LCP//MARILYN MONROE & THE POETHICAL WAGER
Colleen Iverson
Long Critical Paper:
Marilyn Monroe & The Poetical Wager
[1]
Marilyn Monroe was an American movie actress. She was born in 1926 and died in 1962. She is most famous in popular culture for her roles as a dumb, blonde sex-symbol. She is also famous for her death at thirty-six, from an overdose of barbiturates, which was determined at the autopsy to be a “probable suicide,” but has in the years since come into question as a possible murder. (That her death may have been an accidental overdose is rarely considered, but never ruled out.)
Marilyn's story has been told many times.
In The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Sarah Churchwell studies the various divergent tellings of Marilyn's life and death. Of them, she says: “it is not just the case that biographies of Marilyn Monroe disagree about the answers to charged questions about her life, her character and her experiences. They often do not acknowledge that other versions even exist. Each of Marilyn's many lives asserts as proven fact what another calls a total lie, and presents conjecture as if it were certain knowledge.” (Churchwell, p. 3). She says: “uncertainty is the story of Marilyn's biographical life.” (Churchwell, p. 3).
Uncertainties in Marilyn's story include: her birth name; her birth father; how many foster homes she lived in; whether she was sexually abused/raped as a child (and if so, by whom, and how many times); whether her mother tried to kill her; whether her grandmother tried to kill her; whether she liked sex more than most people, or less; whether or not she had an abortion/s (and if so how many); whether she had lesbian affairs (and if so, how many); whether she attempted suicide early on in her career (and how many times); whether her walk was “natural” or designed; whether she was oppressed by Hollywood or using Hollywood—whether she was a calculating monster/hooker/seductress/bitch or innocent, angelic and exploited; whether she was the most beautiful woman in America or fat and plain and deceiving us; whether she was stupid or brilliant; how many times she was married; how many Kennedy’s was she sleeping with; was she crazy; was she murdered, did she kill herself or was it an accident?
In her book American Monroe, S. Page Baty studies Marilyn's use(s) as a symbol in popular culture. She writes: “Marilyn is a wonderful subject for American cultural memory. Her many contradictory qualities and histories allow for competing creations of the “real” Marilyn Monroe. And remembering is about creating what is real; it is about finding stories to tell ourselves about the past and the present. These stories help us...to know who we are.” (Baty, p. 31).
“Marilyn has gone from sex symbol to symbol of mourning, from a promise of the liberation of sex to a cautionary tale about the dangers of loneliness and spinsterhood...it is the writing and rewriting of her life story that has achieved this transformation.” (Churchwell, p. 4)).
The ambiguities of Marilyn's life and self/persona make her both difficult and fascinating to try to “read.” Because they don't allow her to be read, but the attempt to do so shows us ourselves and our world. In looking at how we imagine her, as individuals as well as as a culture, we can see our own fears and desires. Baty writes: “rememberings of Monroe express an irresolvable tension between the longing for a unitary and stable subject and the impossibilities of same.”
Marilyn once said that “the questions often tell more about the interviewer than the answers do about me.”
Both Churchwell and Baty consider how we tend to literalize the metaphors that we make up to discuss or “explain” Marilyn. Most of her biographers write about her as if she were two separate people inside one body: Norma Jeane versus Marilyn, the real girl at war with the artificial. Often this split is seen as occurring, literally, “irrevocably,” when she bleaches her hair and/or changes her name.
As a culture (as represented by her biographers), a major source of our continued fascination with her seems to come out of this seeming division of inside and outside. Both Baty and Churchwell write that a major theme throughout her biographies is the uncovering of what is real. The promise of finally revealing to us the real woman behind the legend (Baty, p.93; Churchwell, p. 10), or the promise of revealing what really happened to her—a literal murder mystery. (Baty, 115-142).
