Of Boys and Men, Rethinking "Slap Shot"

Richard V. Reeves, a scholar at the Brookings Institution in Washington, D.C., is internationally recognized for his scholarship on equality of opportunity, with a focus on divisions of social class and race. But in recent years, he has become concerned about a less-scrutinized axis of inequality: the myriad ways in which boys and men are falling behind girls and women educationally, economically, and on many indicators of social well-being. In his new book Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, Reeves examines the difficulties that millions of boys and men are having in school, at work, and in the family. As an advocate for gender equality, who has devoted considerable study to closing the pay gap for women, Reeves rejects right-wing calls to repeal feminism. But he also contends with those on the left who believe that focusing on men’s problems distracts from the challenges still faced by girls and women. “We can hold two thoughts in our head at once,” he writes in his new book. “We can be passionate about women’s rights and compassionate toward vulnerable boys and men.” And the problems of boys and men falling behind — in absolute terms as well as relative to women — are real and serious. For example, the 2020 decline in college enrollment was seven times greater for male than for female students. The wages of most men are lower today (in real terms) than they were in 1979. One in five fathers is not living with their children. Single and divorced men account for hugely disproportionate numbers of drug-related deaths. Men account for two out of three “deaths of despair,” either from a suicide or overdose. 65,000 more men than women died of COVID in this pandemic. Source: www.niskanencenter.org

In Slap Shot, Paul Newman played Reggie Dunlop, the ageing player-coach of the fictitious Charlestown Chiefs, a sad-sack minor league ice hockey team in a collapsing steel town. Dunlop confesses his worries about the future: Charlestown's steel mill is closing and the Chiefs will fold after the season, his losing record as a coach raises doubts about his future in hockey, and he cannot imagine himself "in one of those bullshit nine-to-five jobs." Trying to encourage him, the experimental lesbian Suzanne tells him: "Hey, use your imagination. That's what I've been doing." Dunlop will embrace that mantra, even use that quote to encourage one player's unhappy wife, but neither he nor the male characters display the creativity that many of the women do in dealing with the uncertainties facing them. At the time of its release, Slap Shot seemed so profane and violent many viewers found the film objectionable, and certainly beneath an actor of Newman's stature and popularity. The New York Times reported that Slap Shot may have been the "most obscenity-sprinkled major movie ever made," while famed critic Rex Reed called the film "violent, bloody and thoroughly revolting." Not all reviews were so negative--noted critic "Pauline Kael raved that Slap Shot was Newman's best work to date: 'one of the best performances of his career,' but the film was widely disparaged. The New York Post critic Frank Rich observed that "Nancy Dowd has an ear for American vernacular that Ring Lardner might have appreciated; she realizes that cussing can be an exhilarating folk art".

Given the boorishness, violence, profanity, sexism and homophobia of many of its characters, Slap Shot is understandably associated with a retrograde vision of combative masculinity, but a closer look reveals the film is better understood as prescient and forward-thinking in its representation of women's superior adaptability in confronting the challenges of a changing economy. While the men look to cling, or return, to formulas that are increasingly unworkable, the women in the film operate with much greater creativity. Slap Shot's perceptiveness about changing gender roles, its dramatization of the decline of Rustbelt manufacturing, and the film's relentlessly negative portrayal of people involved in hockey, all combine to make this film much more profound than its image as a foul-mouthed glorification of hockey violence would suggest. At the film's start, the Chiefs are losing, despite their talent: Their roster includes the league's leading scorer, and in one pre-game pep talk Dunlop proclaims, "Man for man, we're better than any fuckin' club in the league."

But the announcement that Charlestown's steel mill will close at the start of April forces a reckoning. Dunlop initially maintains a brave front, confidently telling his estranged wife that he's not worried about the future because of his coaching experience. Francine (Jennifer Warren) tells him bluntly, "You're no good at it... you can't make 'em win." Once General Manager Joe McGrath (Strother Martin) makes it official that the team will fold after the season, Dunlop becomes more worried about the future. Most players join him in those worries. One has options: Ned Braden (Michael Ontkean), a Princeton-educated American, has his Ivy League degree. But team captain Upton exemplifies the worries that he and most of his teammates face when he blurts out, "Fuckin' Chrysler plant, here I come!" Yet, as Charlestown's closing mill suggests, the high-paying, usually unionized manufacturing jobs that enabled the working class to enjoy a good standard of living on a single wage-earner's income were disappearing. The result is a much less certain future for working class men.

After the road trip where Suzanne tells Dunlop, "Use your imagination," the player-coach tries to win back Francine and save the team--and his job--by encouraging all of his players to fight, including Braden, who is the team's best player and league's leading scorer. Dunlop had been critical of violence at the movie's start. When the team thought their next opponent would include Ogie Ogilthorpe, who Upton called "the worst goon in hockey today," Dunlop said, "For the sake of the game they ought to throw this fuckin' guy in San Quentin. He is a criminal element." Initially, Dunlop was so appalled that the newly acquired Hanson brothers tape on brass knuckles--"every game!"--that he kept them benched. But, desperate to salvage a career in hockey, Dunlop embraces the violence he initially disdained. 

He also convinces gullible local sportswriter Dickie Dunn (Emmett Walsh) to publish stories, without identifying the source, about a possible relocation of the Chiefs to Florida--if they start winning. When a player reads one of Dunn's stories aloud to the team, Dunlop looks at the paper and says, "Dickie Dunn wrote this. It's gotta be true!" He then uses the lure of Florida to motivate his players. He taunts Long Island goaltender Hanrahan about his wife's sexuality until Hanrahan attacks Dunlop, earning an ejection. Since Long Island has no backup goalie, the Chiefs win easily--the win that ends their long losing streak. In the next game, Dunlop manipulates the sweetly sensitive Carlson into a fight that leaves him injured and out of the lineup, finally giving the Hanson brothers their chance to play. They escalate the fighting and violence to new extremes, helping the Chiefs beat and beat up most of their league rivals, and turning Charlestown into a title contender.

