When studying celebrities as a cultural phenomenon, the constant consideration seems to be this: person or persona? This seems to be especially relevant when thinking about stars from the early days of movies. While Marilyn Monroe’s persona lives in our collective consciousness to this day, to me the person behind the persona feels distant.
https://joesmoviestuff.blogspot.com/2017/09/marilyn-monroe-as-lorelei-lee-in.html
Gentlemen Prefer Blondes is a perfect example of the specific way Monroe can be considered a feminist icon. In one of the final scenes, when Monroe is with her fiance and her fiance’s father, she points out the double standard which has caused others to label her as a “gold digger.” Throughout the entire movie she uses her sexuality and extreme beauty to manipulate the men around her. However, it is not until this scene that she reveals she has been conscious of it the entire time, and lets the audience know that her femininity is really her greatest source of power. For me, this was the most important turning point in the movie.
https://www.bluscreens.net/gentlemen-prefer-blondes.html
In the book Heavenly Bodies, the author Richard Dyer claims that all Monroe’s film characters are defined by just three characteristics: age, gender, and sex appeal. Some of the women she plays are never even given actual names. It’s interesting to think about this from a historical perspective, and to consider a time when it was widely accepted to present movie characters with no more depth of character than the most surface-level gender stereotypes. Perhaps this is why movies from this time period are considered to not “hold up.” One-dimensionality is no longer considered sufficient.
Dyer also talks about increased cultural curiosity in the more hidden aspects of human existence in the 1950s. He points out the rise of men’s magazines, novels which openly talk about sex, and more references to sex in mass media in general as proof that sex was widely accepted as the deeper truth of the human existence. It feels as though audiences at the time accepted Monroe’s persona as her true and vulnerable self because her whole image was so deeply intertwined with sex. The fact of Monroe’s tragic death, the stories about her difficulties on set, and her very public and turbulent personal life gives this film a very different cast than it must have had when viewed when it first came out in 1953. The image that her studio was trying to present is so painfully obvious and forced in hindsight.
https://www.themoviescene.co.uk/reviews/gentlemen-prefer-blondes/gentlemen-prefer-blondes.html
It is interesting to me that through various publications at the time, Monroe’s troubled past and the fact that she was no longer connected to her family was widely known. It seems that this vulnerability only made her more desirable. Despite knowledge of trauma in her past, people still accepted that the woman Marilyn Monroe could really be the happy-go-lucky, untroubled, uncomplicated person that she played on screen and in public. This could be because of the attitudes of the day and the facts of the time; because WWI, the Great Depression and WWII had all just happened when Monroe was becoming famous, most people at the time had truly and deeply suffered in some way, and had to continue life despite past problems.