So...turns out that doing loose canons on real people and events is..
kind of a bummer, you know, because the world is sad
Speaking of which, let's talk about Marilyn Monroe!
[*music*] A kiss the hand may be quite continental
Lindsay: Glamour icon, tragic cautionary tale
Attributed quoter of shitty Facebook memes
that there is absolutely no evidence that Marilyn ever said
people stop spreading this!
Goddammit, no!
Lindsay: No, stop it. This is a made-up quote stop attributing it to Marilyn Monroe!
But it is pretty telling people are more interested in the
idea of
Marilyn Monroe than in the person that she actually was
A construct if you will
that people make up to be more relatable
That's why when I think of Marilyn Monroe one of the first things that comes to my mind is
Andy Warhol's painting which is called
Marilyn Diptych because really there are two Marilyns
the actual human being who lived and died tragically and
Marilyn Monroe the Glamorous symbol of Hollywood Glitz and Glamour who is just that..
a symbol
a construct
the reason Warhol's work comes to mind for me is because
Marilyn's face was the image that he set on as the idea of pop culture
ubiquity and some people interpret this to mean that repetition and
ubiquity render an image meaningless
He also famously did the same thing with Campbell's soup cans, coke bottles, Elvis
This therefore being his critique slash tribute to pop culture through pop art
So in a perverse way
that's what made Warhol's interpretation become such a perfect statement of what pop culture even was
This human person's face has become so ubiquitous that it's just an image
It has f*** all to do with the actual human being who owned it
In terms of symbology aside from the image Warhol made famous
her two most famous images come from the Diamonds are a Girl's Best Friend
scene from Gentlemen Prefer Blondes famously reappropriated
By Madonna
and the sewer grate scene from the Seven Year Itch parodied by everyone..
*Loud Flatulence*
Woman: [oh oops]
Repetition ad nauseam yes, but to what end?
She means something to people, but what?
Marilyn gets name dropped in Pop songs a lot
[ *music playing*]
But the most famous pop tribute to her is Candle in the Wind
[*music playing*]
Lindsay: And this one kind of sets that tone of trying to separate the symbol that was
Marilyn Monroe from the person who was Norma Jean Mortenson or Baker
So I find that pop-culture depictions of Marilyn Monroe
tend to want to reconcile this
dichotomy, this split between the
icon of Hollywood glitz and glamour and
a troubled young woman who never really learned to connect with anybody
in no small part because nobody ever really learned to connect with her
The song lyric was adapted into a low-budget movie called Goodbye, Norma Jean
Woman: [Prove it! Prove what he said! You owe me that.]
Lindsay: It holds a yikes rating on IMDb, and there are a surprising number of low-budget
Marilyn Biopics
There's also a few about her relationship with the Kennedys and
how her death was like a false flag or something and
There's all sorts of some "truther" nonsense
Yes, there a Marilyn "truthers..." Shock I know, but we're not going to get into that
So before the 90s it was mostly
Biopic stuff, but then vhs became big and with it Direct-To-video schluck
My favorite of this group is a film called Marilyn Alive and Behind Bars
Which is exactly what it sounds like
Woman: [I'm Marilyn Monroe]
Man: [I thought she died]
Woman: [That's a lie]
Lindsay: It took place in the present day of 1992 when Marilyn was in her 60s or so
but still looking good
Basically her death was faked by the studio to commit insurance fraud
But they kept her alive for some reason and also there are mind-control scientists
Woman: [They ensured my life for millions of dollars, and then they murdered a look-alike Marilyn Monroe. They left her in my bedroom.]
Clip: [Did you ever think that maybe there's more to life and being really really really
ridiculously good-looking?]
Lindsay: She also looks the same as she does in her
publicity stills of old because I guess Marilyn went to all this effort for 30 years every day
without changing a thing
You know.. getting a haircut and mad mind control scientists even gave her hair bleach, nice!
There was another one of these called Netherworld, and that featured a zombie Marilyn
Woman: [First I was alive
And then I was dead,
And now I'm alive again!]
Lindsay: Classy..
There was one woman in the 90s named Susan Griffiths who seems to have built an entire career
out of being a professional Marilyn Monroe impersonator
And she pops up a lot S
he first appears in a 1991
Made-For-TV movie called Marilyn and Me which is basically a precursor to My Week With Marilyn
She pops up again in an episode of Quantum Leap where Sam quantum leaps
into Marilyn Monroe's chauffeur right before she dies
The premise of the show is protagonist, Sam, quantum leaps into different peoples lives slash
bodies to do destiny things
and he's a nice guy who
wants to help, so it's sad that she's destined to die young and tragic
But hey, at least he puts it off by a couple months??