Despite their new, winning ways, the Chiefs have their critics. Francine responds to Dunlop's claim that "We got a whole new attitude--it's bringing us a lot of success" by telling him, "Any fool can fight." Opposing fans protest the Chiefs' style of play more vigorously. During one game in Hyannisport, an angry fan throws an object that hits one of the Hansons in the face, triggering a wild scene in which a number of Chiefs leave the ice and climb into the seats and fight with spectators. When the Chiefs are one win away from the league championship, Dunlop finally meets the team's mysterious owner, Anita McCambridge (Kathryn Walker). She tells him she cannot make enough of a profit to justify a sale, so she will fold the team for tax purposes after the season. Dunlop comes clean to the players about his deception before the final game, telling them, "I conned you guys. I just lied to you. We were never anything but a rich broad's tax write-off." Of the fighting he himself had encouraged, he tells his players, "We've been clowns... goons... We're a bunch of criminals. We ought to be in jail." 

He professes to be "ashamed... really ashamed of myself." For his final game, Dunlop says, "I want to win that championship tonight. But I want to win it clean. Old-time hockey." He specifically singles out Toe Blake, Dit Clapper and Eddie Shore as "the greats" he wants to emulate in his final game. The Chiefs' opponents, the Syracuse Bulldogs, have different plans, though, and have fortified their roster with some of the worst goons from recent league history, including the dangerous Ogilthorpe. The Bulldogs pummel the suddenly pacifist Chiefs in the first period. When the general manager scolds the Chiefs at intermission for their refusal to fight back, and tells them NHL scouts are in attendance looking for tough players, Dunlop abandons his commitment to play it clean. In the next scene, all of the players on both teams, aside from Braden, are fighting on the ice in a comically appalling spectacle while Braden sits by himself on the Chiefs' bench. When his estranged wife Lily walks into the building, freshly made over by Francine, Braden sees her, looks smitten, then leaps onto the ice and does a strip tease, with musical accompaniment by the marching band. Braden's strip-tease triggers a protest by the Bulldogs' player-coach Tim McCracken. Furious that the referee refuses to stop Braden's "disgusting" display, McCracken punches the referee. The referee then declares a forfeit by the Bulldogs, and awards the game and the championship trophy to the Chiefs. The film ends with the Chiefs' victory parade but with a bitter taste. We suspect Reggie will keep on losing, as his ex-wife Francine abandons him for good.

This was an era of particular violence in professional hockey: the rapid expansion of the National Hockey League (NHL), from just six teams in 1966-67 to 18 in 1974-75, the establishment of a rival World Hockey Association in 1972, and a related expansion of minor leagues and teams, led to the watering down of talent. Players who previously would have lacked the skill needed to stay in pro hockey could do so through violence and intimidation; their presence forced teams to keep players whose main role was to fight opponents' goons. The situation was worsened by the fact that the NHL's initial expansion doubled the league to 12 teams, permitted established teams to keep so many players that few of value were available to expansion teams. This combined to create a race to the bottom in terms of fighting and thuggishness that led to frequent bench-clearing brawls and other episodes that made the hockey league a joke to many American sports fans in the 1970s. In the pre-expansion period the league's penalty-minutes leader for the season typically recorded fewer than 180, but this number ballooned after expansion; in the seasons starting in 1973-74 penalty-minutes leaders respectively recorded 405 and 472.

Slap Shot's portrayal suggests the decline of Rustbelt manufacturing, the process Barry Bluestone and Bennett Harrison in 1982 called The Deindustrialization of America. Johnstown, located about 70 miles south of Pittsburgh, was known for catastrophic flooding that got it nicknamed "Floodtrap City" and the "Valley of Death". Nonetheless, it had enjoyed a "golden age" of steel manufacturing and coal mining. In the 1970s, though, Johnstown joined other Rustbelt cities like Bethlehem, Pennsylvania; Youngstown, Ohio; and Fort Wayne, Indiana in being hit hard by plant closures that eliminated thousands of industrial jobs. The loss for industrial workers continued into the 1980s, when "competition and new technology eliminated millions of jobs and permanently reduced the wages of millions of workers"--even during a period in which the economy as a whole enjoyed a period of sustained growth. At its peak in 1957, Johnstown had had 40,000 full-time jobs in steel-making and coal-mining; by 1996 that figure had declined by about 90 percent. Conditions for industrial workers had deteriorated so markedly that Jack Metzgar's 1985 Dissent article surveyed the loss of unionized jobs, the decline of manufacturing wages and benefits, and the relative generosity of pension benefits accrued during the 1950s and 1960s and scathingly concluded, "In working-class Johnstown... the best paying job is retirement".

Part of what made Slap Shot prescient is that the decline in manufacturing, and in private-sector union membership, continued into the 21st century, as did men's difficulty in responding to it. Hanna Rosin's 2010 Atlantic article, "The End of Men," described the Great Recession in 2008-09 as doing most damage to predominantly male occupational categories. She found women were proving themselves much more adaptable than men, and that many men simply withdrew from the labor force rather than undergo retraining. Rosin's article dovetailed with findings in a July 2010 New York Times article that described male college graduates unwilling to settle for jobs they considered beneath them; that article led with the story of a newly-minted Colgate University alumnus who turned down a $40,000-per-year job because he considered it "dead-end work." In Slap Shot, the men similarly struggle to adapt to the changing economy. Dunlop tells Lily Braden, "Use your imagination. That's what I've been doing." But he, like most of the male characters, reaches backward, trying to recapture a disappearing past, rather than trying to look forward in genuinely imaginative ways. This is exemplified in Dunlop's belief that he can reclaim Francine's affections if his hockey team starts winning, despite her obvious loss of interest in the game. The male characters, rather than the film itself, are sexist. And even their sexism conceals admiration for the women in their lives. 

