Ozark's Marty Byrde vs Breaking Bad's Walter White: American dream down a dark tunnel

As a weary, desperate husband and father in Netflix’s “Ozark,” Jason Bateman is terrific. He plays a mild Chicago money manager named Marty Byrde who launders cash for a Mexican drug cartel and wants to get out of it. Bateman is nicely restrained on the drama, giving us a man who controls his panic, a pot always just about to boil. In his precarious position, other men might be screaming and shooting and running away; instead, Marty contemplates and plots. You can feel the chill of his existential struggle, as he seems to constantly wonder if he’d be better off dead than taking on a cartel. On the one hand, he’s a sympathetic guy who has made bad choices, ultimately putting himself in the sights of the nasty cartel strongman, Del (Esai Morales). On the other hand, he’s charmless, very unlike Bateman’s best-known role as the endearing straight man in a pack of freaks on “Arrested Development.” Marty is a drab fellow whose best quality is his ability to lie his way out of disaster.

The last time a comic actor was so transformed by the right dramatic role, we were watching Bryan Cranston in “Breaking Bad.” And to some extent, “Ozark” works like “Breaking Bad” in reverse, as Marty tries to get out of the world of crime without meeting the fate of his business partner, who is liquefying in a big barrel of acid. Both White and Byrde are ordinary family men who face evil men with guns, devastating deceptions, and plans that never seem to go right. The two shows strike a similar tone, giving us remarkably specific characters and locations while nodding to larger themes about money, America’s failing systems, and masculinity. Source: www.bostonglobe.com

There are shocking moments that establish a constant tension throughout Ozark — this is horror, plain and simple — it’s Marty’s unbearable emotional arc that keeps us in his reality. From watching his wife’s sex tape, again and again, torturing himself in silence, to begging for his life at gunpoint after watching his friend and business partner die, to choosing whether or not his philandering wife — who just betrayed him, again, by trying to steal his money — will live or die, Marty’s ability to compartmentalize is astounding. What keeps it from being unbelievable, aside from Bateman, is his breakdown. This is a family story. This is a romance. This is unparalleled perseverance; brought on as a result of a bad decision, yes, but motivated by the purest of intentions. Marty loves his family. He lost them. And he’s not going to lose them again. Source: www.indiewire.com

When the camera panned away from Walter White’s cancer-struck, bullet-ridden body spread eagle on the floor of a Nazi meth lab, you could say it was a dark spirit of American ambition leaving its vessel. Consumed with his drive to financially provide for his family, Breaking Bad’s protagonist had descended into an amoral pit. He made a few attempts to pull himself out, but ultimately decided it wasn’t worth his efforts. He saw his American dream with tunnel vision, and irreversibly destroyed lives in his peripherals. Only his dream was compromised, having sacrificed too much – his family and humanity – to ever fully attain it. He had become a supremacist kingpin with no real home.

Ozark’s Marty Byrde (Jason Bateman) is chasing the American dream down a dark tunnel. In essence, Marty Byrde is an outsider. When his partner Bruce starts skimming off the top, Marty is forced to concoct a plan to pay the drug lords back. He invents a desperate scheme to move his entire operation to the Lake of the Ozarks in Missouri to cash in on tourism and property as well as the potential for distribution. Then we start to see the self-destructive urges churning beneath Byrde’s mannered exterior. The Byrde family: wife Wendy (Laura Linney), fifteen-year-old daughter Charlotte and thirteen-year-old son Jonah are immediately hit with culture shock. Lives uprooted to the Bible Belt, a wild country of hills, lakes, and dark woods, populated by townies, tourists, hillbillies, rednecks, and every type of lowlife. 

Off the bat Marty and Wendy become entangled in the fabric of the Ozarks. A momma’s boy real estate agent who hires Wendy; Rachael, the mysterious and attractive owner of the Blue Cat Lodge; the preacher who gives his sermons on the lake; Buddy, the dying old man who lives in the basement of the house they buy; and the Langmores, the white trash low-level criminals are just a few of the characters into which the Byrdes crash their lives. How many deals with how many devils can Marty make? The local people who have lived in the Ozarks since before the Power Company flooded the area to build the lake do not forget. It’s something that Marty continues to overlook. 

