Short description
This text explores the ways we remember Marilyn. Representations of Marilyn, Baty shows, displace neat categories of high and low culture, of public and private, male and female. The book seeks to understand Marilyn's enduring power and examines the making and remaking of popular icons.
Long description
Marilyn Monroe is alive and well in the American imagination. She is the stuff of memory, living as icon, mysterious suicide, transgressive goddess - a character that tells the story of America itself. This book explores the ways we remember Marilyn - from playing cards, books, and fan clubs, to female impersonators, political conspiracies and high art, her ubiquitous presence informs our cultural common ground. Finding in Marilyn a "representative character" of time, Baty explores some of the cultural lives she has been made to lead. We follow "the mediatrix" from the biographies by Mailer and Steinem, to the shadowy Kennedy connection, to the coroner Noguchi's obsession with the body of the dead star. Representations of Marilyn, Baty shows, displace neat categories of high and low culture, of public and private, male and female. She becomes a surface that mirrors everything it touches, a site upon which to explore the character of the postmodern condition. This book is a look at the making and remaking of icons. It explores the vocabulary of memory as it moves the reader past vistas of American political culture. It seeks to understand Marilyn's enduring power and how through our many-layered rememberings of her, we come to understand ourselves and our shared history.
Review
Baty's postmodern rendering of Monroe's ghostly presence in American culture suggests the ways that not only beauty but individuals themselves are commodified as they circulate through the mass media. . . . Baty evocatively analyzes the different modes by which the mass media remembers figures like Monroe. -- In These Times