Marilyn Monroe - Brossura

Brossura

ISBN 10: 1783202017 ISBN 13: 9781783202010

Casa editrice: Intellect L & D E F A E, 2015

Riassunto

Born Norma Jeane Mortenson, Marilyn Monroe was an actress, singer, and sex symbol whose influence far outlasted her short life. Contributors to Fan Phenomena: Marilyn Monroe situate the platinum blonde starlet’s omnipresent cultural relevance within the zeitgeist of current popular culture and explore the influence she has had on numerous elements of it. Her aesthetics and images have been reappropriated, recreated, imitated, and emulated by such celebrities as Lindsay Lohan, Jayne Mansfield, Drew Barrymore, Anna Nicole Smith, and Madonna. The quintessential American sex symbol, Monroe was an influential style icon for a spectrum of designers, including Dolce and Gabbana, Betsey Johnson, and Nike, all of whom have named lines of clothing, shoes, or accessories after the star.

The essays here explore representations of Monroe in visual culture by looking at the ways she is reimagined in visual art while also considering how her posthumous appearance and image are appropriated in current advertisements. With an inside look at the universe of Marilyn Monroe impersonators and look-alike contests for both males and females, the book also explores numerous homages to Monroe in music, from the 1979 opera Marilyn by Lorenzo Ferrero to Nicki Minaj’s song “Marilyn Monroe.” The definitive guide to one of the most famous women who ever lived, the book will be essential reading for any scholar of twentieth-century American popular culture.

Su questo libro

Informazioni sull?autore

Marcelline Block is a lecturer in history at Princeton University. She is the editor of Intellect's World Film Locations books on Paris, Las Vegas, Marseilles, and Prague.

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Marilyn Monroe

By Marcelline Block

Intellect Ltd

Copyright © 2015 Intelect Ltd
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78320-201-0

Contents

Introduction MARCELLINE BLOCK, 5—17, 
Timeless Stars and New Spotlights: Looking for Marilyn Monroe on YouTube LOUISE ELALI AND CATALINA VÁZQUEZ, 18—27, 
Fan Appeciation no.1 Mary Sims, Owner of the Immortal Marilyn Fan Club Website, 28—35, 
Lipstick Thespians: Being Marilyn Monroe after 5 August 1962 ROSS SLOAN, 36—53, 
Marilyn is a Smash: Depicting the Icon in NBC's Musical Drama RAQUEL CRISÓSTOMO, 54—65, 
Fan Appeciation no.2 Gianandrea Colombo Marilyn Monroe Italia, 66—73, 
Marilyn Monroe's Dresses ANGE WEBB, 74—85, 
Fan Appeciation no.3 Scott Fortner, The Marilyn Monroe Collection, 86—93, 
Performing Marilyn: Michelle Williams in My Week with Marilyn ZACHARY INGLE, 94—105, 
Fan Appeciation no.4 Tara Hanks, author of The MMM Girl, 106—113, 
The 50th Anniversary of Marilyn Monroe's Death SCOTT FORTNER, 114—l19, 
Fan Appeciation no.5 Melinda Mason, the 'Marilyn Geek', 120—123, 
Fan Appeciation no.6 Marijane Gray, 124—129, 
Editor and Contributor Biographies, 130—133, 

CHAPTER 1

Timeless Stars and New Spotlights: Looking for Marilyn Monroe on Youtube

Louise Elali and Catalina Vázquez

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.

- Marilyn Monroe

In 2006, PBS aired a Marilyn Monroe tribute entitled Marilyn Monroe: Still Life (dir. Gail Levin), which featured American feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who, in her 1986 essay 'The Woman Who Will Not Die', wrote that,

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the death of a minor American actress named Marilyn Monroe [...] If you add her years of movie stardom to the years since her death, Marilyn Monroe has been a part of our lives and imaginations for nearly four decades. That's a very long time for one celebrity to survive in a throwaway culture [...] As I write this, she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities.