Churchwell notes how each biographer lets us in on the “great secret” that Marilyn wasn't really beautiful (Churchwell, p. 185). She writes that “the premise that Marilyn Monroe is made up enables biographers to expose the 'shocking revelations' of the reality behind the facade, a reality that they give different names: Norma Jeane, pain, loss, sex, the naked body.” (182)
Likewise, Baty says “desire to turn history into a show is played out in cartographic rememberings as the imposition of narrative plot on the historical real...telling truth means exposing lies—in essence, retelling lies. 'The desire for a show' is consummated in the production of the historical as if it were always ready to be exposed as the product of plot, or fiction.” (124)
She says, “cartographic rememberings seek to recover the real by revealing and fixing its form. Yet this 'real' remembering ultimately leaves the citizen on the terrain of the map itself, a map that has confused the literal and representational, a map that has reworked the very relation between the two.” (125)
We seem to try to freeze her, flatten her, turn her into a metaphor, or a lesson, or simplify and define her into a closed system of symbols.
Baty writes: “We make up stories about what has happened even as it is happening, hoping to somehow “fix” the object of narrative with iconic nomenclature capable of reproducing—and “taming”—reality. Is there an impulse in this remembering of Marilyn not simply to tame her cultural power but to further domesticate and quantify death, to somehow resolve death and its object...?” (Baty, p.176)
Marilyn brings the idea of identity into question by pushing at its limits in multiple directions. Churchwell notices that even as we divide her into real and fake, we say she is both real and fake; she is considered both ultimately, overly natural (an oversexed phenomenon, with no proper limits) and ultimately, overly constructed. “Marilyn Monroe may be a role, but Marilyn Monroe can't play it, she can only be herself. Everyone was always looking for the real Marilyn while insisting that she only did what came naturally.” (Churchwell, p. 43). She both creates and is fully believed to be the constructed identity “Marilyn Monroe,” inseparable from the roles she plays, and is completely disbelieved, so obvious is it that it is a role. Yet Marilyn-the-woman (more complex, intelligent, nuanced, “real”) is still a sex symbol (is the actual sex symbol?). In Conversations with Marilyn, Weatherby writes, “she entered the dimly lit hotel bar in a girlish flutter that suggested shyness at meeting a stranger—was this a role she had given herself?” (Weatherby, p. 55).
Baty says Marilyn is a “beautiful grotesque...she constantly risks making a spectacle of herself even while she functions as the image of female beauty.” (150).
She explains that “'Being a spectacle' is for women associated with boundary-crossing, vulnerability, potential humiliation, and public shame...'the grotesque body is the open, protruding, extended, secreting body, the body of becoming, process, and change. The grotesque body is opposed to the classical body, which is monumental, static, closed, and sleek, corresponding to the aspirations of bourgeois individualism; the grotesque body is connected to the rest of the world'” (150).
I am endlessly intrigued by the many dimensions of Marilyn Monroe.
[2]
Joan Retallack is an American poet and critic. She was born in 1941, and is still living. She is the Director of the Language and Thinking Program at Bard College, where she has been the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Professor of Humanities.
In her book The Poethical Wager (2003) she discusses her ideas of art, and art/the artists relationship/responsibility to the world. She talks about what she calls “the swerve,” the “sometimes gentle, often violent out-of-the-blue motions that cut obliquely across material and conceptual logics” (I). Basically, things that give us new and broader perspectives on reality.
This book looks at the idea of art, and specifically the essay, as a form of life. She likes John Cage's idea that art should not create an image of nature/the world/life, but should imitate its patterns (p.?). She talks about writing as a form of engagement, preferring the idea of writer and reader as “conspirators,” rather than that of the reader being “inspired” by the writer. The former is a breathing together, making the reader an active participant in the understanding of/attempt at understanding the world. The latter has the writer breathing life into the reader, who passively receives the writer's vision of the world.
