'On Marilyn Monroe' by Richard Barrios
One of the surprising motifs in Richard Barrios’ new critical biography, On Marilyn Monroe, was the continuing skepticism of studio executives. “She was,” he writes, “widely considered to be a garish and empty flash in the pan.” Instead, the flash was blinding and the after image endures 60 years after her death.
Sex appeal was nothing new in Hollywood when Monroe was first noticed in a small role as a corrupt lawyer’s mistress in The Asphalt Jungle (1950). But Monroe was outstanding among the studios’ tinsel starlets, yearning but vulnerable, a flashing amber light signaling come with care. Months later in All About Eve (1950), her template was formed. She was “the Blonde,” a persona forged, Barrios writes, “from equal parts of her own self, her intensive study and work, and sheer, pure instinct.” With her success came the copycats as Hollywood tried to recreate what Monroe molded from the wet clay of her own experience. Enter Jane Mansfield and company, truly garish and empty.
Barrios focuses on the work Monroe performed as an actor and doesn’t dwell on her personal life except as it shaped her career. Even so, On Marilyn Monroe may well be close to definitive for the author’s efforts to sift fact from legend and pause for silence when facts are unavailable. Conspiracy theories linking her death to the Kennedys, whether “real, invented, speculative, prurient, hysterical,” he writes, are “fortunately lies outside the scope of these pages.” By the time she encountered JFK and RFK, she was depressed, medicated, in conflict with studio executives.
On Marilyn Monroe’s strength is the context and critical thinking offered on her films. Barrios describes her screen finale, The Misfits (1961), as “polished yet inchoate, a European art film with old Hollywood trimmings, neither one thing nor another, less a career marker than an oddly compelling asterisk.” Many of her films fall short of classic status. He’s not afraid of calling out “a thoroughgoing dud” when he sees one but is pleased that as old gossip (and gossipers) whither into irrelevance, Monroe’s persona remains “endlessly exciting, continually generous, and inventive to a fault.”
On Marilyn Monroe is published by Oxford University Press.
