Bookshop links are affiliate links.
The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe (Sarah Churchwell, 2004)
Not a biography of Monroe so much as a kind of metabiography, looking at all of the different Marilyn Monroes other people have conjured up. What does “what we are willing to believe about her” say about us? Churchwell got onto this project because she was originally writing about Sylvia Plath and discovered endless comparisons between Plath and Monroe. Along those lines, she includes one of those jaw-dropping article quotes that always reminds you that no matter what nasty nonsense you thought people were saying, the truth is usually worse:
But Marilyn, that icon of über-femininity, is most often compared to other dead women. Or rather, other dead women are often compared to her. To take just one example, when Princess Diana died in September 1997 the New Statesman wrote: “By dying young, at the peak of her fame, she has taken her place in the holy trinity of immortal blondes. The more beautiful Marilyn Monroe overdosed wearing Chanel No. 5. The more intelligent Sylvia Plath died with her head in a gas oven like a Sunday roast.”
I do like the idea implicit here that the trinity consists of two superlatives and one mediocrity. Which one is the apparently less beautiful and less intelligent Princess Diana? The Holy Ghost? Chime in on which member of the trinity is mid below.
Anyway—this book is mostly great though Churchwell has level of hostility toward Joyce Carol Oates’s Blonde that I think can get a little silly. (She basically treats Blonde as another biography.) I finished it thinking I knew which Monroe biographies I might want to read if I wanted to go further (Donald Spoto, Barbara Leaming) and which I absolutely didn’t (Anthony Summers, which I unfortunately already own); a general belief that while the Kennedys didn’t really have anything to do with her death we might as well blame them because they would have if they could have;1 and newfound irritation for anybody who insists on calling Monroe “Norma Jeane.”
Ultimately, Churchwell’s biggest contribution in this book is treating Monroe like an intelligent, strategic, and ambitious woman (to whom a lot of bad things happened), not as a tragic sexy baby. “Since her death, Marilyn Monroe’s story has been endlessly told and retold. Nearly every book begins with the same question: Who was the woman who became Marilyn Monroe?” she comments at the end of her introduction. “But this book asks a different question: Who was the woman Marilyn Monroe became?” It may not seem like a huge shift, but it makes a difference.2 I read this after writing my Fritz Leiber article but I felt vindicated in all my choices and beliefs.
Helter Skelter (Kyoko Okazaki, 1995)
River’s Edge (Kyoko Okazaki, 1993–94)
One of the freedoms art permits is letting you think about a situation in ways that would not really make sense if it were real.3 For instance: if the underground plastic surgery clinic in Helter Skelter, which uses black market organs in order to create body modifications so extreme that if their clients don’t continually pay for expensive treatments their bodies will begin to fall apart, existed… then… it would just be really evil, and its clients would just be victims. The reasons they ended up as clients wouldn’t really matter. How they felt about it wouldn’t really matter.4 In a story, though, you can think about other things.
Helter Skelter is primarily interested in the personality of Liliko, a model whose entire body is artificially constructed, we’re told, except for her eyes (and a couple other parts). Liliko is spiteful, petulant, manipulative, and more than a little insane:
She’s also about to age out of the business, as she’s well aware. Even if she can keep up with her treatments and keep her body from falling apart, she’s going to keep getting older. Her type of fame has no afterlife, either: once she’s gone, she’s gone. Nobody will remember her. Liliko has moments of clarity about this fact, just as she has moments of clarity about other aspects of her life, but that clarity isn’t useful for her. She pushes it away.