Dunlop tells his team what he had said to infuriate the goalie Hanrahan: "His wife is a dyke." But he adds sincerely, "She's a fantastic gal! I mean, fantastic!" Recalling the late Jackie St. Pierre, a teammate whose wife left him before "that great Peterborough game" in 1968, Dunlop says he thought Jackie was right to beg her to come back to him: "She was a dynamite broad." Dunlop also has a complicated connection with Lily Braden. As part of his mind games designed to get Braden to fight, Dunlop flirts with Lily, and encourages her to leave Braden. He tells her, "I think you're a champ. Only you've gotta stop killin' yourself." After Lily finally moves out of Braden's house and in with Dunlop, Dunlop taunts Braden by telling him Lily is a "terrific gal"--adding, "We've been havin' a hell of a time!"

While the men react with sexism, homophobia, and attempts to either cling to or return to formulas that are no longer likely to work, the women show much more ingenuity. Some of the hockey wives, admittedly, accept their sad circumstances passively, best exemplified by Upton's wife confessing that she "only drinks in the afternoon... Or before a game. or when Johnny's away." But other women act more forcefully. Anita McCambridge becomes the villain because she folds the team, but she is in charge, and will still be living very comfortably long after the team is just a memory. Suzanne goes well outside contemporary conventional norms with her approach to escaping her unhappy life with Hanrahan. After leaving Dunlop, Francine has become a successful hairdresser; by movie's end, with business collapsing in Charlestown, she has accepted a new job and is moving to a salon on Long Island. Lily leaves Braden, accepts a makeover by Francine, then gets her husband back, on what appears to be her terms. Even Jill St. Pierre, the "dynamite broad" who left Dunlop's teammate a decade earlier, showed initiative and an ability to imagine a completely different life than the one she had as a hockey wife. Not only are the female characters more creative than the sexist, homophobic hockey players, it is the male characters who perform the film's most memorable nudity, even though we see Suzanne's exposed breasts in her scene with Dunlop. There is Braden's strip tease in the climactic scene: with his wife sitting in the stands yelling, "Take it off!," he strips until he is naked except for his jockstrap and skates. 

Owner Anita McCambridge can't make "enough of a profit" from a sale of the team; she could make money, and provide her players with the chance to continue their livelihoods--"We're human beings," Dunlop tells her when they finally meet--but choses instead to hurt or end their careers to fatten her own, already substantial bottom line. General manager McGrath's gleeful performance of simulated masturbation in one early scene makes him appear perverted. When he learns that the team will fold because of the mill closing, he selfishly tries to conceal the news until he can find a different job for himself. He frequently speaks of his past work for Eddie Shore to establish his hockey credibility; when the players invoke Eddie Shore as an inspiration to play clean, "old time" hockey in the final game, McGrath, who wants the team to goon it up, hypocritically blurts out, "Piss on Eddie Shore!"

Paul Newman sees himself cornered by the narrow-minded characters around him, and somehow he gives up. Newman seems to capture in his expression a contradictory feeling of victory and defeat in the ending. So while Reg Dunlop and the hockey players in Slap Shot showed the lack of imagination that has made it harder for many men to adjust to changes in the economy, the people of Johnstown, like the female characters in Slap Shot, have used more imagination. After the golden age Johnstown enjoyed with coal and steel in the 20th century, its citizens and leaders understand that it, like other industrial centers, will be unable to make it "Right Back Where They Started From." —"Rethinking George Roy Hill's Slap Shot as a Tale of Feminist Empowerment and Male Struggle in a Post-Industrial World" (2020) by John Soares Source: galeapps.gale.com

Babylon, Liz Taylor, Paul Newman, Slap Shot

Actor Eric Roberts gushed over Margot Robbie’s performance as Nellie LaRoy in Babylon, comparing it to Elizabeth Taylor and Sandy Dennis’ landmark performances in Mike Nichols’ “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” And even though it’s early in the Oscar race, Roberts (who plays a small role in Babylon) is already predicting that Robbie will walk away with the Best Actress trophy. “I don’t watch myself anymore,” Roberts said. “But Damien Chazelle’s movie, I have watched that. I will also tell you that Margot Robbie is going to win an Academy Award for that. She gives the most incredible performance in ‘Babylon’ that I have ever seen. The two incredible actresses in ‘Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?’ gave perfect performances, and it’s on that level. She blew me away. I couldn’t believe how brilliant every minute of every day she was.” Source: indiewire.com

Despite the rather tepid one-two of The Helen Morgan Story and Until They Sail, Paul Newman was a rising commodity, and he was connected in trade papers with a number of roles: the male lead in Marjorie Morningstar; an adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s A Time to Love and a Time to Die; and an adaptation of Nelson Algren’s A Walk on the Wild Side. As it happened, none would pan out (the roles went to Gene Kelly, John Gavin, and Laurence Harvey, respectively), but the increasing frequency of his name in the press evinced his gathering stardom. His next film would prove it. He won the role of Brick Pollitt, the alcoholic scion of a powerful southern family in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, which writer-director Richard Brooks was adapting from the successful Broadway version of Tennessee Williams’s play. Elizabeth Taylor would play the heroine, Brick’s wife, Maggie the Cat, with a far more cinematic brand of sensuality than Barbara Bel Geddes, the original stage Maggie, could bring to the screen. But Brick was a tricky part. Ben Gazzara had created the role on Broadway, and he had theatrical credentials. But he had no value as a name; there was no way he’d get the movie role. A lengthy search for a screen Brick had ensued, and Newman was selected only when Brooks and Taylor’s husband, impresario Mike Todd, warned MGM that she would walk from the project if a Brick wasn’t found soon. “For Christ’s sake,” Todd told the studio brass, “we’re gonna blow this thing.” His threats worked: Newman, Brooks’s favorite for the role, was to be paid $17,000, his highest fee yet, for his work.

