Marilyn Monroe As A Role Model

Army photographer David Conover was taking pictures in local factories for a magazine article about women’s contribution to the war and shot a picture of Marilyn. That picture later made it’s way to the Blue Book modeling agency and they signed her. She started her modeling career as a pin up model, that way early from the beginning she became associated with sexuality. Pin ups were intended to be pinned up on walls in male-dominated areas such as gas stations or car repairs. A pin up was the wide distribution of reproduction of the hyper realistic but clearly idealized picture of scantily clad women. Her most famous poses are all semi-nude or fully nude in front of a mirror, which makes it clear, that sexuality is a main aspect of Marilyn. She always liked being watched and admired. In her famous commercial for Chanel No.5 she’s leaning over in front of a mirror, dabbing the perfume between her breasts, which could suggest the equivalence of her being a sexual product and can also be identified with the perfume. Richard Dyer once said

Her roles developed from just the sex object to eventually creating a type, ‘The Girl’ which Marilyn quickly became associated with. The roles that got her noticed by critics where roles playing sexual opportunists. She played Gold Diggers in The Asphalt Jungle, All About Eve, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry A Billionaire and in Niagara she played a sexual predator. In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes she played Lorelei Lee, which became her most famous role of a series that helped define Marilyn’s public persona. In these roles she played a woman who was selling sex, and thus she was figuratively selling sex as an actress. Carl E. Rollyson argues that: Monroe was only ‘’given credit for skillfully playing parts according to her type, and not for imaginatively exploring a type according to her talent.’’ . This statement emphasizes that she was always stuck with a role that would suit her, which was always a role where she played a sexual opportunist. In 1952 she starred in Monkey Business which’’ […] was the first to cast Marilyn in what would become her fixed type: the dumb, childish blonde innocently unaware of the havoc her sexiness cases around her. ’’ In the movie Niagara the focus of her role was this time not on her persona as the dumb blonde but more on her look, which had been carefully produced by Marilyn and her makeup artist and close friend Allan Snyder. Her most iconic role as the innocent