More recently, University of Southern California Professor Emerita Lois W. Banner, author of MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe (2010) as well as Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (2012), wrote an opinion piece in the 5 August 2012 edition of the Los Angeles Times, which marked the 50th anniversary of Marilyn's death:

Why is Marilyn Monroe still an American icon 50 years after her death? She is end-lessly analyzed in films and biographies; her image appears on T-shirts and posters; her popularity is reflected in the 52,000 Marilyn-related items for sale on EBay. My USC students, fixated on contemporary pop culture, know little about 1950s Hollywood stars, except for Monroe. Like everyone else, they puzzle over her death, respond to her beauty, and recognize her paradoxes: the ur-blond child-woman, the virgin-whore of the Western imagination.

Although it might be hard to explain why, it is rather easy to observe that Marilyn's figure is still as effervescent and inspiring as it has ever been, even more than half a century after her death. In a culture where celebrities are 'the flavour of the week'-they quickly gain exposure, become over-exposed and fade away – Marilyn seems to be more popular than ever, and interest in her persona has only increased. She is often featured in an array of mass media productions, from television shows like NBC's Smash (Theresa Rebeck, 2012-13) and its 'duelling Marilyns' – as the press referred to Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) and Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee), the show's characters competing to play Marilyn in a Broadway musical based on her life – to Michelle Williams's lauded and award-winning portrayal of the star in the film My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011), to countless books about her life [Editor's note: see the chapters elsewhere in this volume about Smash and My Week with Marilyn]. The test of time has proven that Marilyn Monroe is a lasting cultural icon as the quintessential sex symbol and pop culture motif.

Indeed, Marilyn remains avibrant presence in the world's collective memory to this day. However, what does she truly represent? While alive, Monroe longed to be seen as a serious actress, but she struggled with the reality that many people only saw her as a sex symbol. One of her famous quotes describes her thoughts on this matter: 'Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work.'

While she was indeed a successful and highly recognized actress, it seems she felt that her on-screen roles did not match her off-screen strength and individuality. Although she often played the stereotypical dumb blonde in comedy films, she ultimately wanted to be accepted as a serious artist, taking steps like moving to New York so she could participate in classes on the Method, a highly disciplined acting technique based on the great Russian director Constantin Stanislavski. In her final interview, Marilyn pleaded: 'Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe. I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one [...] I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity.'

Although biographies state that Marilyn herself never managed to change the public's perception of her while she was alive, she now has many fans that defend both her on-screen and off-screen personalities with incredible fervour, which piqued our curiosity. We wanted to find out if these fans have managed to do the very thing that Marilyn could not accomplish during her lifetime: are they indeed turning Marilyn's iconic sex symbol image into that of a serious actress? In order to answer this question, we decided to take a look at the 'Marilyn Monroe' videos posted on YouTube. More specifically, we wanted to see what Marilyn-related content is being produced and reproduced these days, and equally as important, what that means for the star's time-honoured iconic image.

YouTube is the perfect social media platform to use in addressing such a socially complex query. Not only is it currently the third most visited site in the world (coming in just after Facebook and Google), but this social media-based website seriously gives way to a growing bottom-up, user-generated approach to creating stardom, since it is guided by 'prosumption' – a word used to describe the users' role in social media platforms by combining 'production' and 'consumption'. On the other hand, it still incorporates the long-standing Hollywood star system. In this newer and visual space, Hollywood idols reclaim their status as timeless icons that are found, re-found, reintroduced and re-created within this cluster of participant-led content.

Like Marilyn Monroe herself, the YouTube platform came from left field, unexpected but explosive, and, like the beloved actress that demanded and gained attention from people all over the world, this social media tool we have all come to know – and in many ways, depend upon – has requested and received participation from all kinds of people.

It has become truly significant in the way we communicate in our society. Within this organized chaos that is actually video sharing led by prosumers, we dig for the standing of our beloved Hollywood star in our collective memory.

