From the much-imitated Diamonds Are a Girl’s Best Friend routine and the white dress billowing over a subway grate, to entertaining the US troops in Korea and JFK’s Happy Birthday, there are few people who could claim to be unaware of Marilyn Monroe’s legacy. But Reframed: Marilyn Monroe suggests that, actually, you might not know cinema’s greatest icon quite as well as you think. If you look closer, examine all the details and hold them up to a different light, these fragments might just tell another story.
That’s the premise of this thoughtful and analytical four-part documentary, which first appeared in the US last year, to coincide with the 60th anniversary of Monroe’s death at 36. It puts forward alternative versions and interpretations of what we think we know about her life and career. Was she the blond bombshell, the tragic victim, the passive, exploited young starlet chewed up and spat out by the Hollywood machine? Or was she an intellectual, a woman ahead of her time, a pioneering power broker when female stars had little power to barter with?
Its reframing act is persuasive and compelling. Jessica Chastain narrates, and all of the contributors and talking heads are female, which is notable, and in turn suggests that this is far more of a rarity than it should be. It’s a strong lineup, too, stuffed with film critics and academics such as Bonnie Greer and Susie Orbach, contemporary performers Mira Sorvino and Amber Tamblyn, and Hollywood’s Joan Collins and Ellen Burstyn, who, like Monroe, navigated the studio system at a time when women were considered commodities. (Collins remembers being moved around a set, referred to only as “the girl”.)
The first two episodes deal with Monroe’s early life and her rise to fame, ending with her divorce from the baseball star Joe DiMaggio. It is a history of Hollywood, sexuality and the entertainment business in the first half of the 20th century – particularly as it pertained to young women – and it highlights the older male studio bosses who held power and ran the show. What first stands out is how tenacious Monroe was as a very young woman, and how many rejections and knockbacks she endured. Her successes were hard-won, and the contributors here talk of strategising, of carefully made bold decisions, and of an image constructed, as Greer suggests, in the “machinery of womanhood”.
This machinery was forged in a system run entirely by men. We hear of the studio boss who claimed he simply couldn’t see that Monroe was a star, until good business sense eventually dictated that he had to. He kept casting her in light, fluffy, sexy and funny roles that she felt stereotyped her and wasted her abilities. Though she faced rejections, she was also capable of doling them out. When head of Columbia Pictures Harry Cohn suggested she might like to spend some time on his yacht – the euphemism was clear – she asked if his wife would be joining them. Her contract with the studio was not renewed.
The documentary often refers to Monroe’s modernity. In 1953, she co-authored an article about her experiences with predatory men, called Wolves I Have Known. It feels far beyond its time. Later, when the nude photographs she posed for as a struggling young star began to do the rounds, she decided to “own” it, as we might say now, admitting that it was her in the pictures, and that she posed for the photographer because she had no money to pay her rent. “What are you gonna do, if she’s not showing any shame?” asks Burstyn, sagely.
Reframed shares some qualities with the “we’re sorry” school of contrite documentaries that take a (usually deceased) star and expose their unfair treatment at the hands of a vicious tabloid press, for example. But this takes a much more academic approach, and as a result it seems less sentimental and more intellectually robust. It argues that Monroe had a fierce and largely ignored intellect (there is that famous photograph of her reading Ulysses), so it seems appropriate. It isn’t dry with it, either. A discussion about her working in a bomb factory during the second world war effort has fun with the connection between bombs and bombshells (“explosive sexuality”).
The idea of Monroe as a “perpetual victim”, as the critic and author Molly Haskell puts it, crumbles as the documentary progresses. It doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of her life, though it doesn’t linger on them, either; rather, it wrestles with questions of commodification, sexiness, power, image and even pay disparity. “I can be smart when it’s important,” Monroe famously said, playing Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. “But most men don’t like it.”
• Reframed: Marilyn Monroe is available on BBC iPlayer