Retallack talks about the desire to simplify things, and freeze things, as a biologically meaningful response to change, which equals danger (98). This relates to our desire to form the world into stories: “a major source of the practice of storytelling seems to come from the need, first as children, to hear stories that contain the terror, that seduce one in as night tourist only to skillfully deliver us into the daylight on the other side of the door clearly marked THE END...There is as well the crucial impulse to tell one's own story, to exercise for oneself the power to fashion a version of reality that can be exited intact” (Retallack, p. 84). She writes that “everything in mass culture is designed to deliver space-time in a series of shiny freeze-frames, each with its built-in strategy of persuasion. One writes poetry and essays to stay warm and alive and realistically messy.” (5)
[here I need to talk about fairy-tales, and division, and the experimental feminine]
She says that “certain kinds of art help us to live with nourishment and pleasure in the real world, connect us with it in a way that nothing else can, by shifting our attention to formally framed material conditions in ingenious ways” (Retallack, p. 25). She likes Cage's idea, also, that the job of art is to open up perspective. To act as the swerve, in a way. That what matters is the manner of attending, not so much what is attended to.
She distinguishes between what she calls “complex realism,” and styles that create an image of the real. Complex realism is a form that lets in the chaos and complexity and dynamism of life (and so is an engagement with the reader), whereas static realism creates a closed system which convinces readers of it's ultimate truth and reality.
She says that “poetics without an h has primarily to do with questions of style. Style is the manner in which your experience has understood, assimilated, imprinted you...At this point, preswerve, but feeling a distinct surge of power, you exclaim, Ah, I’ve found myself as a writer! Actually your poetics has you in its grip.” (38) She talks about poethics is a means of exploration of “complex life on earth...an exploration of art's significance as, not just about, a form of living in the real world” (26). Poethics is an interruption of poetics: “your poethical work begins when you no longer wish to shape materials...into legitimate progeny of your own poetics. When you are released from filling in the delimiting forms” (38).
There is the matter of what art does (or should—or can—do), and there is the matter of how art is (or should, or can) be created. She talks about how, in such a complex world as this, we have no real way of calculating, or controlling, the outcomes of anything. She has a theory that this incalculability means that we can only act based on our ethics. (This is the wager:“When you make a wager you stake something that matters on an uncertain outcome” (21)). For example, if ones ethics call for a non-violent world, one would act peacefully, rather than attempting to create peace by way of violence. She talks about wading out into the mess of ones life, and engaging with it.
Writing can not only be the swerve, but can experience the swerve itself. The writer isn't so much creating (as in designing), as she is exploring the world. She discusses Gertrude Stein, in terms of her writing as being an engagement with the present moment (which she calls the contemporary). One of my favorite essays (The Difficulties of Gertrude Stein) is about Stein's attempt (and failure) to write a traditional, best-seller type murder-mystery. Stein, she says, was too much engaged with the contemporary to allow her to write a normal sentence, let alone a plot.
She talks about Stein's writing as a coastline, an encounter with a border-place, where forms of life meet. She talks about how a coastline can be experienced, but not distilled. “As location of conventional murder-mystery, where all must resolve into a single gory punctum—vanishing point of “the body”—Stein's coastal prose is entirely revelatory in its surprising variations. The more you can't find what you're looking for, the more you're learning about the language coastline itself” (Retallack, p. 155).
[3]
My own mess:
Going back and forth between reading Retallack and reading about Marilyn, certain elements jump out at me as similar, or related, or at least relevant to each other. I notice the ways in which I engage with the Marilyn or how she functions for me as (if I’m understanding Retallack) poethical.
What I initially recognized was a feeling; the feeling I get reading about and thinking about and watching Marilyn is an open, spinning feeling. It's a feeling that in my peripheral vision some wall just cracked open. It's a feeling that life is different than I think it is. She feels wildly magical and deeply grounded. This feeling has always seemed somewhat (very) ridiculous to me (she's dead, a movie star, I never knew her, so many people are obsessed with her, and it's just weird), and has made/makes me nervous because it's something I can't explain, not even to myself.
Marilyn is difficult to write about for the same reasons that she's fascinating. My first idea in writing about her was that I wanted to write about my Marilyn, the one that I imagine, that I have been in a sort of conversation with, or used as a means of conversing with myself, or with the world, for going on sixteen years. The issue I keep running into is the way everything bleeds together.
