Today's post.

Dope.

No. Not today. The Enron news comes thick and fast, and you know how LI laps this stuff up -- it is our personal financial porno, wish fulfillment that overwhelms the senses. Etc. But isn't it the better portion to resist the snares of the devil, especially when the devil comes bearing such unbearable proofs of the correctness of one's world view?

Surely our world view is not all that correct. Surely there's something diabolic going on here.

We try to diversify our little posts when we can. Actually, we had planned a post on Marilyn Monroe this week. Over the weekend, we watched the Seven Year Itch with our friend, S. We also urged her to see Some Like It Hot -- which she did. She was impressed by Jack Lemmon in the latter, and she laughed at the former, but in neither did she find Ms. Monroe the "stradivarius of sex," as Norman Mailer once pronounced that ill fated woman. Our friend S. doesn't cotton to the "flighty blond" imago -- which would put the keebosh on appreciating Marilyn.

Ourselves -- well, when I was a little boy, with a hey, ho, nonny nonny ne, I used to watch Monroe movies on Channel 17 in Atlanta, Georgia. Of course, I was learning, like any true American adolescent, to connect the hormonal dots with the help of visual aids, and she was a nice visual aid. But I like to think that even then I had a budding, so to speak, sense of what movies were about. Cinematic possibility imported into my own life, that was what they seemed to be about. You watched a movie in a theater, and the very bigness of the screen, the scale of sound and sight, guided you outside of that viewing -- it gave you a sense of how you could manipulate your own scale in the world, a sense for the action of the sensibility on the deceptively inert appearance of things. So, for example, some like it hot gave me the idea that someday I could troop around with scantily dressed chorus girls; it even made me see the girls in the seventh grade as possibly scantily dressed chorus girls, given the right circumstances. This is important -- those who lack any intuition of how fantasy can bend the world are not more careful judges of what exists, but the worst judges -- they walk through a world of locks without keys.

Yet when I watched Seven Year Itch this weekend, on S.'s tiny tv, I experienced this odd thing, this thing I've been experiencing whenever I see a film that was made more than twenty years ago -- I am more interested in the things that existed then, and their evidence in the pans and takes, than I am, really, in the content of the film. To give you a for instance -- S. and I saw The Blues Brothers a couple of weeks ago. The plot of the film was even worse than I vaguely remembered. But what moved me almost to tears was the introductory shots, which showed Chicago from the air. Guess what? Chicago, at that time, still had patches of industry. There were factory chimneys spouting smoke. Just this little factum seemed so intensely interesting to me -- filled me with such a sense of loss, and of time itself -- that I didn't really follow the rest of the movie.

The Seven Year Itch, with its lubricious/silly jokes about straying husbands, and its New York City without a/c, did not thrust its facts on me with the same force. It was an imminently theatrical film. The fact that slowly, slowly filled me with that sense of loss was more a social fact -- the existence, even in caricature, of this kind of culture, this post-war prosperity, that has been so radically altered that it doesn't really exist any more. Yes, I get my Proustian kicks watching b&w films. S., who is so much younger than me, is immune to this nostalgia.

It is one of the gifts of middle age. Alas, the term middle age is so loaded with unfortunate connotations that my readers will probably take me to be meaning something deeply ironic. I'm not being ironic. You don't really understand the past, I think, until you reach middle age. That in itself makes it worth being forty-four.

Okay, since this does seem to be vaguely about Marilyn Monroe: on the Monroe front, we found several articles, each more ridiculous than the other -- this, too, is a tradition that stems from Mailer's Monroe biography. We quite like that bio, but there's rather a disconnect between intelligence and subject in the book -- reading it is like watching a nuclear reactor being attached to a tricycle, the high tech artifice and energy of the one having little to do with the elementary mechanics of the other. The prize for the most ridiculous hommage to Marilyn surely goes to Andrew O'Hagan's St. Marilyn, an article that appeared, all moist and coldcreamed, in the London Review of Books.

O'Hagan, like every writer on Monroe, seems impelled to put his arm over her shoulder. He starts out with a rather pat, and at the same time absurd, juxtaposition of St. Theresa and Marilyn Monroe. The connection here is that both leave relics... Well, undoubtedly, there are relics of saints and there are autographs, pearls, and chattels of dead stars that end up at auctions. But sainthood is not defined by the reliquary. I imagine you could make the argument that the believer's relationship with a saint is similar to the fan's relationship to a movie star, but I think the comparison is way to broad. It ignores way too many social relationships, including the role of the church. The kind of thrill the buyer of Marilyn's letters gets is not, I think, the same thrill experienced by making a pilgrimage to Lourdes.

He then shifts into the classic therapeutic approach to M.M. Odd how you can't write about M.M. without taking a side:

"Barbara Leaming's new book adds to a sense of Monroe as someone in constant struggle with fictionality and mental illness, with the demands of men, and with an overwhelming wish to be taken seriously as an actress. Monroe's mother blamed her daughter for being born, and the child grew up with a dark memory of people screaming in the hall, of departures and uncertainties, and of men taking advantage of her loneliness and dependence."

I wonder what men taking advantage of her loneliness and dependence means. Taking advantage seems to hint at having sex. And the thought behind that, of course, is that the woman surrendering that sexual treasure is, of course, giving a pure gift -- one that takes from her, and gives nothing back. A token, in fact, that signifies conquest. Well, the idea that M.M. was a martyr to the male brute's desires, a blond Olive Oyl, is not borne out by anything M.M. said. In fact, she seemed to enjoy sex quite a bit herself. O'Hagan's wording, here, slots all too easily into the madonna/whore logic Freud explored in his Three Essays on Sexuality.

Here's O'Hagan, being particularly dim, I think, on the period around the time of the Seven Year Itch:

It was Marilyn's misfortune to think that serious acting could save her from self-doubt. In fact it only exacerbated it. The Girl, though certainly choking and limiting as a character, was something she knew about, and it remained for her a very special and individual invention. But Leaming is bigger and better than any other biographer when it comes to describing Monroe's terror in the face of Twentieth Century Fox's view of her.

In 1955, after showing America and the world how to relax about sex by allowing her skirt to blow over her head in The Seven Year Itch, Monroe ran away to New York to become somebody else. But The Girl would always follow her. She threw a press conference to reveal 'the new Monroe':Cocktails were served for about an hour as guests awaited a 'new and different' Marilyn. Shortly after six, the front door opened and Marilyn blew in like a snowdrift. She was dressed from head to toe in white. A fluttery white mink coat covered a white satin sheath with flimsy, loose spaghetti straps. She wore satin high heels and white stockings. Her long, sparkling diamond earrings were on loan from Van Cleef & Arples.

Marilyn seemed disappointed when people asked what was new about her. 'But I have changed my hair!' she protested. Her hair did seem a shade or two lighter. Asked to describe the new colour, Marilyn replied in a child's voice: 'Subdued platinum.' The crowd received Marilyn with good-natured amusement. They responded as though she were one of her comical, ditzy blonde film characters? 'I have formed my own corporation so I can play the kind of roles I want,' Marilyn announced? She declared herself tired of sex roles and vowed to do no more. 'People have scope, you know,' said Marilyn. 'They really do.'"

He doesn't seem to connect this trope -- sexy comedianne wishing to be taken seriously -- with its long tradition in Hollywood, and M.M.'s probable awareness of it -- an awareness inscribed in The Seven Year Itch. As for the "terror" of being manipulated by the Studio publicity machine ... as for 'showing the world how to relax about sex..." Well, as we said earlier, M.M. has an extraordinary effect on writers. She makes them go off the road, over the river and into the trees, crashing all the way.