Why Marilyn Monroe is the world's most misunderstood icon

BBC Sports 

Think about Marilyn Monroe, and certain images instantly come to mind: the red lips, slightly parted; the sleepy, siren eyes; the platinum blonde hair; and that voice, breathy, like she just woke up and can’t wait for you to join her in bed. Her friend, the writer Truman Capote, described her as a “platinum sex-explosion“. The cinematographer Leon Shamroy, who shot her very first screen test in 1946, famously said she was like “sex on a piece of film“. Marilyn conjures up sex and – simultaneously – misery, thanks to the way her troubled personal life has been pored over from the moment she became a movie star.

Since her death from a barbiturate overdose in 1962, the elements that made Marilyn Monroe into an icon have also led people to dehumanise her, over and over again. And with the latest biopic of the movie star, Andrew Dominik’s adaptation of Joyce Carol Oates’ 2000 novel Blonde, her legacy has once again been debased.

Oates’ Pulitzer Prize-winning book is a fictionalisation of Marilyn’s life, narrated from the point of view of a deeply traumatised and lonely woman, in love with movies and the idea of love, but desperately crippled with daddy issues that infect every single relationship she develops. Dominik’s is not the first Blonde screen adaptation – that was Joyce Chopra’s 2001 TV movie, which starred Poppy Montgomery. Chopra’s version channels the cruelty of Marilyn’s life without displaying the surgical coldness of Dominik’s film. With each character speaking directly to the camera, verbalising their point-of-view as the scenes unfold, it’s a less exploitative adaptation and a more psychoanalytical one. Both Marilyn and the men she was close to get to have their say. Montgomery plays Marilyn as an overly grateful and naive woman-child, saying please and thank you to the very men who dismiss and debase her. “Let’s drop the goo-goo routine, you can’t be as dumb as you look”, the studio head known as Mr R (an avatar for 20th Century Fox boss Darryl F Zanuck) tells her just before he sexually assaults her. However there is, at least, an element of bratty joyfulness to this Marilyn as she enjoys her success, and the film ends without putting her (and us) through her sorrowful demise.

She stands for different narratives: the victim narrative, and the absolute essence of feminine, sexual glamour and irresistibility – Dr Lucy Bolton

Dominik turns Marilyn’s story into a body horror. As Dr Lucy Bolton, a reader in film studies at Queen Mary University of London, says, the actress was often “cut up into segments in her films,” with shots that focussed on her breasts, her crotch, her mouth. “It’s objectification, it’s fetishisation, it’s ownership. It’s classic Laura Mulvey stuff,” she says, referring to the pioneering academic’s “male gaze” theory. During her lifetime and beyond, Marilyn’s body has been “used to sell a dream of desirability”, posits Yhara Zayd in her video essay Selling Marilyn: A Life Merchandised, about the posthumous commercial exploitation of Monroe’s image…