Retallack talks about the difference between fantasy and imagination, imagination being a playful engagement with reality while fantasy is traveling away from reality, further into ones head (pp). I realize that I engage with Marilyn in both of these ways at different times (and maybe even at the same time). She functions both as escape from the world (when I try to become her) and a way deeper into the world, as someone whose consciousness/perspective/self makes me think about/look at/experience the world differently.
But these two ways aren't even as separate as I’m making them. The mysterious, dynamic Marilyn Monroe that fascinates me, that opens up the world, is the same one I try to escape into. I don't particularly care about the official Hollywood image of her as glamourized, dumb-blonde sex-symbol, except as it relates to the image of the abused/sad/trying-to-be-happy/determined/ lost/confused/brilliant/etc woman “underneath.” Over the years I’ve realized that what I want to retreat into isn't a static image but a sort of sensation, an internal way of moving, an approach to the world. The same sensation/sense of movement/approach to the world that makes my head spin, makes things seem like they're opening up. The feeling I want to retreat into is the feeling of being terrifyingly, spinningly, heart-throbbingly present.
Retallack's discussion of the ways and reasons we seek narrative feels similar to Baty's discussion of how we use Marilyn as a cultural figure, to define ourselves, and create solid cultural ground. It feels relevant to Churchwell's discussion of the many versions of Marilyn's life, and her biographers seeming inability or unwillingness to accept the unknowns and ambiguities.
Likewise, Churchwell's noticing of Marilyn's biographers' tendencies to literalize the metaphors that they themselves create to discuss her, interests me in terms of Retallack's writing about Freudian/fairytale logic. The desire/attempt to create a closed system so as to pin down meaning. The way that that system inevitably becomes useless because, in the fixing of meaning, it loses connection to reality.
The metaphors we tend to employ—specifically, the literalization of the split of Norma Jeane/Marilyn, inside/outside, real/fake, angel/monster, etc., also seems relevant in terms of Retallack's discussion of the trouble we have seeing both the inside and outside of a structure at once, or the masculine and the feminine logics as part of one thing.
All of the ambiguities of Marilyn's life and personality create the effect of complex realism. Or at least complexity through which we have to deal with many uncomfortable things about life. I want to say that her life imitates “not nature, but 'her manner of operation'” (Retallack, p. 189) but I don't have legitimate grounds for this, not knowing exactly how nature operates.
The story of the search for the “real” Marilyn, or what “really” happened to her, or what was the magic, or magic combination of elements, that made/makes her so endlessly appealing to so many people, feels like Retallack's discussion of Gertrude Stein. Her attempts to write a traditional murder mystery, or the experience of/attempt at reading Stein, or the attempt to distill a coastline. Marilyn, and her life, give the impression, the seduction of a murder-mystery, story with a body as a vanishing point/answer to something. But the closer you look the more problematic it becomes. The plot of Marilyn's life, and the “problem” of Marilyn herself, is conceived and solved again and again yet nothing is solved at all:
“There's the particular way the form of any coastline structures an exploration of it. The reader can tramp up and down the shifting coastline of Stein's words looking for the lost object (the victim, the culprit) in vain, day after day not finding it, finding instead a strange constancy in the scene of the absent object, the coastline itself as a pattern-bounded indeterminacy in flux. Even if something as reassuring as a body were to turn up with an explanation tagged to its toe, it could hardly become the focal point of this tidal windblown beach or page.” (Retallack, p. 154)
[4]
My bigger mess:
I began working on this paper with the intention to write about my Marilyn. The idea, or feeling, or image, or mystery, that emerged from the combination of her photographs and films, the books I’ve read about her, that I’ve been in “conversation” with for the last sixteen years.
