America’s Favorite Marilyn Monroe Cliché

In her article America’s Favorite Marilyn Monroe Cliché for The Atlantic, Sarah Churchwell (author of The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe) deconstructs the pernicious trope that Marilyn was a false identity imposed by the studios upon the ‘real’ Norma Jeane – as propagated by biographers and in popular culture, and most recently in the wildly misleading Netflix ‘biopic’, Blonde. Most films that are widely reviled upon release simply evaporate into their own disfavour. Yet Andrew Dominik’s recent Netflix film, Blonde, has lingered in the public consciousness after its release and subsequent criticism for a simple reason: the enduring star power of Marilyn Monroe. ‘I have to tell you immediately that I never would have written any book about Marilyn Monroe,’ Joyce Carol Oates said in an interview promoting the novel at the time. ‘I got very interested in writing about an American girl who is Norma Jeane Baker who becomes a celebrity later in life. To me, she’s always Norma Jeane.’ It was hardly a new idea then, and it isn’t one now. Since the first studio-written press release in 1946, the search for the real Norma Jeane behind the supposedly artificial persona of Marilyn Monroe has driven endless stories… We talk endlessly about the myth of Marilyn Monroe, but the myth of Norma Jeane is its foundation, encouraging people to express contempt for the ‘fake’ Monroe by pretending to love the ‘real’ Norma Jeane instead. 

In fact, Marilyn Monroe was a real person in every way recognised by our culture—except in our stories about her. The idea that Norma Jeane is both the real Monroe and a different person from Monroe is part of the myth of Marilyn Monroe. Regardless of how unconscious it may be, reducing the staggeringly successful Monroe to ‘little Norma Jeane’ has the undeniable effect of denying her power, keeping her infantilised and pathologised. That fundamental idea of Marilyn Monroe (as artifice) bleeds into any number of unquestioned clichés about her. One, for example, is that Norma Jeane hated Marilyn—as proved, supposedly, by the tragic circumstances of her death. Little that Marilyn Monroe actually said suggests this is true. In many interviews, especially in the fullness of her stardom, she spoke of self-respect, insisting upon her self-worth, asking people to take her seriously. Monroe’s drug addiction could be self-destructive, but it also likely spun beyond her control before she comprehended its dangers. Addiction doesn’t have to be a symptom of self-hatred: It might also provide escape from the  incomprehension of others.

Marilyn Monroe’s life did not happen to Norma Jeane. Norma Jeane is significant because she created Marilyn Monroe. If Norma Jeane had not turned herself into Marilyn, we would never have heard of her. But we don’t speak of Norma Jeane as being the agent of her own transformation; instead, we speak of Norma Jeane passively becoming Marilyn. We still refuse to do Marilyn Monroe the basic justice of crediting her for her own stardom. Marilyn was not put on a treadmill; she pushed and shoved her way onto it, and then beat the competition. Nor did anyone make her change her name: A casting director suggested it, and Monroe, hoping for stardom, agreed. ‘Monroe’ was, in fact, her mother’s maiden name. She legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe soon after she started her own production company: There is no reason to view her name change as anything other than a triumphant assertion of her identity. British journalist William J Weatherby (author of Conversations with Marilyn) said: "Marilyn had an ability, unique in my experience, to make her real persona remain elusive. If you just considered her a blonde bombshell, she'd play that for you, but she wouldn't have respect for you."

We also prefer Marilyn Monroe, but we flatly refuse to admit it. There is another Marilyn Monroe, recalled by those who actually knew her—a woman of tremendous determination, ambition, humor, and dedication to her craft. Her addiction to pills was serious; her stage fright was real and disabling; every one of her successes was met with gaslighting. But she rose above it all, fighting back, fighting them off, showing them up, until the day she took too many of the pills she routinely took too recklessly. ‘Everybody knows about her insecurities,’ another Monroe biography quoted her friend, the photographer Sam Shaw, as saying, ‘but not everybody knows what fun she was, that she never complained about silly things, that she never had a bad word to say about anyone, and that she had a wonderful, spontaneous sense of humour.’ The truly rare tribute to Marilyn Monroe would focus on her survivalism, her ambition and wit, the courage with which she fought her detractors. The great struggle of Marilyn’s life wasn’t her struggle against addiction, depression, and loneliness—it was her struggle for respect. ‘Some people have been unkind,’ she once said. ‘If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don’t expect me to be serious about my work. I’m more serious about that than anything.’ Marilyn wanted, above all, to progress and improve, but we don’t let her change—because then we’d have to change our minds and admit that she was one of America’s great success stories, instead of one of its favorite tragic myths. In truth, Marilyn Monroe offers one of the purest instances of the old American promise of reinvention.” Source: themarilynreport.com

Aesthetic value is a catch-all term that encompasses the beautiful, the sublime, the dramatic, the comic, the cute, the kitsch, the uncanny, and many other related concepts. It is a well-worn cliché that the practical person scorns aesthetic value. But there’s reason to think that it is the only way in which we can draw final positive value from the entire world. Thus, to the extent that we care whether or not we live in a good world, we must be aesthetically sensitive. We want to say that we are part of a good world, and even contribute to its goodness. And if we can say this, the value of our own lives is considerably more robust. Yet the world is, for the most part, not morally good. And even if people stopped treating each other so brutally, it is not clear that this would deliver a definite positive value so much as eliminate a definite negative value. In contrast, aesthetic value is precisely a way in which we can get positive final value from the world at large. 

The value of a beautiful or sublime thing is final because it needs no justification. There is currently some debate over whether depression cuts one off from appreciating beauty, but the philosopher Tasia Scrutton has plausibly argued that depression may only undermine the enjoyment of cheerful sunny scenes, and not the appreciation of the aspects that resonate with one’s condition while also elevating and dignifying it. Just as the dissonant chord in a piece of music is redeemed as part of a larger harmony, so disease and disorder can be redeemed when understood as parts of a larger grandeur. The world is not a jolly place, not a Walt Disney world, but one of struggling, sombre beauty. The dying is the shadow side of the flourishing. Part of the initial motivation for aestheticism was the failure of moral value to give us a positive value for the world. It is thus part of aestheticism to take moral evil seriously. In fact, we need not appreciate suffering to appreciate the person who suffers. Again, we can turn to the aesthetic version of sympathy. This is the aesthetic value we experience when we enjoy sympathetic characters in a fiction, but it is equally applicable to real-life individuals. It is aesthetic because it does not rely on having a personal relationship with the other person. 

Rather, it involves enjoying their rich and poignant individual qualities: the complexity of both charms and flaws that make up their character. It is an aesthetic version of the basic drive for love – the sense that a person is lovable, though we may not be in a loving relationship with them. Our aesthetic analysis of bad people is entirely compatible with morally condemning them. From an aesthetic perspective, we can curiously explore and be fascinated by evil, while also taking practical steps to minimise it wherever possible. –by Tom Cochrane (author of The Emotional Mind: A Control Theory of Affective States (2018) and The Aesthetic Value of the World (2021). Source: aeon.co