The shoot was scheduled for Hollywood in March, which would allow both Newman and Taylor to work on their southern accents with dialect coaches and generally to take the holidays for themselves. For Taylor, this meant a Christmas with Todd, whom she’d married in February (at age twenty-four, it was her third wedding), and their baby daughter, Liza. For Newman, it meant arduously working out the terms of a divorce from Jackie, who had finally agreed to give up her claim on him. The gossip press scented something in the air—the New York Post ran a photo of Newman and Woodward in December with a caption implying a wedding was impending. On January 16 they appeared on television together in “The 80 Yard Run,” a Playhouse 90 production of Irwin Shaw’s story about a college football hero’s unlikely romance with a sophisticated girl and the troubled marriage that results. 

It was their first filmed work to appear anywhere, and it proved what all the directors and fellow actors and Actors Studio colleagues had always said about them: Newman had indelible star power, but Joanne was by a good measure the more accomplished actor. She’s alive in an indeterminate number of ways, all fresh and exciting. In comparison, Newman is game and ardent and a bit stiff; you sense him planning and staging his emotions and reactions. He’s stunning to look at but he’s not her equal. Funnily enough, the differences between their levels of skill add credibility to the script. Joanne’s character is meant to be the sophisticate, and she winds up dumping her shallow Adonis for a pipe-smoking New York magazine editor (a Hugh Hefner type played, ironically, by Richard Anderson, the mama’s boy from Long, Hot Summer). Newman’s character, on the other hand, needs to develop a sense of himself and build a reservoir of self-respect and self-reliance. Dramatically, he needs to be less effective than she; the director Franklin Schaffner recognized this. Which isn’t to say Newman didn’t do a nice job: it would be his final appearance on live television and a thoroughly creditable one: lively and knowing and with a broad swath of blue-collar decency and plausible streaks of insecurity and shame.

Indeed he was acting. In real life he was surely caught up in drama and emotion that had little to do with what he played in that film. Chief was the knowledge that Joanne was carrying his baby. Sometime during the shoot of Long, Hot Summer, perhaps on that voluptuous brass bed, they had conceived a child—the reality of which may have been the final straw in Jackie’s agreeing to let him go. And now that there was to be an end to his marriage, he and Joanne could make wedding plans of their own: she’d take the train (she hated flying) to Las Vegas, and he’d meet her there after a side trip to Mexico to obtain his divorce. He did, however, confess to one emotion about his divorce from Jackie: “Guilty as hell” was how he described himself, adding “And I’ll carry it with me for the rest of my life.” Newman and Woodward's honeymoon was very happy, but it ended with a sting. 

Newman had to be back in Hollywood by early March to begin work on Cat on a Hot Tin Roof; Joanne would, of course, join him there in his tiny rented home—“a glorified shanty,” as Hedda Hopper described it—so that she could take part in the Oscar campaign for The Three Faces of Eve. But Joanne had a miscarrage and was admitted to St. George’s Hospital, while Newman had to be shooting Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. And then she returned from London to the States on her own. “That very nice doctor then put me on a plane and sent me home,” she said. “It was a terrible end to a lovely honeymoon.” Shooting with Brooks began in March with several members of the original stage cast—including Burl Ives and Madeleine Sherwood—joined by the likes of Judith Anderson and Jack Carson. At first Newman had trouble with Taylor because their styles of acting were so different. “He needed to rehearse and explore,” remembered Stewart Stern, who heard Newman’s complaints. “She would just be doing nothing in rehearsals except saying the lines and walking along. He’d go to Richard Brooks and say, ‘What’s going to happen when we get to a shot? She’s not doing anything.’ Brooks said, ‘Just wait a minute.’ He’d say ‘Action,’ and Paul’s eyes fell out because she’d be there with a full performance, and he never knew where she found it.”

The atmosphere was of great seriousness—as Newman learned when a joke he pulled on the set backfired. He was playing a scene in which the drunken Brick, who has been filled with guilt at the apparent suicide of his schoolmate and friend Skipper, brushes up against one of Maggie’s nightgowns. “I’m in my pajamas,” Newman remembered, “and I’m supposed to slam out of a door, and when I do, my wife’s nightgown, hanging on the door, brushes against my face. So during the rehearsal, when we got to that point, I suddenly tore off my pajama top and cry, ‘Skipper!’ There were twenty people on that set, and not one of them laughed. To them, this was the Method in action, and they stood in respectful silence.” If Newman’s penchant for awkward jokes didn’t impair the flow of work, the events of March 22 did, awfully. That day Mike Todd was killed in the crash of his private plane, the Lucky Liz; Taylor was to have been on the flight with him but had a cold and chose not to travel. She was, naturally, hysterical, and Brooks went to her house to console her. “You son of a bitch,” she greeted him. “I guess you’re here like all the rest of those bastards who’ve been here all day long!” Brooks tried to assure her that she, and not the film, was his chief concern. “It’s a movie, that’s all it is,” he said. “If you never want to come back, that’s fine.” “Well, I’m not,” she replied. “I’m never coming back. Fuck you and the movie and everyone else.”

The studio was, indeed, ready to pull the plug, but Brooks was able to mollify them temporarily by changing his shooting schedule and rewriting some scenes so that he could shoot without her for a couple of weeks. And then he got a call from Taylor’s secretary saying that the actress wanted to visit the set. “I think I’d like to come back to work,” she told him. “I don’t know how long I’ll be able to work. Maybe I’ll start and something will happen.” Brooks eased her back into the production with short bursts—an hour, then two. “By the end of the week,” he remembered, “she was working four or five hours. Never missed a day and was never late.” As impressed as he was with the transformation in Taylor between rehearsals and the actual shoot, Newman was even more awestruck by her work in completing the film. “She was extraordinary,” Newman recalled. “Her determination was stunning.” Two for the Seesaw, a hit Broadway play about the unlikely romance of a Nebraska businessman and a Greenwich Village dancer, was going to go onscreen, and Newman was to star opposite Elizabeth Taylor again. But somehow the project fell apart. 