Collective memory is a shared pool of information held in the memories of a group. In the 2011 article 'Collective Memory and Video-sharing in the Internet', Segah Sak explains that collective memory can be described as based upon the following six premises:

1. Processual, because it is 'a transforming, unfolding and changing process'

2. Unpredictable, for it does not follow a linear or rational logic

3. Partial, as it engages a range of fragments from diverse histories

4. Usable, since it can facilitate the connections that are necessary for the production of meanings

5. Particular and universal, considering that it can characterize both a particular past occurrence for a specific group and a universal connotation for another

6. Material, as it exists out in the world, and not only in our minds

In fact, communication scholars have been exploring the relationship between the Internet in general – and YouTube in particular – and collective memory for some time now. In an essay published in the 2011 book Navigating Landscapes of Mediated Memory, Valentina Gueorguieva explains how 'collective memory' becomes 'online collective memory' when paired with the Internet (and especially with YouTube). In new media, memory is constructed in a process of meaning-making while searching, selecting and rearranging parts, which is a process where the user is guided by his or her emotions. If memory is a way to conserve history, digital media not only puts forward new potential for preserving and representing the past, but also, at the same time, it lets the individual express creativity and expressivity in their own interpretations and remixes of historical records, which are then shared with not only friends but possibly many anonymous fellow users. This is the defining characteristic of new media: the Internet (and more specifically, YouTube) permits a more democratic prosumer approach that combines official discourses and mediated memory-making. The author also reminds us that 'we no longer watch film or TV, we watch databases'. In this context, YouTube becomes an archive of information that the user manipulates based on the database: he or she can search, view, navigate, comment, create lists or add content, appropriate and remix digital material into new compilations.

In other words, collective memory refers to the shared knowledge and perceptions of any group of people, and online collective memory adds on the contemporary context created by the Internet. In our study, these concepts create a bridge between the user-generated videos posted on YouTube and representations of Marilyn Monroe. After all, we intend to find out whether the actress's overall image is shifting in the public eye (which would be mirrored in the YouTube videos shared by the prosumers), and, consequently, collective memory.

Therefore, in order to approach these concepts in a more concrete manner, we decided to focus on Monroe's presence on YouTube. The pop icon and quintessential sex symbol was an obvious choice for a case study, since her stardom has carried over for decades and her image is consequently firmly cemented in collective memory. As a result, our research question became: do YouTube representations of Marilyn Monroe play into or move away from the Hollywood narratives in which she was originally placed?

The next step was, then, to perform a simple YouTube search for 'Marilyn Monroe'. As an anonymous user (as in 'not logged in'), we set the language to 'English (US)' and picked 'Worldwide' on the location menu as well as turned off the safety system. The results were ordered by relevance.

Under these parameters, 70 per cent of the videos brought forward consisted in simple repostings of movie scenes from Marilyn Monroe's film career such as Marilyn's performance of the song 'I Wanna Be Loved by You' (Herbert Stothart and Bert Kalmar, 1928) in the movie Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder, 1959), an unmistakable favourite (repeated three times in the twenty videos, with 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' [Jule Styne and Leo Robin, 1949] from Howard Hawks's 1953 film Gentlemen Prefer Blondes as a close second); footage of the actress herself (her iconic rendition of 'Happy Birthday Mr. President' appeared three times in the sample, although from different angles), or diverse parts of the 2001 television documentary entitled Marilyn: The Final Days (dir. Patty Ivins), which means that, on this website, original presentations of the actress take precedence over user-generated representations. Since our initial intentions were to analyse how the performer is recaptured in the YouTube canon by its users, we decided to add an extra filter we called 'variation'. Therefore, we excluded videos that showed solely material performed by Marilyn Monroe herself, including scenes from movies, performances, and tribute- like photomontages set to one of her songs.

As a result, the data collection was performed again, and we created a new sample of twenty videos, gathered in the last week of April 2012. The videos were analysed on the basis of:

• Basic Video Data: recording each video's metadata, namely, title, date posted, total views, number of comments, likes and dislikes, category and tags

• User Info/Posting Context: looking at the user's declared country and age

• Audio: whether the video's audio was exclusively a song or spoken language, or was composed of a mix of the two

• Production Quality: establishing if the content was generated by the user (or, better yet, prosumer) or a simple copy of a professionally created production

• Original Content: we registered if and how Marilyn herself was present in the video, i.e. in a visual manner (moving or still image), in an audible manner (through her voice, either in a song or a dialogue), both or none

• Reference: if Marilyn herself was not part of the video, how did the piece convey the actress? The options were through visual elements (clothing, accessories, blonde hair, mole, make-up, among others), by name, or in another unpredicted manner

Overall, we found that Marilyn Monroe is still a very relevant pop culture icon, with a constant presence in collective memory. This idea is supported by the reality that 95 per cent of the videos were posted in the last six months (as of 2012), and the films were rather popular, averaging 265,645 views, 3,562 comments, 4,039 likes and 374 dislikes per item.

