Marylin Monroe Pink Posters
January 6th, 2009 artmaster
Marilyn Monroe, Pink Art Print
She plays, from the beginning, “the girl,” defined solely by age, gender, and appealingness. In two films, she does not even have a name, Scudda Hoo! Scudda Hay! (1948) and Love Happy (1950), and in three other films, her character has no biography beyond being “the blonde,” Dangerous Years (1948), The Fireball (1950), and Right Cross (1950). Even when any information about her character is supplied, it serves to reinforce the basic anonymity of the role. For instance, when her character has a job, it is a job that, while it may be genuinely useful, like that of a secretary, is traditionally (or cinematically) thought of as being a job where the woman is on show, there for the pleasure of men. These jobs in Monroe’s early films are chorus girl in Ladies of the Chorus (1948) and Ticket to Tomahawk (1950); actress in All About Eve (1950) (the film emphasizes that the character has no talent); or secretary in 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 she is 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. The tendency to treat her as nothing more than her gender reaches its peak with The Misfits (1961), where, instead of being the “girl” from 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.