While reading The Poethical Wager, I kept seeing ways in which this Marilyn of mine seemed to act in her life as Retallack says we should write. She not only functions as a piece of writing, she acts as the writer engaged in the poethical problem; it seems to me as if the world, or her life, functioned as an essay to Marilyn. And in engaging in the conversation, Marilyn functioned as an essay to the world around her. Her early death makes her literally feel like an unfinished thought. Like she was a puzzle that was in the midst of unfolding. “It was like half understanding a sphinx, half solving a complex problem.” (Weatherby, p. 98)
In life we always, inescapably wagers on our ethics, whether we realize it or not. Because we literally, inherently, always live what we believe. Each of us has an uncertain quantity of time here. We necessarily spend this time in one way or another. When you come into this world you come into the game, whether you realize it or not, whether you want to or not. And the stakes are always high because the stakes are life. Retallack says: “to some degree or another this is the work of living in our world that we are all doing whether we like it or not.” (Retallack, p. 29)
I am taking Marilyn's whole life to be the wager. Her movies, and the “Marilyn Monroe” image, are elements of her life. Means of public participation. But I think that the nuances of what is known of her private life are also important. They give context to, and so help us understand the meaning of, her public presentations. They contrast each other creating interesting tensions. I don't know whether Marilyn aimed to enter into a public conversation or was simply having a conversation with herself, negotiating her life. The conversation became public regardless because in her negotiations she became a public figure.
Here I’m writing about my own idea of Marilyn. In my version, Marilyn is aware that she is here, in the game, the stakes as high as they can get. In The Misfits Miller writes that Roslyn (based on Marilyn) has got the gift of life, while the rest of us are just looking for somewhere to hide and watch it go by.
Where Stein's ethics precluded the possibility of not living in the contemporary moment (and therefore made it impossible for her to write a “story”), I think that Marilyn's ethics—her need to “find herself,” whatever the cost—preclude the possibility of residing in image, of buying into false comfort.
She lived her life based on wagers rather than on an attempt to control outcomes. The place her actions seem to point to are into an unknown future, into an attempt at something that was not fame or money or security. She took huge risks for what she believed in. There were many instances in which she chose the truly terrible odds of the gamble rather than the sure thing. The most obvious example was her decision to stand by Arthur Miller during the HUAC trials. As one Hollywood reporter wrote: “One way for an actress to get herself disliked in America at this moment is for her to have any connection with communism—even some remote “guilt by association” is enough. Women's clubs and ex-service organizations would boycott her films. Studios suddenly discover they have no parts for her...It could happen to Marilyn Monroe” (McCann, p.103)
And there are other examples: When she was only twenty she divorced her husband in favor of her dream of being a star. She refused to marry Johnny Hyde though he was kind, wealthy, in love with her, and dying, because though she loved him she wasn't in love with him. When she became famous for being a sex symbol she risked her career by fighting being typecast.
She didn't seem willing, or maybe wasn't able, to “settle.” Retallack says “I suspect it is precisely Becket's refusal to be consoled (a rejection of sentimentality) that allowed him to “go on.” I suspect the same of Marilyn. Except perhaps it was a rejection of easy answers; and maybe it was less a rejection than an inability to accept them, not because she didn't want to (it seems that she may have wanted to, from her pattern of attaching herself fully, if temporarily, to various men (Strasberg, Miller, Kennedy) and their ideologies), but because they wouldn't work.
This is, obviously, different from joyful play/engagement. But it is real engagement, which I think is important. It's the inability/unwillingness to accept a fantasy. Marilyn said “I'd rather be unhappy alone than unhappy with somebody—so far.” Which to me has always meant that she would rather face her loneliness than try to mask it (so far). That “so far” is important. It's a recognition of the choice to face the real as a moment-to-moment decision; a recognition of the real possibility that she might not always think the real is worth it; a recognition of herself as a changeable being, always working with the context of the moment, constantly engaged, not making up a way to survive and hanging onto that. Not deciding she knows what the world is and closing the case.
She seemed to be aware of the beauty within the pain, the need to live joyfully even while in some kind of horrendous pain. Because of how hard she worked for some indefinable thing, which may not even exist. She found joy, delight, humor, even within pain, uncertainty, and doubt. She said: “She was a girl who knew how to be happy even when she was sad.”
