Marilyn Monroe Effect On Society

Marilyn Monroe was a famous actress and sex icon in the 1950s and early 1960’s until she eventually took her own life in 1962. Marilyn was a deeply troubled woman with a toxic childhood who found comfort in acting. All throughout her life Marilyn has been wronged by both men and women in the industry; she was often abused, exploited, and used. People only saw her as a shallow ‘Blonde Bombshell’, failing to see Marilyn’s strengths and complexities. Even after her death she is being continuously exploited for profit, which not only has a negative effect on her reputation, but also can seriously affect female audiences. Norma Jeane, aka Marilyn Monroe, was born in 1926 and was raised by her paranoid schizophrenic single mother, Gladys Pearl

It was in a foster home, around “age 8, that she was sexually abused for the first time” (Getlen 2018). In 10th grade, she was married off to a 20 year old Jim Dougherty, beginning her life as a sexual being. As Norma Jeane’s popularity grew, her childhood trauma was never far away. In 1956, she legally changed her name to Marilyn Monroe because she associated her old name with “her troubled childhood and the feelings of abandonment and neglect” (Tyler 2022). But, no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t outrun her past, having many relationships end because her “sexual history stained all the good [they] saw in her” (Getlen 2018). All she wanted to do was live her life happily and full of love, but men in Hollywood constantly threw hurdles to stop her. Marilyn Monroe performed in 29 films throughout her life, but not once did she ever win an award. She watched as her male co-stars like Jack Lemmon were nominated for best actor in one of Marilyn’s most famous films, Some Like It Hot, while she was only recognized “not [by] her talent, but her looks,”(Kilday 2022). People fail to realize that Marilyn Monroe is both a performer and a persona; her life was

The film followed Marilyn Monroe through the many hardships she had faced in order to shine a light on the objectification of Marilyn. However, when trying to accomplish this, Dominik fell flat. The film ONLY showed Marilyn’s hardships, portraying her as a damsel in distress, rather than an actual three dimensional character. Blonde doesn’t just show us how Monroe was objectified; it “dares to play a role in that process” (Kohn 2022). The novel which the film is based on is a work of fiction, but the adaptation presents itself as a non fiction biopic. Many scenes from the movie were shown as fact, including multiple abortion scenes containing talking fetuses, while in reality Marilyn Monroe was only alleged to have abortions, there is no real evidence of that occurring. The talking fetus called Baby was meant to be a metaphor for Marilyn’s need to heal herself from the childhood she had, but the tone turned sinister when Baby started begging her not to hurt it. This was a very gross representation of abortion that “weaponizes Monroe’s guilt and sadness” in order to whittle her down to the point where she is “solely defined by the abuses she suffered at the hands of men” (Abdulbaki 2022). In an interview with Andrew Dominik, he stated that he believes that Marilyn “wanted to destroy her life,” without stopping to consider what pushed