. Monroe’s films reflected unacknowledged problems within a cultural discourse that encouraged women to be housewives. Her roles in The Seven Year Itch, Bus Stop, and Some Like It Hot attest to the changing understanding of female sexuality in the postwar period. By playing women more interested in pleasure than in marriage, Monroe reflected Kinsey’s findings in Sexual Behavior in the Human Female that about half of women engaged in sex outside of marriage. What’s more, while in these roles her desire for pleasure is apparent, the films received Production Code Administration approval. We use Marilyn Monroe in the present to remember and perhaps advocate for prior ways of being American. —"Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe" (2019) by Amanda Konkle