Fluent Essays

Describe three ways in which The Seven Year Itch supports Richard Dyer’s argument that Marilyn Monroe embodied the values that were important to 1950s audiences.How does the clipping from Picturegoer magazine reflect the Playboy discourse as described by Richard Dyer?What evidence does Dyer use to support his argument that Monroe’s star image reflected the mid twentieth-century discourse about female sexuality? Describe one example that Dyer uses to support his claim.Richard Dyer argues that, in order to understand why Marilyn Monroe continues to resonate with audiences today, we need to understand how she embodies contemporary values. Select one example of a way in which Monroe continues to circulate (). What values are represented in this impersonation or reference? Why do these values resonate today? You may choose from the following or find your own example: makeup tutorials and drag shows on YouTube; impersonations by celebrities like Kylie and Kendall Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, or Dove Cameron; the advertisements for Snickers or Zales; Niki Minaj’s “Marilyn Monroe,” Madonna’s “Material Girl”; or the trailer for My Week with Marilyn starring Michelle Williams as Monroe. In your answer, be sure to identify the quality that is being referenced (Monroe’s beauty, sexiness, innocence, vulnerability, etc.) and explain how this quality is being used in the example. new_microsoft_word_document__2_.docx dyer_heavenly_bodies_marilyn_monroe.pdf picturegoer_may_12_1956_p_a17.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview 1. Describe three ways in which The Seven Year Itch supports Richard Dyer’s argument that Marilyn Monroe embodied the values that were important to 1950s audiences. 2. How does the clipping from Picturegoer magazine reflect the Playboy discourse as described by Richard Dyer? 3. What evidence does Dyer use to support his argument that Monroe’s star image reflected the mid twentieth-century discourse about female sexuality? Describe one example that Dyer uses to support his claim. 4. Richard Dyer argues that, in order to understand why Marilyn Monroe continues to resonate with audiences today, we need to understand how she embodies contemporary values. Select one example of a way in which Monroe continues to circulate (). What values are represented in this impersonation or reference? Why do these values resonate today? You may choose from the following or find your own example: makeup tutorials and drag shows on YouTube; impersonations by celebrities like Kylie and Kendall Jenner, Kim Kardashian, Katy Perry, Beyoncé, or Dove Cameron; the advertisements for Snickers or Zales; Niki Minaj’s “Marilyn Monroe,” Madonna’s “Material Girl”; or the trailer for My Week with Marilyn starring Michelle Williams as Monroe. In your answer, be sure to identify the quality that is being referenced (Monroe’s beauty, sexiness, innocence, vulnerability, etc.) and explain how this quality is being used in the example. Chapter 1 Monroe and sexuality Richard Dyer, Heavenly Bodies 2nd Edition. (New York: Routledge, 2004). The denial of the body is delusion. No woman transcends her body. Joseph C. Rheingold Men want women pink, helpless and do a lot of deep breathing. Jayne Mansfield Stars matter because they act out aspects of life that matter to us; and performers get to be stars when what they act out matters to enough people. Though there is a sense in which stars must touch on things that are deep and constant features of human existence, such features never exist outside a culturally and historically specific context. So, for example, sexual intercourse takes place in all human societies, but what intercourse means and how much it matters alters from culture to culture, and within the history of any culture. The argument in this chapter is that, in the fifties, there were specific ideas of what sexuality meant and it was held to matter a very great deal; and because Marilyn Monroe acted out those specific ideas, and because they were felt to matter so much, she was charismatic, a centre of attraction who seemed to embody what was taken to be a central feature of human existence at that time. My method is to read Monroe through the ideas about sexuality that circulated in the fifties, ideas that I centre on two strands, the one most forcefully represented by Playboy magazine, the other concerned with comprehending female sexuality. I want to use the term ‘discourse’ for these strands, to indicate that we are not dealing with philosophically coherent thought systems but rather with clusters of ideas, notions, feelings, images, attitudes and assumptions that, taken together, make up distinctive ways of thinking and feeling about things, of making a particular sense of the world. A discourse runs across different media and practices, across different cultural levels – from the self-conscious Playboy ‘philosophy’ to the habitual forms of the pin-up, from psychoanalytic theory through psychotherapeutic practices to the imagery of popular magazines and best-selling novels. 