Indeed, Newman could have made an impressive career of the films he didn’t make over the span of the next half-decade. To wit, he was supposed to appear in The Sixth Man, a biopic about Ira Hayes, the Native American marine who helped raise the flag on Iwo Jima; The Hook, a Korean War melodrama with Sidney Poitier; Sylvia, a romantic detective thriller; The Last Frontier, based on the Howard Fast novel about the U.S. Army’s war on the Cheyenne; the political melodrama Seven Days in May; an adaptation of The Wall, John Hersey’s novel about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising; The Enemy Within, an adaptation of Robert F. Kennedy’s book about his racketeering investigations; The Great Race, Blake Edwards’s gigantic chase movie farce; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, from the John Le Carré novel; After the Fall, from Arthur Miller’s play about a man married to a ravishing second wife (inspired by Marilyn Monroe); an adaptation of Tropic of Cancer costarring Carroll Baker; Night at Camp David, in which he would play an aide to an American president who may be approaching a nervous breakdown; The Sand Pebbles, in the role that Steve McQueen ultimately won; and even In Cold Blood, when Columbia Pictures thought that Newman and McQueen combined would be boffo box office as the cold-blooded killers Dick and Perry. Even Federico Fellini had wanted Newman for the lead role in La Dolce Vita, but Riama Films imposed Marcello Mastroianni. And François Truffaut discussed with his producers by repeatedly suggesting they try to build their adaptation of Fahrenheit 451 around Newman, even going so far as to suggest setting it in New York. Only a handful of these films would get made—and without him—but their sheer numbers give an insight into the sort of stature he was achieving. —Paul Newman: A Life (2009) by Shawn Levy

Slap Shot (review by Gary Arnold in 1977): "This tendentious comic fable about the comeback of a failing minor-league hockey team under the desperately mischievous leadership of an aging player-coach called Reggie Dunlop, finds Paul Newman in winning form while the director seems to be running a deliriously hypocritical fever. "Slap Shot" comes at you like a boisterous drunk. At first glance it appears harmlessly funny, in an extravagantly foul-mouthed sort of way. However, there's a mean streak beneath the cartoon surface that makes one feel uneasy about humoring this particular drunk for too long. Luckily for the filmmakers, audiences may decline to equate themselves with the hockey fans shown clamoring for brawls and buffoonery. There's strain and discontent in the movie that seems unwarranted and damaging. It's as if Hill couldn't suppress his resentment at giving public what he presumes it wants. Like their protagonist, Hill and screenwriter Nancy Dowd, try to engineer a con, but their motives and techniques are less respectable. Dunlop is scheming to save the jobs of his players. 

The filmmakers exploit Dunlop far more questionably than he exploits the Chiefs and their followers, because they attempt to stretch the story into a would-be devastating social parable to no avail. One can't even be certain what Braden's climactic beau geste, a striptease on the ice, is supposed to signify. If may be a gesture of ironic contempt or a gesture of whimsical resignation. For reasons that remain baffling, it appears to patch up his marriage. The ultimate weakness of the film is that it's calculated to be a self-fulfilling cynical prophecy: Box-office success can be taken as justification of the assumption that moviegoers only want to play dirty. Well, not necessarily; it all depends. It is unreasonable to expect the public to feel guilty because Hill and Dowd insist on slapping the hands that feed them." Source: washingtonpost.com

Paul Newman is one of the few stars we've got in a normal emotional range. The Actors Studio may have contributed to the situation of many of our leading actors, such as AI Pacino—they can do desperately troubled psychological states: gloom, defeat, manic... but they're so inward you can't see them getting through a competently managed average day. Newman's range has become more normal with the years; he has grown by going deeper into the emotions of ordinary men. Newman is too modest and too straight inside for the strutting blowhard of Buffalo Bill; Warren Beatty, who's not as skilled an actor, could have done the role better. Newman is one of the least vain of movie stars; he used to smirk sometimes, but it wasn't vanity, it was nervous self-mockery, a shameful recognition of the effect that his handsomeness could have on other people. What Newman does in Slap Shot is casual American star-acting at its peak; he's as perfectly assured a comedian as Bogart in The African Queen, even though the role isn't particularly well written and the picture itself isn't in the same class. 

In The Sting, he was smooth and charming, but he wasn't a con man for a minute. What he does as Reggie shows he has now the confidence, the control, the awareness. The essence of his performance is that Reggie has never grown up. Reggie is scarred and bruised, and there are gold rims on his chipped teeth; you don't see much of his eyes. But with Newman leaner, and his bone structure more prominent, the childlike quality is inner, and the warmth comes from deeper down. Whizzing around on the ice, Reggie is a raucous American innocent. He's thin-skinned but a bit thick-headed, a good-natured macho clown who can't conceal his vulnerability. Newman gives Reggie a desperate, forlorn quality. He suggests an over-age jock's pain from accumulated injuries and the despair under Reggie's manic behavior. The story premise is that the steel mill in the mythical town of Charlestown (most of the film was actually shot in Johnstown, Pennsylvania) is closing, and the Chiefs, a third-rate team, dependent on the support of the local workers, are going to fold at the end of the season. 

Reggie convinces himself that if the team has a winning streak a buyer may be found, and in order to improve morale he bluffs the men into believing that a Florida syndicate is interested. They begin to play dirty and to draw crowds. Shabby as the team is, it would mean a lot to the decaying town, but we don't get to see this or feel it. The director skims the material, as if he were directing from a low-flying helicopter. Actually, the shutdown of a mill might be expected to improve hockey attendance; laid-off workers have to get out and do something, and a minor-league hockey ticket isn't that expensive, even if you're on union benefits, or welfare. People kept going to the movies during the Great Depression. The plot of Slap Shot and its asserted social theme never gel together. We're told that the fans only want blood and gore. 

