America is obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. ‘Blonde’ is about Norma Jeane.
America is obsessed with Marilyn Monroe. ‘Blonde’ is about Norma Jeane.
For a moment there this spring, she was inescapable.
In late April, Marilyn Monroe’s life and death were the subject of the Netflix documentary “The Mystery of Marilyn Monroe: The Unheard Tapes,” which explored a handful of conspiracy theories regarding her relationships with President John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. The following week, Kim Kardashian made headlines around the world when she arrived at the Met Gala — so fashionably late as to be the very last guest on the scene — wearing the very dress Monroe wore to sing “Happy Birthday” to Kennedy in 1962. The week after that, the famed Andy Warhol portrait of Monroe sold for a record-shattering $195 million at a Christie’s auction.
With the addition of “Blonde,” the new Andrew Dominik film (based on the novel of the same name by Joyce Carol Oates) that arrives Wednesday on Netflix, it would now be hard to refute: We’re in a Year of Marilyn. With her cotton candy puff of golden-white hair unmistakable on the streamer’s home screens and her enigmatic, sleepy gaze peeking out from our entertainment news pages, fascination with her is peaking once again.
Monroe “represents a lot of things to a lot of people,” says Lucy Bolton, who teaches language, literature and film at Queen Mary University of London and guest-edited the 2015 “#Marilyneveryday: The Persistence of Marilyn Monroe as a Cultural Icon” issue of the journal Film, Fashion and Consumption. Her image has “come to stand for the very essence of glamour and beauty,” Bolton says, while her life story “stands for the classic hard-luck, rags-to-riches” tale of making it big in Hollywood.
Indeed, the sale of Monroe’s portrait and the controversial use of her gown at the Met Gala celebrated the former aspect of Monroe’s fame — which suddenly feels in step once again, with the ultrafeminine aesthetic that’s lately become trendy among some younger Americans. But none of this year’s moments of Marilyn fixation have engaged quite as directly with the latter as “Blonde,” which focuses on Norma Jeane Baker, the woman who became Marilyn Monroe.
A few forces have converged this year to create a period of renewed fascination with Monroe — or perhaps more accurately, with Monroe iconography. For starters, 2022 marks the 60th anniversary of Monroe’s death at the age of 36. In August, a memorial service was held in her honor in Los Angeles, timed to the day of her death; tributes and remembrances cropped up all over the internet. Her death in its own right, Bolton notes — its apparently accidental nature coupled with its untimeliness — accounts for a lot of her enduring mystique. “She’s got a victim narrative,” Bolton says, “which, like Judy Garland or Princess Diana, has its own aura of tragedy. And people are attracted to that.”
And while certain aspects of her iconic image have come and gone — her pointy bras and her Middy haircut among them — several routinely come back into style, and have once again this year. “I have noticed once again that clothing is coming around to the ’60s,” says Donelle Dadigan, president and founder of the Hollywood Museum in California (where interest in the Monroe items spikes yearly in June around her birthday). Indeed, while many of today’s most fashionable looks are 1990s- and 2000s-inspired, late-’50s and early-’60s Monroe-era staples such as winged eyeliner, midi skirts and colorful matching two-piece outfits are going strong. (Of course, much of Monroe’s signature look has never gone out of style. “We can pick up pretty much any magazine — particularly a fashion magazine like Elle, Vogue or Harper’s [Bazaar],” Bolton says, “and there is nearly always, somewhere in that magazine, a picture of Marilyn.”)
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