Early on when Marty and Ruth meet (Ruth robs Marty’s motel room while working as a maid) there is an instant connection between them. Without much explanation Ruth sees right through Marty when she says to him, “I do have this feeling, we both know, you’re better off dead.” Ruth sees Marty as her ticket out of the mud. Marty sees Ruth as his way into the Ozark community and as someone who is smart enough to keep up with him. Like in the Bible, Ruth will have to choose where she belongs. Jason Bateman takes his dry comedy style and turns it into a darker, more bitter interpretation. Jacob Snell pushes Marty down a path where it seems unlikely he can return. Walter White introduced us to a protagonist who slowly changed for the worst to provide for his family, but he struggled with his actions along the way. Marty Byrde, however, is riding quietly in an elevator going down, and we have no idea which button he is going to push next. Source: fishbowlsreview.com

Marilyn Monroe, Same-Sex Attraction

Many men prefer women who are occasionally attracted to other women, according to research that examined preferences for same-sex attraction across different cultures. “I am an evolutionary psychologist and same-sex attraction constitutes a major puzzle that remains to be solved by evolutionary-minded scholars,” said study author Menelaos Apostolou of the University of Nicosia. Specifically, about one in four heterosexual Chinese men and two in three heterosexual UK men preferred mates who were not exclusively attracted to the opposite-sex. Most of these men preferred women who were mostly attracted to men but occasionally to women, rather than women who were attracted both sexes equally or women who were more attracted to women than men. “Across different cultures there are many heterosexual men who find same-sex attractions in women desirable,” Apostolou said. However, men preferred same-sex attraction in a partner much more than women. The male participants were 6.49 times more likely than women to prefer a partner who was attracted to both sexes. “Men find same-sex attraction in women much more desirable than women find same-sex attraction in men,” Apostolou told PsyPost. “I believe that same-sex attraction in heterosexual women constitutes a normal variation in sexual attraction, and it is not something abnormal that women should feel shame for or worry about,” Apostolou added. Source: www.psypost.org

Marilyn Monroe had a secret lesbian affair with her domineering German acting teacher, newly unearthed documents reveal. They show that the actress lived as ‘man and wife’ with Columbia Pictures drama coach Natasha Lytess for two of the seven years they worked together from 1948 to 1955. When they first met in 1946 when Monroe was 20. Speaking in the 1962 interview, Lytess said: 'She couldn’t speak, she didn’t know how to open her mouth, and she feared everything.' She also claimed the actress was 'always naked' in the home they shared. But, she added, the actress was also crippled with insecurities. 'She was afraid of giving up all that had made her as Marilyn the sexiest girl: dresses, make-up, moves. Because she thought she had nothing to give except sex appeal. In fact it’s interesting because she really hated sex!' Natasha, who died from cancer in 1964, said she was with Marilyn for ten years and they were so close the actress would often insist that they held hands, even when they were filming a scene. 'On the set I was always very close to her,' she said in the interview. 'I had to be so close to her that she was always asking: "Can she be a little bit closer to me?" The director answered, "Yes but we see her in the camera."

'Very often, during close-ups I had to hold her hand. I had to support her every time. 'Thanks to the specificities of the close-up - which films only the head or the shoulders - I could hold her hand without being filmed by the camera. I had to do it to give her some courage.' The acting coach also claimed to have saved the famous actress from death after discovering her in bed with a bottle of sleeping pills. 'I saw Marilyn in her bed, her hair was uncombed, she was not really covered up and her face was awfully pale. Her cheeks were swelled and she had a vacant look. I said, “What have you done Marilyn?" In her recent book, Marilyn: The Passion And The Paradox, author Lois Banner wrote: 'Natasha and Marilyn lived together as husband and wife, although Marilyn often simply wanted to be held. 'She was like a child in her need for physical affection.' 'Miss Lytess made me free,' Monroe would say later. 'She gave me balance and made me understand life. I owe everything to her.' Source: www.iol.co.za

