"In a black notebook dated around 1955, Monroe tells herself to 'know reality (or things as they are ... and to have as few illusions as possible -- Train my will now.' It would not be going too far to say that Monroe surrounded herself with people who saw it as their task to rip the cover off national self-deceit. Looking back, her friend the writer Norman Rosten defined the 1950s as a time of 'cowardice on a national scale,' when 'strong citizens fell before the rhetoric of pygmies.' "Writing of what McCarthyism had done to the spirit of freedom, I.F. Stone cites these lines from Pasternak:
"The great majority of us are required to live a life of constant, systematic duplicity. Your health is bound to be affected if, day after day, you say the opposite of what you feel, if you grovel before what you dislike and rejoice at what brings you nothing but misfortune. Our nervous system isn't just a fiction, it's a part of our physical body and our soul exists in space and is inside us, like the teeth in our mouth. It can't be forever violated with impunity."There was a 'numbness' in the national air, Stone wrote. 'It's like you scream,' Monroe's character, Roslyn, says in The Misfits, 'and there's nothing coming out of your mouth, and everybody's going around: 'Hello, how are you, what a nice day' ... and you're dying."
[Again, are these not apt descriptions of the numbness and duplicity of our day?]
"American culture, Miller wrote in his memoir Timebends, had 'prised man's sexuality from his social ideals and made one the contradiction of the other' (he abandoned a play on the topic because he couldn't bear the thought of the spiritual catastrophe it foretold). 'We had come together,' he wrote of himself and Monroe, 'at a time when America was in yet another of her reactionary phases and social consciousness was a dying memory ... As usual, America was denying its pain, and remembering was out.' This is the frame of their marriage, the frame of her life. In this context, Hollywood escapism takes on a whole new gloss. Political hope fades and the unconscious of the nation goes into national receivership, with one woman above all others -- hence, I would suggest, the frenzy she provokes -- being asked to foot the bill, to make good the loss. ...
"What is being asked of Monroe? 'Sex,' Steffens said, 'was the thing.' Monroe's desire to be educated, Trilling suggested, robbed us of a 'prized illusion: that enough sexual possibility is enough everything.' Why should a woman with such sexual advantages want anything else? Precisely because she had been so poor, because there was a mental pain in her that no adulator could quite evade (as Trilling put it, the pain balanced out the ledger of her unique biological gift), Monroe pushed want to the very edge of wanting, to a form of wanting that seems to want nothing but itself. What thwarted dreams were poured into this woman's body? You don't have to be a Freudian to know that such idealisation punishes as much as it sets you free. ..."Seen in this light, Monroe's suffering becomes the tale America does not want to tell of itself: 'America was denying its pain, remembering was out' (anticipating Tony Judt, Miller sees a nation's refusal to remember and its reactionary politics as deeply linked). Only in Don't Bother to Knock (1952) and Niagara (1953) was Monroe given the chance to play a part that would expose the darker side of America, the pain it wanted to forget -- for me, they are two of her best roles. Both turn on the Second World War. In the first, she is a woman driven to murderous hallucinations by the loss of her lover shot down in a plane; in the second, she is a woman who tries to pass her husband off as war-traumatised so his murder by her lover can be staged as suicide. As if in these early films, America could without inhibition offload onto a crazy and/or murderous woman's sexuality the violence it couldn't reckon with in itself. At the end of Niagara, the woman is strangled by her husband, who has managed to survive the attempted murder by killing her lover. But I count no fewer than five earlier images where she is lying prone, asleep or in a faint, splayed out, to all intents and purposes already dead (one stage instruction describes her as lying in 'angelic peace'). It is as if the woman whose sexuality is meant to redeem the horrors of history -- the woman who is being asked to repair a nation emerging from a war it already wants to forget -- owes her nation a death. America was denying its own pain. Who paid the price? This is the classic role of the femme fatale who is always made to answer for the desire that she provokes.
"... In The Misfits, Roslyn, the character played by Monroe, speaks the truth (although 'speaks' isn't quite the right word) in a brute world of mustang hunters, lost men -- the misfits of postwar America. Only she can see that their violence is not the antidote to the nation's poison, but its restaging in the desert to which they wrongly believe they have escaped. She offers them two hundred dollars to set the mustangs free, and when Gay asks her to give him a reason to stop what he has been doing, she is enraged: 'A reason! You! Sensitive fella? So full of feelings? So sad about your wife, and crying to me about the bombs you dropped and the people you killed ... You could blow up the whole world, and all you'd ever feel is sorry for yourself!' Then as they are tying up the trapped mustangs, she runs off and shouts at them from a distance:'Man! Big man! You're only living when you can watch something die! Kill everything, that's all you want! Why don't you just kill yourselves and be happy?'"In the screenplay she screams these lines from forty yards away (Miller's directions are precise), then runs back towards them and speaks directly into Gay's face:
'You. With your god's country. Freedom! I hate you! You know everything except what it feels like to be alive.'"
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