Scrawled in Wax

So, in a recreation of Bert Stern’s now famous snaps of Marilyn Monroe, Lindsay Lohan and Stern have done a nearly identical shoot for New York Magazine – and people are pissed. Looking at the photos – both the original and new – I gotta’ say, I’m having a hard time figuring out why people are so annoyed. But one thing that seems to be driving the outrage is some sense of sacrilege: that Lohan and Stern’s attempt to make parallels between Marilyn and Lindsay are an affront to the memory of a legend. As Jason puts it, the shoot “only serves to underscore how unlike (and inferior) Lohan is compared to Monroe”. And I think I can sum up my measured, intellectual response by saying: fuck off.

It would be facile to say that Marilyn Monroe ‘was no big deal’ – that she was just an empty pinup with no cultural significance. Marilyn projected female sexuality into the public consciousness in a way that hadn’t been done before and, while there are those who would scream about this, you could argue that there’s a sort of feminism at work. Furthermore, she obviously had something – something that elicited some form of desire in almost everyone who saw her. But, to argue that Lindsay Lohan’s shoot sullies the memory of Marilyn Monroe is to miss the fact that LinLo, Britney, Paris and every other modern starlet are simply the seeds ‘Marilyn’ sewed come to fruition.

Why was Marilyn famous? For both being and becoming the “ideal woman”. How did she become this? Through the display, suggestion and allusion to her sexuality. Why are young starlets so coveted (and condemned) today? Because of the display, suggestion and allusion to their sexuality and, consequently, their desirability as ‘ideal people’, people who have the qualities and lives ‘everybody wants’. I feel it’s pertinent here to say that one of things that ‘everyone wants’, both then and now, is nice, big tits.

What is missed in the condemnation is that LinLo is simply the dream of Marilyn Monroe realised, the uneasy relationship between public desire and private self-destruction made (even more) mass-market and instantly consumable, the fantasy of innocence now too obviously fake to hold on to. When Stern says the shoot was “like visiting an old street”, you catch a glimmer of how these images work: through echo, through reflection, through refraction and through the impossibility of ever seeing behind them. It is the very scattering and diffusion of the images across time and memory – the impossibility of locking them down to a “real person”, to a being beyond the images – that deflates the criticism aimed at them. LinLo could not sully the memory of Marilyn Monroe because it already is sullied beyond repair. The images of Marilyn, far from being preserved in an age of innocence, are now simply a historical precursor to Rex’s assertion that now more than ever, fame = fucked up. And all attempts to preserve Monroe are attempts to posit the past as innocent and the present as corrupt. But whatever it is one perceives as corrupt – whether fame without talent, female objectification or the circulation of images with no connection to reality – it certainly didn’t start or end with Lindsay Lohan. And indeed, you can no longer talk about starting and ending the process – we’re already in it; and Monroe’s memory cannot be rescued or recuperated because these images are just added to the heap, to the mass of already corrupted pictures and ideas swirling out there in the cultural ether. So, Jason and others: what exactly are you so angry about?

[Addendum]: For some reason, I was angry when I wrote this. For the record though, I like kottke.org and, from what little I know from the interwebs, its author seems like a decent guy.