Some Kind of Mirror: Creating Marilyn Monroe (2019) by Amanda Konkle 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. Source: www.amazon.co.uk

A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn’s Death

Marilyn Monroe was afflicted with a “divided and confused mind bordering on an hysteria.” As a result of that division and confusion, her behavior was often conflicted and contradictory. The mythology has flourished in the unusually fertile firmament of distrust and paranoia; and it has been continuously fertilized by a voyeuristic media and opportunistic individuals adept at manipulating the confusion caused by misinterpretation and misunderstanding, invariably grinding confusion into a dollar, literary or otherwise. Dr. Greenson ended up spending most of that Saturday with her. While the actress and her therapist talked in private, Pat Newcomb lounged by her host’s swimming pool under the Southern California sun. Their session ended between 6:45 and 7:00 PM. Ralph Roberts telephoned a second time to discuss the menu for their planned Sunday evening BBQ. Perhaps the reluctance to accept a probable suicide edict has something to do with who Marilyn Monroe was and what she represented to the millions of fans who adored her, adored her movies and her talent, adored her charm and her humor, adored her beauty. To them, she was a person, a woman, a goddess who had it all. They loved her and they sensed that she loved them. Those feelings about Marilyn persist today. Slatzer essentially cobbled together a book that was then sold to Pinnacle, who was eager to publish a story about Marilyn merely to capitalize on the success and the publicity generated by Norman Mailer's factoidal biography. The problem is this: Slatzer was unknown to all of Marilyn’s friends. It is quite possible that all of Marilyn’s friends did not know all of Marilyn’s friends; however, for everyone who was actually close to Marilyn, especially Joe DiMaggio, who stated that he never met Slatzer, to have missed Slatzer’s presence stretches a fellow’s credulity.

In his 2014 update of Marilyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress, Revised and Updated, Carl Rollyson admitted the he “shied away from references to dubious sources such as Robert Slatzer, Ted Jordan, and Lena Pepitone. Reputable biographers like Lois Banner and Donald Spoto have exposed the unreliability of such books.” Slatzer claimed that he and Marilyn were together all day on the 3rd of October and they talked about marriage well into the small hours of the 4th. The problem with that assertion is this: on the 3rd of October in 1952, Marilyn attended a party in Hollywood thrown by Photoplay magazine during which she received an award, an event and an accolade not mentioned by Slatzer; and Slatzer’s alleged friend, former boxer, Noble Chissell, who testified that he witnessed the wedding in Tijuana, later recanted and admitted to both Donald Spoto and the photographer Joseph Jasgur that Slatzer paid him to lie. Additionally, Slatzer’s wife from 1954 until 1956, Kay Eicher, according to Donald Spoto, guffawed at the mention of a marriage between Marilyn Monroe and her former husband. Eicher confirmed for Spoto that Slatzer’s only encounter with the blonde movie star occurred at Niagara Falls while filming her Technicolor noir, when his photographs with her were taken, photographs that Slatzer used to deceive many people. But the final and definitive proof is what follows. Slatzer claimed that he and Marilyn arrived in Tijuana at approximately 11:30 AM on the 4th. Driving time from Los Angeles to Tijuana is approximately three hours, so to arrive at 11:30 AM, Slatzer and his soon to be bride had to leave Los Angeles by 8:30 AM, a time when probably most of the shops and clothing stores in Los Angeles had yet to open. 