Man: [Are you telling me that I saved her life, so she could be in one last picture?]
Man: [Don't want a picture]
Lindsay: You know what no comment..
Here Griffiths is again as a Marilyn impersonator in Pulp Fiction
and yet again in the short-lived TV series Timecop
Woman: [Actually I was hoping to get a little advice from you]
Lindsay: ..Which I didn't know existed either
Harmony Korine made a 2007 film called Mr. Lonely
that takes place in a commune of celebrity impersonators
These guys have no real identity outside of who they're impersonating
so in this film she's just Marilyn and
Marilyn has a bit of a love triangle with Charlie Chaplin and Michael Jackson and
eventually hangs herself
Harmony Korine
Yeah, I have zero thoughtful insight into this filmmaker
if you want that you should go watch the Brows Held High episode
Woman: [I'll be playing Bushenka]
Man: Can you spell that?
Woman: Sure, can you?
*crowd laughter*
My Week With Marylin is the highest profile of the recent adaptations, and it's..."aight"
Michelle Williams is great, despite Eddie Redmayne's performance that frankly made me think we'd never see this guy again
This one documents the tense production of the Prince and the Showgirl, which was a real movie directed by Laurence Olivier
during her time while she was married to playwright Arthur Miller
Who wrote The Crucible
God she had a weird life..
Anyway, it was based on two books by Colin Clark who was played by Redmayne in this film
and which may or may not be accurate, we'll never know
Woman: *singing* [When you sing happy birthday to someone you love
You see diamonds you wish for are free]
Lindsay: The same year there was a short-lived NBC drama called Smash
in which a Broadway musical based on the life of Marilyn Monroe is produced
riding that Glee wave for adults I guess..
This show was more about
inter-cast drama than about Marilyn, but Anjelica Huston was in it
There's a 2012 feature in the vein of Movie 42 called InAPPropriate Comedy
and here she's played by Lindsay Lohan
Lindsay Lohan plays a Marilyn-alike in an app where the viewer gets to look up her skirt
and that's the app..
That is InAPPropriate
see it's called In [app] propriate comedy because
It's an app and it's inappropriate...
burn everything..
Lana Del Rey did a Kanye-style short film out of her album Born to Die called Tropico
that features her and that albino
model dude I see on tumblr sometimes as Adam and Eve
John Wayne as God, and Marilyn Monroe and Elvis as
*music playing* [Del Rey]: Marilyn's my mother
Jesus is my bestest friend
Lindsay: Kind of ties back to that "Marilyn the spirit guide" thing
Lana del Rey loves to romanticize and appropriate that drugged-out starlet
persona, so...
Okay.
and I find this interesting because when you look at the likes of Lana del Rey and Megan Fox and how they kind of
want to emulate her,
I mean it, it makes sense,
and I know Lana del Rey is pretty out there
but I think she does kind of hit on something with the way that we
Deify our pop culture icons
Monroe's image was recently acquired and is now managed by Authentic Brands Group, a business which
specializes in owning and managing dead celebrities,
so now this image of Marilyn Monroe that has become almost folkloric is now
a company's intellectual property
Hmm
And that's how she's come to be codified in Post-Marilyn interpretations
Marilyn is the symbol - a symbol of dying young,
a symbol of Hollywood glamour,
a cautionary tale, whatever,
and Norma Jeane is the person
and there's almost the sense of nascent guilt, the way she was
objectified and dehumanized in life, ultimately leading to her death,
not that that necessarily
redefined the way we relate to celebrities
The idea of her is relatable, but it's still kind of a "brand," hence her being misquoted so much
Which is kind of funny because I think the real Marilyn would take umbrage with that
Here is a real quote:
"If I'm going to have that kind of influence
I want to be sure it's because of something I've actually said or written"
So Marilyn has all this influence now as like an image Macro in a Soundbite, but
Most of it isn't really hers
Sadly poetic
Speaking of sad I promise I will have the next episode out soon
Thank you all to the patrons who make this show possible and also to my researcher/AE, Elisa Hansen
You can vote for the next episode in the link below, and I will see you next time
soon I promise
Andy Dwyer: [What's 5,000 times better than a candle in the wind? This song is called 5000 candles in the wind]