Marilyn Monroe is Clown Shoes: Stop It
By Robert Patrick
Anna Karina is a touchstone of French New Wave (Nouvelle
Vague, for those of you who are brooding elitists and clerical mavens). The
slight, doe-eyed symbol of Jean-Luc Godard’s affection is forever branded in
monochrome stills as a foxy chain-smoker with the lettuce of Clara Bow.
Karina’s flippant mane was later worn by the foot herself, Uma Thurman, in
Quentin Tarantino’s jazzy, sardonic Pulp Fiction. That maintained mop of hair
Karina sported on her proud dome ensnared viewers into a celluloid bear trap.
Karina was a music box ballerina with a smoking gun and the
heart of a maimed lioness. Marlene Dietrich was steely, cool and aloof. Audrey
Hepburn was wiry, frail and steamrolled with mascara. Marilyn Monroe was an
hourglass smeared with lipstick. Karina, though, balanced her cigarette like a
baton and dusted her fingertips over sticky coffee tables.
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| You decide who wore it better. |
She was an existentialist’s muse. A woman who padded her
lungs with cigarette smoke and wore frumpy sweaters with fuzz balls. A woman
who single handedly out smoked an entire circuit of New York cocktail lounges
in the 1960s.
So why the deal with that cooing, salacious Marilyn Monroe?
Why is her porcelain mug branded onto stamps and lacquered
onto walls? Because she pursed her lips and mewed, slunk around with serpentine
abandon, and struck walls with the wingspan of her eyelashes. Maybe for her
time, if you were a hammered Charlie who used his drunken hips to play pinball
with bar stools, you would be smitten over the curled locks belonging to MM.
Today, I have no idea why teenage girls fawn over the star’s hushed whispers
and flighty, staccato speech.
Unless every seventeen year-old girl is a reincarnated JFK.
And the fact that the infinitely talented Michelle Williams
had to dumb herself down to play the vodka inundated, lolling star has me
rolling my eyes like a struck cue ball. If teenagers and twenty-somethings want
to use their short bones to claw at an actress, why not pick Myrna Loy?
Norma Shearer, who was smug and sexual rather than naïve and
crestfallen, is even a better choice. The Cliff’s Notes say that if you’re a
girl, 15-30, and like the carbonated, fuzzy-brained Marilyn Monroe, you likely
suck. You’re not a 1950s businessman with a perversely agape maw, so there is
no reason you should be pining over Norma Jean – that means you, too, Elton
John. Get your shit together.
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| Old school is foxy as fuck. |
At least the
posthumous popularity of Audrey Hepburn is generating interest in someone other
than the boggle-eyed Norma Jean. I don’t really mind when I see girls dotting
their speech with compliments for the fair-browed Hepburn (though I mentioned
her before in a semi-negative light). Sheathed in gloves, each one of Hepburn’s
hands, as if a skewed liberty scale, weighed a cigarette and a cocktail glass.
But she was still smart as a whip (ever see a blind Marilyn Monroe antagonize
Alan Arkin in a dark room? I didn’t think so).
So, my advice to you is to go meet cute with Anna Karina in
a smoke plumed 1960’s France. Go waltz with a coy Audrey in a Cary Grant
misadventure. Watch Norma Shearer clink her teeth together in searing
manipulation. Adhere to Myrna Loy’s slicked back buoyancy. Just shut the fuck
up with this Marilyn Monroe garbage.
Go fourth, young person, and understand life!
Robert Patrick has worked for The East County Herald and Alpine Sun
newspapers. He has contributed to The San Diego Reader and is currently the food
reviewer at The East County Californian. He is part of the San Diego
Film Critics Society and runs a website, far less active than the one
you're on, called cinemaspartan.com. He is also a popular sports expert
(Boston University women's ice hockey). Robert failed to make it into
the fencing portion of the Olympics this year. He instead earned gold in
forcing Tom to publish his work on this site.
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