While researching for his tome, Marilyn Monroe: The Biography, Donald Spoto uncovered proof of a shopping excursion by Marilyn and Natasha Lytess which occurred on the 4th of October in 1952. Marilyn wrote a check to JAX of Beverly Hills in the amount of $313. The check was dated October the 4th. Beneath her signature, she included her address at the time, 2393 Castilian Drive, the house in Hollywood Heights which she sub-leased along with Joe DiMaggio. Obviously Slatzer’s 'weekend wife' was not with him during that weekend. Slatzer parlayed a few photographs taken of him posing with her at the waterfalls into an amazing, fortuitously lucrative and virtually lifelong career. He was frequently accorded the status of expert and former spouse when he appeared as a guest on several television talk shows hosted by uninformed microphonists like Larry King, Geraldo Rivera and Phil Donahue. He invariably complained that Marilyn’s death was never properly investigated; he knew she did not commit suicide. Slatzer also contributed Marilyn’s Little Red Diary, her Red Book of Secrets, in which, according to him, she kept an accounting of the tiptop secrets revealed to her by John and Robert Kennedy. Slatzer’s memoir is demonstrably false, based on what is undeniably known about Marilyn’s real life. Those realities reduce Slatzer’s memoir generally, and his marriage claim specifically, to the level of a completely deceitful mendacity. During her tenure at UCLA, Marilyn's biographer Lois Banner worked with John Miner; and according to Banner, he admitted that he never interviewed Ralph Greenson, certainly a significant revelation. According to Banner, an unnamed source told Miner about the mysterious tapes. Were Miner's recollections a mere fabrication? Possibly. Also, Marilyn's sporadic journal entries (collected in the 2010 book, Fragments) contain no references to either Kennedy brother.  

Marilyn had become so famous and so powerful that omnipotent studio heads, Darryl Zanuck for instance, actually had feared her. But her worst adversary was always her mental illness. Marilyn had come to believe that Thorazine had been helpful in stabilizing her. It had begun to represent hope to her that she might be able to regain control of her often chaotic thought processes. However, Marilyn thought her magic was leaving her, but really it was just transitioning. Perhaps the only real question about her death is whether or not it was intentional. It’s been argued that Marilyn’s upcoming prospects were so promising, she couldn’t possibly have taken her own life. She supposedly had too much to live for. However, what was probably going on inside her mind might have had little correlation to those factors. When we consider her last moments on earth we need to focus on an unwell brain, not simply the enticing rewards of a movie star’s existence. Norma Jeane created and became a woman more fascinating than she believed possible. And in the face of her own failing mind, she battled to keep that creation alive—not for her, but for us. Indeed, Marilyn Monroe did exist. Even though the woman inside her was at times doubtful of that fact, we knew it better than she did. She spent so much of her energy, her own will, projecting an image of impossible beauty and ultimate joy. Yet, as the end neared, her experience of who she truly was drifted farther and farther from that ideal—until she found it impossible to pretend to be Marilyn anymore. —"A Non-Conspiracist’s View of Marilyn Monroe’s Death" (2018) by Donald R. McGovern

Marilyn's Last Sessions and Decline

An historic Italian atelier that helped make the dress worn by Marilyn Monroe in the iconic subway vent scene in The Seven Year Itch has appealed to the government for help to stave off closure. The family owned tailoring business, Sorelle Antonini or the Antonini Sisters, made the pleats for the ivory dress that blows up over Monroe’s thighs in the New York scene in the 1955 Billy Wilder romantic comedy. The dress – perhaps the best-known frock in cinematic history but once dismissed by its designer, William Travilla, as “that silly little dress” – was sold at auction in 2011 for $4.6 million. The difficulties facing Sorelle Antonini are part of a broader trend in Rome in which historic bookshops, frame-makers, furniture builders and other traditional businesses are being squeezed out by high rents and fewer customers. They are often replaced by ugly, garishly lit convenience stores and tourist trinket shops that are more profitable but much less picturesque. Convenience stores have dramatically increased in number in Rome’s cobbled centre in recent years. “In the last 10 years, the number of artisanal businesses in Rome’s historic centre has declined from 5,000 to less than 2,000,” said Giulio Anticoli, the president of the Association of Historic Shops. 

