Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox

Abstract

As the celebrity-industrial complex continues to feed the seemingly insatiable appetite for information about stars that marks twentieth- and twenty-first-century culture, celebrity studies has become an established area of scholarly research, with its own conferences and journal as well as numerous monographs, edited volumes, and special issues. In her biography of Marilyn Monroe, Marilyn, the feminist historian and American studies scholar Lois Banner bridges the gap between fandom and scholarly approaches to contemporary culture, giving a new twist to what she calls “Marilyn scholarship” to illuminate our understanding of the career and afterlife of this mid-twentieth-century Hollywood star (p. 419). Like Jennifer Scanlon's Bad Girls Go Everywhere: The Life of Helen Gurley Brown (2009), Banner's study contains a wealth of detailed material, much of which was not previously available in published form, marshaled to support the position that Monroe was a protofeminist who prefigured second wave feminism. Yet, like Scanlon's Helen Gurley Brown, Banner's Marilyn seems to conform more comfortably to descriptions of postfeminism offered by scholars such as Angela McRobbie, Rosalind Gill, or Sarah Projansky, or to what I have called neofeminism (Neo-feminist Cinema, 2011), in which the advancement of a woman's own position by capitalizing on her body and her sexuality replaces the more utopian social perspectives emphasized by second wave feminism. What sets Banner's Marilyn apart from later icons of female empowerment such as Madonna were her spiritual and intellectual aspirations, reflected in her increasingly leftist politics, not necessarily apparent in her screen roles (with the exception, perhaps, of the character of Rosalyn in The Misfits [1961], produced by Monroe's company and written specifically for Monroe by her then husband, the playwright Arthur Miller). Undermining this optimistic presentation, Banner also emphasizes Monroe's difficult childhood, which left her psychologically scarred and doomed to promiscuity, exhibitionism, and various forms of dependency, including substance abuse. In so doing, Banner offers a chilling vision of Hollywood in the 1950s and early 1960s. Ralph Greenson, Monroe's psychiatrist, observed that “even if [a] star … is strongly motivated to change, the parasites and exploiters living off the mysteriously successful creature prefer the status quo” (p. 384). Throughout the volume, this image of Monroe as a victim of her environment tends to overshadow Banner's simultaneous depictions of her as an active agent in her own destiny (hence, perhaps, the paradox referred to in the title).