18 Monroe and sexuality To a large extent, the analysis which follows stays ‘within’ discourse. Though I do make some reference to the material world which discourse itself refers to, I don’t really analyse it in any detail. As far as my argument goes, Monroe is charismatic because she embodies what the discourses designate as the important-at-the-time central features of human existence. In this way I want to avoid a simplistic correlation between Monroe and either the actual social structures of the fifties or the lived experience of ‘ordinary’ women and men. However, this is a limitation of my approach and I wouldn’t want to give the impression that there is no correlation between discourses, structures and experiences. If the discourses (and Monroe) did not in fact have some purchase on how people lived in the social and economic conditions of their time, I do not see how they could have in any sense worked or been effective; I don’t think people would have paid to go and see her. But I do not show here just what the precise nature of the connections between discourses, social structures and experiences are in this case. In stressing the importance of sexuality in Marilyn Monroe’s image, it might seem that I am just another commentator doing to Monroe what was done to her throughout her life, treating her solely in terms of sex. Perhaps that is a danger, but I hope that I am not just reproducing this attitude to Monroe but trying to understand it and historicise it. Monroe may have been a wit, a subtle and profound actress, an intelligent and serious woman; I’ve no desire to dispute this and it is important to recognise and recover those qualities against the grain of her image. But my purpose is to understand the grain itself, and there can be no question that this is overwhelmingly and relentlessly constructed in terms of sexuality. Monroe = sexuality is a message that ran all the way from what the media made of her in the pin-ups and movies to how her image became a reference point for sexuality in the coinage of everyday speech. She started her career as a pin-up, and one can find no type of image more single-mindedly sexual than that. Pin-ups remained a constant and vital aspect of her image right up to her death, and the pin-up style also indelibly marked other aspects, such as public appearances and promotion for films. The roles she was given, how she was filmed and the reviews she got do little to counteract this emphasis. She plays, from the beginning, ‘the girl’, defined solely by age, gender and sexual appeal. In two films, she does not even have a name (Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! 1948 and Love Happy 1950) and in three other cases, her character has no biography beyond being ‘the blonde’ (Dangerous Years 1948, The Fireball 1950 and Right Cross 1950). Even when any information about the character is supplied, it serves to reinforce the basic anonymity of the role. For instance, when the character has a job, it is a job that – while it may, like that of secretary, be in fact productive – is traditionally (or cinematically) thought of as being one where the woman is on show, there for Monroe and sexuality 19 the pleasure of men. These jobs in Monroe’s early films are chorus girl (Ladies of the Chorus 1948 (Figure 1.1) and Ticket to Tomahawk 1950), actress (All About Eve 1950 – the film emphasises that the character has no talent) or secretary (Home Town Story 1951, As Young As You Feel 1951 and Monkey Business 1952). There is very little advance on these roles in her later career. She has no name in The Seven Year Itch 1955, even in the credits she is just ‘the Girl’. She is a chorus girl in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes 1953, There’s No Business Like Show Business 1954, The Prince and the Showgirl 1957 and Let’s Make Love 1960, and a solo artiste of no great talent in River of No Return 1954, Bus Stop 1956 and Some Like It Hot 1959. She is a model (hardly an extension of the role repertoire) in How to Marry a Millionaire 1953 and The Seven Year Itch 1955, and a prostitute in O. Henry’s Full House 1952. Thus even in her prestige roles, Bus Stop and The Prince and the Showgirl, the social status of the person she plays remains the same (this does not mean, of course, that there is no difference between these characters or their portrayal). The tendency to treat her as nothing more than her gender reaches its peak with The Misfits 1961, where, from being the ‘girl’ in the early films, she now becomes the ‘woman’, or perhaps just ‘Woman’ – Roslyn has no biography, she is just ‘a divorcee’; the symbolic structure of the film relates her to Nature, the antithesis of culture, career, society, history . . . There is no question that Monroe did a lot with these roles, but it is nearly always against the grain of how they are written, and how they are Figure 1.1 Monroe as chorus doll in Ladies of the Chorus 1948 20 Monroe and sexuality filmed too. She is knitted into the fabric of the film through point-of-view shots located in male characters – even in the later films, and virtually always in the earlier ones, she is set up as an object of male sexual gaze. Frequently too she is placed within the frame of the camera in such a way as to stand out in silhouette, a side-on tits and arse positioning obsessively repeated throughout her films. One of the most sustained treatments of her as sexual spectacle is in The Prince and the Showgirl, a film produced by her own company and directed by Sir Laurence Olivier, a film