While it has gone down in history as one of cinema’s most iconic scenes, it was far from easy capturing the moment that the updraft lifted Monroe’s dress. Filming took place after midnight on the corner of Lexington Avenue and 52nd Street, but after 14 takes and three hours, the producers were still not happy. The scene had to be shot again on a film lot in California. To preserve her modesty, Monroe wore two pairs of white knickers. Source: www.telegraph.co.uk

Gainesville, Florida, Collins Court Old Age Home (5 August 1962):  Gladys Baker didn’t remember the time she worked in the film business, Marilyn, the daughter she had – she had no memories of anything. When a psychiatrist at Rockhaven Sanitarium, where she was hospitalised, told her that her daughter had died, she didn’t react. She doesn’t remember the girl called Norma Jeane; she doesn’t know who Marilyn Monroe is. It only registers a year later. On a dark night she escapes by making a rope out of her sheets. She arrives in the Los Angeles suburbs clutching a Christian Science textbook under her arm. A Baptist minister finds her in his church and talks to her before Rockhaven Sanitarium staff come to pick her up. ‘Marilyn is gone,’ she says. Not Norma Jeane, the minister is very clear about that. ‘They told me when it happened. People need to know that I never wanted her to become an actress. All her career did was hurt her.’ Marilyn had mirrored her mother’s search for sexual perfection, her knack of catching men, then jettisoning them when they’d served their purpose. 

Dr. Greenson had seen the parallels between her role of the disturbed Nell in Something’s Got to Give and the brutal echoes of Gladys Baker’s unhappy, unforgettable life. The return of the lost mother, one of the few scenes Marilyn had filmed after her analyst had gone to Europe, was a replay of the moment in her childhood when she had seen her mother, whom she thought was dead, emerge from the mental institution. Perhaps, Milton Wexler thought, becoming a mother had tipped Gladys Baker over into madness, and perhaps having to play a mother in the film had done the same to Marilyn Monroe. A mother whom her children did not recognise and who would not reveal herself to them. Dr. Greenson never stopped thinking of himself as a father to Marilyn. On 20 August 1962, he wrote to Marianne Kris: ‘I was her therapist, the good father who would not disappoint her and who would bring her insights, and if not insights, just kindness. I had become the most important person in her life. There was something very lovable about this girl and we all cared about her and she could be delightful.’ He probably never acknowledged that his approach took him into areas far removed from Freudian theory, where, instead of father, life and love, the signature themes were mother, homosexuality, and death. With the freedom allowed by psychoanalytic transference, Marilyn said dark, unthinkable things on her tapes in the voice of someone who can’t pretend to be a nice little girl in love with Daddy any more. —"Marilyn's Last Sessions" (2013) by Michel Schneider

Michel Schneider was inspired by a 2005 article in the Los Angeles Times, containing a transcript (from memory) by John Miner, a detective involved in the original investigation into Monroe’s death, of tapes that he claimed were made for her psychiatrist, Dr Ralph Greenson, shortly before she died in 1962. The tapes have never been found, but the publication of Miner’s transcripts proved controversial, which reflected the continuing public interest in Marilyn. Some experts on Monroe’s life pointed to factual anomalies in the text, outlined by Melinda Mason in her response, ‘Songs Marilyn Never Sang’. Schneider re-imagines in Last Sessions the relationship between Monroe and Greenson over the last two years of her life, and draws the intriguing conclusion that it was not her absent father that Monroe sought, but her lost, sick mother. While Schneider does offer some valuable insight into Monroe’s fatal liaison with Greenson, he – perhaps unwittingly – falls into the trap that so many authors do, of patronising Marilyn. Though Greenson acknowledges that ‘all their sessions had been like acts in a play,’ he seemed unsure of its meaning. ‘The curtain had fallen, and the enigma of Marilyn's self was intact.’ He realises that she ‘revealed herself only to mask herself again.’ Greenson is haunted by the memory of Marilyn and devastated by his failure to rescue her. Schneider also explores the popularity of psychoanalysis within the narcissistic atmosphere of Hollywood. ‘It’s not analysis that gets everywhere,’ Greenson believes, ‘it’s the movies.’ It was ‘a marriage of intellect and artifice’ that ‘came to an end when Hollywood itself did.’ Monroe’s decline coincided with the demise of the studio system which she had grown to bloom. Source: tarahanks.com