Yet toward the end, when Reggie inspires his men to go out and play "old-time hockey," they don't get the chance to play it that way. The film is too buffoonish to care about its own theme. And as Jennifer Warren plays Reggie's wife, she's so self-contained she doesn't look as if she'd ever given him the time of day. Hill isn't strong on male-female attachments. The use of hockey as a metaphor for what has been going on in movies is nebulous at best. Hill is a technician, not an artist. Yet he's not just putting down the industry hacks who use shock effects-he's putting down the artists like Scorsese who use violence organically. I don't know that I've ever seen a picture so completely geared to giving the public "what it wants" with such an antagonistic feeling behind it. The theme is that the public no longer cares about the sport--it wants goonish vaudeville and mayhem. There is a grim relentlessness, and expletives are sprinkled around to give it a funky seasoning. Perhaps as a result, the public rejected the film. Hill lacks the conviction or the temperament for all this brutal buffoonishness, and he can't hold the picture together; what does is the warmth supplied by Paul Newman, as Reggie Dunlop, whose likableness in the role is infectious. —"When The Lights Go Down: Film Writings" (1980) by Pauline Kael

Paul Newman: Mercurial Life, Mercurial Talent

Paul Newman: My satisfaction with my success has always been tempered with a great sadness that my mother could never truly feel a part of the enjoyment of my success. My mother thought I was simply a weapon of her Catholicism to be paraded in front of my father’s people as the royal vindication of her own family, her smartness, and her genes. Most people who have experienced themselves fully have in common that they remember some person—a teacher, a religious figure, a parent, uncle, grandfather—someone about whom they can say, “That was my mentor. That was my rock. That’s who pointed me in the direction I followed, who inspired me, who gave me the example to learn from and emulate.” I never had that. I’ve always wondered that I was never able to find a mentor. I never had anyone in my childhood I can look back on as an adult and say, “Boy, I never realized what a foundation that was, how I leaned on that.” I did get little bits of morality from my father; I don’t know what I got from my mother. I don’t know that any teachers gave me anything or any understanding of myself. No scout leader or camp person. Nobody in a church. Nothing. As far as I can tell, I got no emotional support from anyone.

I’m no proud ot it, but while I was having troubles in my marriage with Jackie, there were a couple of quick diversions at the Actors Studio; you couldn’t even call them one-nighters. And they were always followed by terrible pangs of recrimination and guilt. My ethical self was overwhelmed by the discovery of these powerful appetites. Betraying my marital vows to Jackie seemed strangely at odds against that discovery. In my marriage, Jackie was available, but there was always a gauze, a veil, over our responses to each other. You know how it’s decided some luminary deserves a special evening, an honor night? If I ever deserve an evening tribute, it should be for the invention of that sex symbol that was created by Joanne Woodward. And it shouldn’t be done at the American Film Institute or the Oscars—it should be a parade right before the Orange Bowl or the Rose Bowl.

I realized that all my desperate fantasies and years of being turned down disappeared with Joanne. I suddenly found the door of opportunity flung open right before my eyes. Joanne made me feel sexy. Joanne made me feel loved. And she made me feel I wanted to make her feel loved. Joanne and I seemed like a couple of orphans. She first knew I was one because of that problem in my pants each time we danced, and I knew that she was an orphan because most of the definition of her personality seemed to rely on her sexuality. We made a point during Picnic and afterwards to let the lusty aspects of ourselves have time to function without interruption or distraction; we left a trail of lust all over the place. Hotels and motels and public parks and bathrooms and swimming pools and ocean beaches and rumble seats and Hertz rental cars. I don’t know that Joanne and I sat around questioning our morals. But I remember a night when everything exploded on me. I just wanted to drop down on my knees and tell Joanne that I really loved her, and I had to get out of this mess that I was in. Then, all of a sudden, I realized I couldn’t do that; I didn’t have enough money and just couldn’t desert Jackie—God, it was horrible. My indecision and judiciousness, constantly weighing all the elements, was paralleled by Joanne’s unpredictability. She was constantly keeping me off balance.

I only have a few firm convictions. I don’t believe in resurrection, I’m not a mystic. But I am convinced that this is only a dress rehearsal. And when I die and they put me in that box down into the ground, someone is going to yell, “Cut!” Then a director will say, “Okay, let’s go back to the number-one position, let’s get the cameras back there and shoot that scene all over again.” And my box will open up again and some other life will be continued or pursued. I actually think I’ll die seven times. And it will all turn out to be some kind of joke.

Having given Native Americans a fair shake in Robert Altman's Buffalo Bill (or at least having attempted to), Newman next turned his attention, surprisingly, to the gays. A popular novel entitled The Front Runner had come out that detailed the love affair between a male track coach and a younger male runner. The author Patricia Nell Warren had originally had two lesbians in mind but was told by the publisher that if the protagonists were gay men, it might sell better. With scarce artistic pretensions and full of cliches about gay men, The Front Runner at least came along at the right time. The chosen front runner for the possible film role was Richard Thomas, who’d been Newman’s son in Winning and could have certainly handled the part. 

Robby Benson was also in contention. Benson had sensitively played Newman’s self-destructive son in Harry and Son. Although there was hardly as much speculation as there had been when Selznick sought his Scarlet O’Hara, the many fans of the novel anxiously awaited the announcement of which actor would be necking with Newman on the big screen. Many pointed out that Thomas and Benson were hardly handsome enough to play the runner and that it would stretch belief that gorgeous Newman would be attracted to either of them. When asked about the picture, which intrigued many of his fans, Newman would always refer to script problems. The screenplay did go through several drafts, none of which were apparently satisfactory. Finally Newman let it be known that he was backing out of the movie. He claimed that no one would find him believable as a homosexual and he seemed to intimate that no one would believe a young runner would have the hots for his middle-aged coach (even if he looked like Paul Newman). Maybe his "emotional Republican" side appeared again. 