In her work she was playful. She saw the humor in her image, the ridiculousness, even as she believed in it, and believed she needed it, and lived in it. I think that the combination of these things is important because the living in it keeps it from just being mocking, makes her take the problem seriously, while the ability to see how ridiculous it is opens up the conversation. Retallack says that “great art...reveals what ideology conceals” (Retallack, p. 54). Marilyn's performance of gender pushes at limits. Her performance of identity is taken to an extreme that exposes itself as construct.
The blonde bombshell role, the dumb-blonde-gold-digger-seductress. The static image. The idea of femininity, of beautiful woman. The creation of solid, static, image-centric identity—the “actors” produced by Hollywood who get “typed.” All of this is her “poesis”; and my Marilyn is poethical.
As a woman who played a dumb-blonde-bombshell-gold-digger-seductress but also showed us a confused, sad, sometimes unbearably sweet, sometimes unlikeable and cruel, insecure, terrified, immodest, vain, (etc) real human being, “warts and all.” As a woman who walked at the border of the beautiful and the grotesque. As a woman who refused easier, often offered versions of success because she wanted to really act. I take this as the poethics, the breaking out of what is easy, what is successful and acceptable. How she humanized a stereotype. How she worked with the reality of the living within the image.
Hollywood is (obviously) the deliverer of “shiny freeze-frames,” of images intended to convince its viewers of a specific world, and as an attempt to control the conversation (or keep there from being a conversation). I see Marilyn as making an attempt, a brave attempt within the conditions of her life (no matter how it may (or may not) have failed), to engage honestly with her life. I see her as staking everything on this attempt—she risked, again and again, the career, which she had worked so hard for (and risked everything for in its time). She said: “I'm trying to find myself as a person, sometimes that's not easy to do. Millions of people live their entire lives without finding themselves. But it is something I must do. The best way for me to find myself as a person is to prove to myself that I’m an actress.” (McCann, p. 85)
Marilyn said, “I'm not interested in money. I just want to be wonderful.”
In discussing the biographers' conclusions that Marilyn wasn't really beautiful, Churchwell notices the emphasis on what she terms a nearly Nietzschean will to beauty (Churchwell, p. 186). I find it interesting because, to me, her beauty seems both magical and provisional. Most pretty girls spark in me a reaction of jealousy/ loathing/despair. I’m thinking again of Retallack's statement: “Difficult texts, those that are difficult because of the proportions of what the writer is attempting to take on, have this quality of appealing vulnerability. Rather than pushing the reader away, they suggest collaboration” (Retallack, p. 49-50). I’m thinking of how Marilyn's body itself makes her seem vulnerable. While most physical beauty seems to be used as a shield or a weapon, Marilyn's almost seems to do the opposite. I wonder if her beauty itself is made in collaboration with her audience.
In some ways I feel as if it's cheating. Retallack is talking about writing as a form of life, and here I am, talking about a person's life as writing-that-is-a-form-of-life. Of course Marilyn's life acts as a life. It is one. It can't really avoid it.
I think that what is striking about Marilyn Monroe, and her life, in particular, is the degree of things. We all engage with the problems of image (both desiring to make it complete and impenetrable, and desiring to be free of it). We all experience the problem of memory and its confusions. Of the difficulties of negotiating the chaos without giving way. Of being happy in the midst of our sadness. Of the feminine and (or versus) the masculine. Of identity/lack thereof. Of mortality. Of being alone. Of how to live. The conditions of Marilyn's struggles went to the extremes of our designated opposites. And she was very famous.
And Marilyn is problematic in terms of my theory, too. There are all sorts of things I’m leaving out. Her internal inconsistencies, such that she loved animals and hated violence, yet wore fur and ate meat. Her rigid defense of whatever ideology she believed in at the moment—her tendency to seek ideology. And sometimes she says things that make me flinch, such as when she says that “the star system” is the same as the slave system. Which I feel shows an absolute lack of perspective. Though, it's so hard to say; the quote could be incomplete.