These results go hand in hand with the fact that 65 per cent of the videos were professionally produced for a variety of media, and, therefore, mainstream. They included music industry productions such as two songs by contemporary artists Nicki Minaj and Brianna Perry, which are not only named after Marilyn Monroe but also mention the actress in the lyrics, and an 'Epic Rap Battles of History'episode centred on a showdown between Cleopatra and Marilyn Monroe; several re-imaginations of Marilyn and/or her movies previously aired on television such as NBC's Smash musical numbers and episode previews, Blake Lively's re-creation of 'Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend' for the CW series Gossip Girl (Josh Saf ran, 2007-12); interviews with actresses such as Michelle Williams who took on the role of Marilyn along with Broadway.com's piece about Smash actress Megan Hilty incarnating Marilyn in an Encore stage production of Gentlemen Prefer Blondes; other items with Marilyn-related content, like an announcement for MAC's new line of cosmetics inspired by the famous actress; and other such tributes. Only 35 per cent of the videos were considered user-generated, and those items were mostly 'how to' tutorials, explaining how to achieve Marilyn's sexy look through a specific make-up technique or hairstyle.

The most common tags provide a good overall picture of the content portrayed in the videos, since many words were related to the TV show Smash, including the cast's names (i.e. 'smash', 'musical', 'megan', 'hilty', 'katharine' and 'mcphee'), as well as 'michelle', 'williams', 'nicki' and 'minaj'. Other frequent words refer to appearance (i.e. 'look', 'beauty', 'cosmetics' and 'tutorial'). As a result, it is not surprising to find out that the videos were usually posted under the category of 'Entertainment', which made up 45 per cent of the sample. In addition, there was also a strong presence in the category 'How to & Style' (25 per cent).

Forty per cent of the videos analysed included 'original' content (usually pictures of Marilyn herself in the background). The other 60 per cent, which did not include 'original' Monroe material, usually relied on name-dropping, which was a more common way of referencing the beloved actress than leaning solely on her iconic look, although both methods were often used in conjunction.

Therefore, Marilyn is referred to from new spaces of production, which are based on her name and image, and her references are popular and mainstream. A lot of the content centres on taking on her persona, either professionally, through acting in movies and television shows or 'in real life', by appropriating her looks through advanced make-up skills or particular hairdos. Consequently, much of the Marilyn content refers to a gender performance she expressed wanting to break away from during her career, with a heavy focus on image, body, good looks and sex appeal.

Based on these findings, we cannot help but wonder what are the larger implications about gender inequalities in contemporary society, issues with which Marilyn herself seems to have been preoccupied? Does the similar past and current emphasis on Monroe's sexuality imply alack of progress in terms of structural inequalities since the time of her career? How so?

Moreover, we question the true relationship between the Internet (via YouTube) and collective memory. The scholarly implication that digital media is able to change and re-shape collective memory does not seem to play out as strongly as predicted. However, these are certainly the early stages of this technology, and this relationship can unquestionably progress and become more (or less) intrinsic over time. Consequently, although the Internet in general and YouTube in particular are seen as new influences on collective memory, capable of restructuring it because of its prosumer-centric approach, this case study hints at the possibility that these changes might be more punctual than expected, since Marilyn Monroe is kept in the same type of role she fulfilled while she was alive, even though she expressed an apparent desire (often reaffirmed by her fans) to move away from that. In spite of this, her public persona was so powerful that her image still holds similar values to what she represented decades ago. There are no signs (other than her and her fans' wishes) that this star be remembered differently orunderamore dynamic interpretation anytime soon.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Marilyn Monroe by Marcelline Block. Copyright © 2015 Intelect Ltd. Excerpted by permission of Intellect Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Dettagli dell?edizione

• Editore: Intellect L & D E F A E
• Data di pubblicazione: 2015
• ISBN 10: 1783202017
• ISBN 13: 9781783202010
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Lingua: Inglese
• Numero di pagine: 134
• Redattore: Block Marcelline
• Contatto del produttore: non disponibile