Instead of The Front Runner, Newman ran in 1977 to the safety of one of his macho mindless movies, this one entitled Slap Shot. Newman played a coach all right, but definitely not a gay one. He was a coach, a sometime player for a down-and-out hockey team, and a womanizer despite of trying to win back his ex-wife. Once more we have an attempt by Newman to play a hyper-masculine role almost as an apology for being a Hollywood actor and as a means of washing away all the hype that The Front Runner had sprung up. It was as if he felt he had no choice but to do Slap Shot, with its homophobic dialogue littered with all manner of “fag” and “dyke” jokes. 

Newman had another good reason to do the picture. He’d followed two blockbusters, The Sting and The Towering Inferno, with two pictures that barely registered at the box office: The Drowning Pool and Buffalo Bill. Newman was still frightened of becoming a has-been and of not being able to meet all of his considerable bills, with six children to support. The Front Runner was a risky financial proposition, whereas the crude, more visceral Slap Shot seemed like a sure thing. In this instance, Newman traded in his sensitivity and liberalism for money and, as he saw it, common sense. At heart he was still a boy afraid of being called names by the bigger boys. By this time (late 1970s), movies to Newman mostly represented steady income to support his family and racing activities. “I think Paul is bored with acting,” said George Roy Hill, who was reunited with him on Slap Shot. When Newman's character decides to make his team winners by playing dirty and violent, the movie makes the point that the team attracts more fans that way than by simply playing good hockey. 

Nancy Dowd’s script tries to play it both ways by appealing not only to hockey fans of that type but also to those who have contempt for them—it hardly portrays a world that is flattering to the athletes or their fans. The trouble is that the film is too heavy-handed and far-fetched to make a good satire. There are decades-old movies that have made the same cynical points about human nature but done it with much more flair and wit. And at times Newman plays the vulgar coach too charmingly, completely blunting the desired effect. Just because Newman uses profane language, it doesn’t take away his good breeding. He’s frequently self-conscious and wears a jacket with a fur-lined collar that even The Front Runner gay coach probably wouldn’t have been caught dead in. Gore Vidal attended Newman's 52th birthday shortly before the film’s release. One can only imagine what Vidal thought of it when—and if—he even deigned to watch it. Reportedly Newman once tried to deck a man who referred to Vidal as a fag, but whether it was because the man had used a pejorative term to describe a gay friend or had dared to imply that Vidal was homosexual is not known. 

George Roy Hill was directing from a script by Nancy Dowd, who had written a ribald and shaggy story centered on Reggie Dunlop (Newman), an over-the-hill player-coach who responds to the threat that his team might fold for economic reasons by turning them into goons who win games by taunting and fighting with their opponents instead of playing by the rules. Based on the experiences of Ned Dowd, who played for the Johnstown Jets of the North American Hockey League, it was by several measures the most vulgar film Newman had ever done, and it was filled with idiocy and violence, albeit of what Newman called the “Tom and Jerry” stripe. Much of the film had to do with Dunlop’s relationship with his star player, an Ivy League grad who refuses to play on the crass level that his coach demands. Several rising young actors were auditioned for the role, including Nick Nolte and Peter Strauss, but none could skate well enough. Strauss actually broke his leg trying to learn the hockey game. 

So the part went to Michael Ontkean, the Canadian-born star of the TV series The Rookies and a former hockey player at the University of New Hampshire. The roles of virtually every other member of the team—rechristened the Charlestown Chiefs—were taken by actual hockey players, including a trio of brothers, Steve, Jeff, and Jack Carlson, who were cast as the Hanson brothers, the gooniest of goons, whose arrival signifies the transformation of the Chiefs from a team that played hockey into a self-destructive yet menacing gang. Newman, who’d spent his boyhood skating on frozen lakes around Shaker Heights and had kept up his skating occasionally when the Aspetuck River beside his Westport home froze over, spent seven weeks training to do most of his own stunt work. “It was hard to go back to using the muscles again,” he admitted. He was fifty-one and he saw his limits. “On the eleventh day of shooting the hockey scenes, I really ruined myself,” he said. “It was a big fight sequence on the ice. So I strained all the muscles on the inside of my thighs and in my abdomen. Isn’t the movie business great? I’ve learned how to drive a race car, to ride a horse, to play the trombone, to shoot billiards, and to play ice hockey.” He'd had fun but he was ambivalent towards the violent content.

Newman made an impression, as well, on a young actress named Swoosie Kurtz, who was playing one of the players’ wives. “It’s interesting to watch his decisions in acting,” Kurtz remarked. “When there’s a choice of being sexy or funny or macho, he’ll choose the last two every time, even though he comes off sexy.” The ticket sales, however, never materialized. The movie grossed $20 million in the same year that Star Wars and Smokey and the Bandit were released: having a budget over $6 million it was really peanuts. Perhaps it was the very subject matter—hockey is at best a second rate game in the American sports pantheon. Perhaps it was the profane language and violence. Perhaps it was because Paul Newman’s star was itself in decline. George Roy Hill was not convinced of having made a good film and Newman even reneged on Slap Shot due to its crassness.

When it came down to shoot Blaze (1989), Ron Shelton recalled, Paul Newman was uncomfortable with the idea of himself paired with a younger woman. “He had a daughter the same age as the Blaze character,” Shelton said, “and that made him uneasy.” So even though the Hollywood trade papers had announced that he would play the role, he backed out. There was talk of offering the part to Gene Hackman. And then, Newman remembered, “I just woke up one morning and said, ‘Screw it.’” He would make the film. That, of course, left Shelton the problem of finding the right Blaze Starr. At one point, producer Dale Pollock claimed, the filmmakers had seen more than four hundred actresses for the part. With Newman attached, the pressure to get it right was heightened; rumors that Melanie Griffith or Nancy Travis would play the role bubbled up. In fact, recalled Shelton, they had four or five candidates read with Paul. And one of them looked too much like his daughter, and Newman said, ‘I couldn’t do that.’ Eventually Shelton had Newman read with a virtually unknown actress named Lolita Davidovich, “and she just blew him away. She got in his face and was funny and brave and guileless, and when she left, he looked at me and said ‘Who is that woman?!’”