What makes Helter Skelter more than an R-rated manga version of Death Becomes Her5 is the sympathy it has for Liliko’s berserk ambition, without ever really trying to make her into “a good person” or even an underdog.6 When Kozue, a younger model who is “naturally” beautiful, expresses what we all know to be true—that the goal in the name of which Liliko’s destroyed her body and also the lives of others is incredibly stupid—the narrative even gets indignant on Liliko’s behalf:
And so did I! I was like—screw you Kozue. You don’t know the struggle. Meanwhile, Liliko is getting her flunkies to throw acid in a sexual rival’s face, but somehow that failed to raise the same level of internal protest. Even Liliko understands her life is stupid, but it’s hers, and she’s in too deep to pick a different life now. Her determination to recraft herself inch by inch, to get at the top and to stay there, to be the fairest of them all—in the end we kind of love her for those qualities. When she realizes she has no choice but to go down, the sheer spite with which she does so feels almost inspirational.7
Kozue shows up in River’s Edge, too, as a high school student whose modeling career is taking off. River’s Edge is a melancholy story about childhood and bullying, where again Okazaki manages to bring you into sympathy with her characters without ever really letting you feel bad for them, or even feel like they are secretly good people. It’s reminiscent of the movie Stand by Me,8 but Stand by Me has a nostalgic quality that this story totally lacks. There’s also a clear line in that story between the bullies and the bullied that does not exist in River’s Edge: all these kids lie and harm each other. Characters who are bullied display no particular righteousness.9 Nevertheless, you hope that—somehow—they can all be OK. (They are not.)
Kyoko Okazaki has a quirky art style that took me a moment to “get.” People can be hard to tell apart. Something about its rough cartoony quality really worked for me once I started to get it, though. It is a little childish, yet very adult. All of these people, the style says, aren’t they kind of pathetic? And yet.
At BDM Industries we have a few key commitments, among them that God’s in his heaven and the Kennedys need to be exiled to an island.
This book also inspired some truly galaxy brained thoughts about Monroe, Plath, Taylor Swift etc. Condemned to sobriety as it is these days, my mind has figured out to act drunk anyway. These thoughts may or may not ever make it to a Taylor Swift Studies post, but the shortest and best version of the thought actually comes from my friend
, who commented to me: “I’ve been following various icons with blood-soaked gowns my whole life and the idea it could be anyone’s blood other than her own … this is a big deal, to me.”Helter Skelter sort of fits with a genre of horror I think of as “the evil store,” though it’s not really contained to stores. Basically, the store (or person) that can offer you the thing you want at a price you might be willing to pay but probably don’t fully grasp. The proprietors are not always evil so much as operating off of a completely contract-based morality: if you are willing to pay for it, you can have it, whatever “it” happens to be. The clinic in Helter Skelter is, however, pretty evil.
“Isn’t the more topical reference The Substance?” Well, first of all, that’s already rated R. Second of all, I did not see it. Third of all, I am not going to.
Liliko is a bad person by basically any standard you want to use, except when it comes to her affection for her kid sister.
In some ways we’re in a similar place to Churchwell on Monroe here: granted that this particular woman lives within an exploitative and frequently evil system, why is she doing what she’s doing? What is is it like to be her? What does she even want, really? Liliko can feel the clock ticking down on her career and she knows she needs to ensure her future somehow, but she’s so ambitious in the moment it’s as if the future cannot really exist for her.
(or Stephen King’s novella The Body, on which Stand by Me is based)
I LOVE Helter Skelter--Liliko is one of the great monsters, all desire and no satisfaction. We can't all be Kozue (born into our correct purpose and accepting of it).
Your observations about Marilyn Monroe makes me think about Questlove talking about "black genius" in the Sly Stone documentary, where he says something like "the career of Sly Stone makes me wonder whether it even makes sense to talk about black genius." I took the point to be that, in a situation where you are obviously better at creating art than the people around you, but the social and economic context means that you need to be inferior to those you are working with, how do you express your superiority without destroying your gifts in the process?
In Marilyn's case, being an artist who specialized in making people feel sexual desire for her image on film, in a world where people looked down on sexually desirable people as dangerous and morally corrupted, would not be an easy road. The sacrifice of blondes as the culmination of Protestant eros.