“under my leadership, the M.A.S. became a Marilyn solidarity cell”

October 27, 2022 5:22 AM

It’s a funny thing: ever since my mother died, now almost three years ago, I have been fixated on other women who were, like her, impossible, hilarious, horny, suicidal, bookish, and intermittently threatened with psychiatric confinement. First, it was the feminist revolutionary Shulamith Firestone; now, it is Marilyn.

–Some Like It Hot, Notes from the Marilyn Appreciation Society by Sophie Lewis, an essay which considers Marilyn Monroe, feminism, her mother, BimboTok, misogyny and a lot else. [Internet Archive link]
posted by Kattullus (7 comments total)

...Remember, seconds before Marilyn steps, decked out in white, onto the whooshing subway grate of The Seven Year Itch and takes flight, she declares her affinity with the creature from the Black Lagoon: “He wasn’t really all bad,” she says. “I think he just craved a little affection—you know, a sense of being loved and needed and wanted.”

....Perhaps Steinem, who proudly worked for the CIA in the Fifties and Sixties, would not appreciate this kind of courage: the courage of one Norma who, when notified by police at a Los Angeles roadblock in 1949 that a nearby house was being monitored for ties to communists, shouted the officers’ ears off and went straight to tip off the blacklisted screenwriters Norma and Ben Barzman.

Wow, that was something. So full of things I never knew before I read this: Sophie Lewis is one hella writer A++ Will read again and again. Thanks Katullus!
posted by y2karl at 7:26 AM on October 27, 2022 [9 favorites]

This writer has a great way with words.
Never seen Dolly (Parton) described as a hillbilly hustler before but it's perfect. I want it on a T-Shirt.
posted by Misty_Knightmare at 8:35 AM on October 27, 2022 [3 favorites]

I think of all people, Dolly Parton would consider being called a hillbilly hustler a grand compliment.
posted by Cpt. The Mango at 9:58 AM on October 27, 2022 [6 favorites]

BimboTok

I hate it, I hate it, some words should not be reclaimed.
posted by Going To Maine at 10:25 AM on October 27, 2022

A good read, except for anything about “bimbo” being a redeemable phrase for a particular aesthetic. (Good luck to ‘em.) The incidental note of the author’s mother being in a Maoist cell in Germany though… it creates some feelings.
posted by Going To Maine at 11:17 AM on October 27, 2022 [1 favorite]

Interesting to read two Sophie Lewis articles in a row here. This one resonates a bit less for me (there is a through line in the mention of the Creature from the Black Lagoon! And slutiness...)

I am all for femme, sluttiness, chaos, mental illness, etc, but I just can't care that much about Marilyn Monroe. It's not that there's something wrong with her - or that the misogynistic framing of her is not emblematic of larger problems - it's just that there's something that feels incredibly arbitrary in her social importance. And now that she is socially important, there is this self-replicating quality where her importance reproduces itself - she is important because she is important - and ultimately it feels there is little at the core. Not a critique of the human being Marilyn Monroe - just - there is little at the core of all of us - none of us as individuals are that important.

One trope briefly mentioned that did resonate for me: "The moral conversions Marilyn is supposed to undergo amid wedding bells at the end of so many of her films rarely seem plausible." For some reason this reminds of me of the trope that dominated my early encounters with popular media: The "tomboy" who inevitably converts to conventional girlhood and dress-wearing at the end of the movie/books/whatever. I resented that conversion but also it always rings false. The movie takes pleasure in this subversion of gender roles - just as Monroe movies revel in her sexy 'bimbo' vibes, then tacks on a dumb moral that undoes all that weird subversive chaotic energy at the end. It is a betrayal and also fake.
posted by latkes at 1:37 PM on October 27, 2022 [2 favorites]

Contra the Beatons and the Steinems of the world, we see part of our task as an insistence on the undivided person, Norma-Marilyn. We honor the whole uncanny and ingenious artist—as raw and true as anything one has ever seen.

What is so scary, exactly, about the reality that has been right in front of us all along: that Marilyn was a living person with convictions—not a doll, and not even a woman pretending to be a doll? Steinem contrasted Monroe with figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Doris Day, saying that those women “offered at least the illusion of being in control.” In the essay “Marilyn, We Hardly Knew You,” Kate Millett, the women’s liberationist, described Monroe’s career as a “gang bang”: a decade and a half of violation that Monroe helplessly suffered through.

I have been positively transfixed by this—a thinker as powerful as Millett permitting herself to say such a thing, that a woman’s career was a gang bang. But perhaps she was onto something. Critics are not incorrect to see in Monroe pliability, openness, lust. And we still think of those who are fucked, sexually, as fundamentally fucked, not to say fucked up. But Monroe’s vulnerability is her power. She did, I think, make a vocation out of a type of sexual communion with millions of people. “If only she had resisted . . . before yielding,” writes the scholar Dean MacCannell. “Then we might trust her. If only she had actually ‘yielded’ instead of freely giving herself."

But she didn’t.

posted by y2karl at 4:59 PM on October 27, 2022 [6 favorites]