you might expect to be different in approach. Superficially it is – the lines more theatrically witty, the sets more tastefully dressed than in her Twentieth Century Fox extravaganzas. Yet the film constantly plays with our supposed desire to see Monroe as sexual spectacle. The first few minutes of the film concerning the Monroe character, Elsie, are set backstage at ‘The Cocoanut Girl’, in and around the showgirls’ dressing room. Such settings always raise voyeurs’ hopes, and the film teases them. One shot follows the call boy along the passage to the dressing room that Elsie shares with the other girls; he knocks and enters, leaving the door open, but from where the camera is positioned we can’t see the girls; after a moment, however, the camera cranes round so that it/we can see in on the girls, but the tease is also a cheat – they are all fully dressed. Later in the film Monroe and Olivier are posed on either side of the screen (Figure 1.2). Olivier is face-on, in a shapeless dressing-gown against a dark background of bookshelves – his figure is not clearly visible and the mise-en-scène identifies him with the intellect (books). Monroe is posed side-on, in a tight dress that facilitates another tits and arse shot as in earlier films. Behind her is a nude female statuette. Her figure is thrust at us, and the mise-en-scène identifies her with womanas-body, woman-as-spectacle. Hardly surprisingly, the reviewers also saw her overwhelmingly in terms of sex.1 Typical of the early period are descriptions of her as ‘a beautiful blonde’ in The Asphalt Jungle 1950, ‘curvey Marilyn Monroe’ in As Young As You Feel, as having a ‘shapely chassis’ and being ‘a beautiful blonde’ in Let’s Make It Legal 1951. Just on the brink of full stardom (and after having, as we now suppose, made a mark, beyond that of sex object, in The Asphalt Jungle and All About Eve), a critic writes, à propos of We’re Not Married 1952, ‘Marilyn Monroe supplies the beauty at which she is Hollywood’s currently foremost expert’. Barbara Stanwyck recalls the gentlemen of the press, when they visited the lot of Clash By Night 1952, announcing that they were not interested in her, Stanwyck, the star of the film – ‘We don’t want to speak to her. We know everything about her. We want to talk to the girl with the big tits’. Again, even as late as Some Like It Hot and Let’s Make Love, the same kind of remarks are found among the reviews – of the former: ‘. . . Miss Monroe, whose figure simply cannot be overlooked . . .’ and of the latter: ‘. . . the famous charms are in evidence’. Thus the direct physical presence of Monroe is never lost sight of behind other later Monroe and sexuality 21 Figure 1.2 Monroe and Laurence Olivier in The Prince and the Showgirl © 1957 Marilyn Monroe Productions Inc. All rights reserved. emphases, such as her wit or acting abilities, though it is true that there is a certain jokey defensiveness about much of the later reviews’ harping on sex appeal, as if in acknowledgement of the other claims made for Monroe in the period. Given this emphasis in the pin-ups, movies and reviews, it is not surprising that Monroe became virtually a household word for sex. It is, for obvious reasons, harder to marshal the evidence for this. I recall it myself and many people I have spoken to remember it too. A couple of quotations may bring it to life. The first, in the sociological study Coal Is Our Life by Norman Dennis, Fernando Henriques and Clifford Slaughter, records the impact of Monroe’s appearance in Niagara 1953 on a group of miners and their wives in the north-east of England. This is particularly interesting. So much is Monroe part of the coinage of everyday speech, she can be used to exemplify quite different ways of thinking and feeling about sex: In the bookie’s office or at the pit they made jokes about the suggestiveness of Miss Monroe, about her possible effect on certain persons 22 Monroe and sexuality present, and about her nickname, ‘The Body’. Indeed any man seemed to gain something in stature and recognition if he could contribute some lewd remark to the conversation. On the other hand, in private conversation with a stranger the same men would suggest that the film was at best rather silly, and at worst on the verge of disgusting. Finally, the men’s comments in the presence of women were entirely different. In a group of married couples who all knew each other well, the women said that they thought Miss Monroe silly and her characteristics overdone; the men said that they liked the thought of a night in bed with her. The more forward of the women soon showed up their husbands by coming back with some remark as ‘You wouldn’t be so much bloody good to her anyway!’ and the man would feel awkward. (Dennis et al. 1969: 216) The second quotation is from Marilyn French’s novel, The Women’s Room. Much of this book is set in the fifties, among a group of newly-weds on a suburban estate. In one section, the narrator (who is also one of the characters) discusses their feelings about sex. This is revealing not only for the inevitability of the Monroe reference, but also for the way it touches upon aspects of sexuality that I’ll be dealing with in the rest of this chapter.2 Sex was for most of the men and all of the women a disappointment they never mentioned. Sex, after all, was THE thing that came naturally, and if it didn’t – if it wasn’t for them worth anywhere near all the furtiveness and dirty jokes and pin-up calendars and ‘men’s’ magazines, all the shock and renunciation of hundreds of heroines in hundreds of books – why then it was they who were inadequate . . . Probably because most people have an extremely limited sexual experience, it is easy for them, when things are wrong, to place the blame on their partner. It would be different if, instead of graying Theresa with her sagging breasts, her womb hanging low from having held six children, Don were in bed with – Marilyn Monroe, say. (French 1978: 106–7, my emphasis) As The Women’s Room makes clear, sex was seen as perhaps the most important thing in life in fifties America. Certain publishing events suggest this: the two Kinsey reports (on men, 1948; on women, 1953), the first issues of Confidential in 1951 and Playboy in 1953, both to gain very rapidly in circulation; best-selling novels such as From Here To Eternity 1951, A House is Not a Home 1953, Not As a Stranger 1955, Peyton Place 1956, Strangers When We Meet 1953, A Summer Place 1958, The Chapman Report 1960, Return to Peyton Place 1961, not to mention the thrillers of Monroe and sexuality 23 Mickey Spillane. Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique quotes a survey by Albert Ellis, published as The Folklore of Sex in 1961, which shows that ‘[i]n American media there were more than 2½ times as many references to sex in 1960 as in 1950’ (Friedan 1963: 229), and she considers that ‘[f]rom 1950 to 1960 the interest of men in the details of intercourse paled before the avidity of women – both as depicted in these media, and as its audience’ (ibid.: 230). Nor is this just a question of quantity; rather it seems like a high point of the trend that Michel Foucault has discussed in The History of Sexuality as emerging in the seventeenth century, whereby sexuality is designated as the aspect of human existence where we may learn the truth about ourselves. This often takes the form of digging below the surface, on the assumption that what is below must necessarily be more true and must also be what causes the surface to take the form it does. This is equally the model with the psychoanalytical enquiry into the unconscious (peel back the Ego to the truth of the Id), the best-selling novel formula of ‘taking the lid off the suburbs’ (Peyton Place ‘tears down brick, stucco, and tarpaper to give intimate revealing glimpses of the inhabitants within’, said the Sunday Dispatch), or in the endless raking over the past of a star, like Monroe, to find the truth about her personality. And the below-surface that they all tend to come up with in the fifties is sex. The assumption that sex matters so much is granted even by writers who attacked the directions that they saw sexuality taking. Howard Whitman in his book The Sex Age, published in 1962, declares in his foreword: ‘Of all areas, sex is perhaps the most personal. But it is also a reflection of all of life and of the whole of a culture’. He quotes a Midwest minister as saying: ‘When men and women come to me with their problems, nine times out of ten as soon as we scratch the surface we find that sex is involved’. (Whitman 1963: 3). Whitman’s message is a familiar enough anti-promiscuity, antisexualvariety, anti-pornography package, but its starting point is that sex is the key to life. For this reason he is anti the wrong kind of sex, but very far from being anti-sex altogether. He quotes H.G. Wells on his title page – ‘The future of sex is the center of the whole problem of the human future’. Hard to get a clearer declaration than that of how much sex was held to matter in the fifties. Probably the most lucid interpretation of the fifties’ discourses on sexuality remains Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, first published in 1963 and clearly a major influence on everything since written about the fifties. Friedan suggests that sexuality at that time became constructed as the ‘answer’ to any of the dissatisfactions or distress that might be voiced by women as a result of living under ‘the feminine mystique’, or what Friedan also calls ‘the problem that has no name’. Time and again in interviewing women, she would find that they would ‘give me an explicitly sexual answer to a question that was not sexual at all’ (Friedan 1963: 226), and she argues 24 Monroe and sexuality that women in America ‘are putting into the sexual search all their frustrated needs for self-realisation’ (ibid.: 289). Similarly, in her survey of some films of the fifties, On the Verge of Revolt, Brandon French argues that the films ‘reveal how sex and love were often misused to obscure or resolve deeper sources of female (and male) dissatisfaction’ (B. French 1978: xxii). If in Foucault’s account sexuality is seen as a source of knowledge about human existence, Friedan and French show how that knowledge is also offered as the solution to the problems of human existence. All argue that sexuality, both as knowledge and solution, is also the means by which men and women are designated a place in society, and are kept in their place. In line with these wider trends in society, sexuality was becoming increas ... Purchase answer to see full attachment