Blaze Starr would give Lolita Davidovich pep talks and tell her how to play the part whether she wanted to hear it or not. Before long, Davidovich froze Blaze out and refused to even pose for photographs with her. In truth, both on and offscreen, Davidovich is more ladylike than the more vulgar Starr. Reportedly, Davidovich, although she liked working with Newman, was not as impressed with his physical appearance. But then she was the kind of beauty who could have any young man she wanted; Newman must have seemed a bit superannuated by her standards. Although the studio could not be faulted for its publicity—they launched a big campaign for Blaze—word of mouth sunk the picture at the starting gate. 

Perhaps it was the food or the Cajun accents, but Newman found himself, once again, pining for his wife Joanne, whom he had openly courted on a Bayou State film set three decades prior. Joanne was, in fact, enrolled at Sarah Lawrence College during that spring term—she’d been attending on and off for more than a decade, hoping to finish the college degree she’d abandoned in Louisiana in the early 1950s. And then she got a pleading phone call from her husband. “He asked me to join him because he missed me,” she remembered. “There’s no academic degree in the world that can compare in importance to the fact that the person you’ve loved for thirty-one years is missing you.” She put her educational plans on hold and went to join him on the film set. As Roger Ebert put it in 1982, casting his eye back to the 1950s, “Like Brando, Newman studied the Method. Like Brando, Newman looked good in an undershirt. Unlike Brando, Newman went on to study life, and so while Brando broke through and then wandered aimlessly in inexplicable roles… Newman continued to work on his craft. Having seen what he could put in, he went on to see what he could leave out. In The Verdict, he has it just about figured out.”

Paul Newman was always happy to lead through his example through his fame or fortune. Along with John F. Kennedy Jr.’s George magazine, Newman encouraged the sort of corporate philanthropy that his food businesses epitomized. The Newman’s Own/George Award was an annual award for a corporation that practiced “innovative and significant philanthropy.” The prize of $25,000, to be presented to the charity of the winner’s choosing, was endowed by a $250,000 grant from Sony Electronics. The award was remarked by the media, but it ceased after Kennedy’s death and the shuttering of his magazine. Newman also continued his efforts to turn corporations into more responsible public citizens with his Committee Encouraging Corporate Philanthropy, an informational group that showed businesspeople how their companies might follow in the shoes of Newman’s Own. At the same time, he donated his time and image to Business Leaders for Sensible Priorities, a group formed by Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cofounder Ben Cohen to lobby Congress for tighter budgetary control of military spending and the reassignment of excesses from the defense budget to schooling programs and health care for children. 

Paul Newman had been the most tempted male star who remained (at least officially) faithful to his wife. As Joanne had advised to him: "It takes such a long time to grow up and by the time you really get there the people usually you’re growing up for are gone." As a proof of his supporting of his wife, Joanne appeared as Abby Brewster, one of the homicidal aunties in Arsenic and Old Lace, in a 1995 production at the Long Wharf Theater in New Haven. In an old tradition associated with the play, the curtain call on opening night was marked by a stagehand opening the door to the basement, where Abby and her sister, Martha, have buried the lonely men whom they’ve killed off with poisoned elderberry wine; a cast of a dozen actors, representing the corpses, would come out to take a bow. Among the dead men that night, to the audible delight of the sold-out audience, was Paul Newman, wearing a Yale sweatshirt and a baseball red cap: his first appearance in a play in more than thirty years, and he got an ovation without even delivering a line. In certain circles, the most remarkable thing he’d done was to stay married to the same woman for fifty years. How in the world did a couple in their position manage that remarkable milestone? 

“Ultimately, I think we both delight in watching this progression,” Newman told a journalist. “And we laugh a lot.” By all accounts, Paul Newman still acted around Joanne like he was hopelessly in love. He would light up when she entered a room, observers noticed, even if he’d been glowering or grumbling or cussing or complaining or sitting in one of his unreadable silences barely a minute before. He held her hand on walks or as they sat at the symphony or the ballet. He surprised her with sudden phone calls, flowers, and little gifts. “He gave her his electrocardiogram for Christmas,” Stewart Stern recalled. He teased her with mocking little praises—“You have a great figure, and you make a hell of a hollandaise sauce,” he told a reporter—but he needed her in an almost childlike way that he couldn’t disguise. When he was shooting Message in a Bottle in 1999, she visited the set; between shots, he beckoned her over to sit on his lap; as she did, he was overheard asking her, in a sweet voice, “Are you my girl?” When he talked about her, it was with a zeal that could frankly startle. 

“She’s a mercurial lady,” Newman once said of Woodward. “I never know what I’m going to wake up with the next morning. That’s made for some fascinating experiences, I can tell you.” An old-fashioned fellow, he demurred from offering an example. Time ago, his long obsession with speed cars and racing had become the perfect balance to the acting craft that had similarly beguiled him and turned him into a lifelong devotee. But where acting’s rewards were, in his view, fleeting and rare, racing’s were verifiable, demonstrable, and concrete. 

“I’m a very competitive person,” Newman said. “I always have been. And it’s hard to be competitive about something as amorphous as acting. But you can be competitive on the track, because their rules are very simple and the declaration of the winner is very concise.” In January 2008, just as he and Joanne prepared to celebrate their fiftieth wedding anniversary, a tabloid reported that he had undergone surgery for lung cancer—and that his prognosis was poor. On the twenty-sixth he reached his eighty-third birthday; on the twenty-ninth he and Joanne marked their golden anniversary. Tenderly, Newman toasted Joanne before their children and their dearest friends. “I feel privileged to love that woman,” he said. “That I am married to her is the joy of my life.” Paul Newman played some unforgettable roles onscreen. But the ones for which he was proudest never had top billing on the marquee. Devoted husband. Loving father. Adoring grandfather. Dedicated philanthropist. —"The Extraordinary Life of An Ordinary Man: A Memoir" (2022) by Paul Newman

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