Hollywood stardom has a tendency to create dream images, reminiscent of mythical archetypes, which trigger a mechanism of identification in the viewer: an actor or director may permanently embody these repetitive models, finding themselves at odds with the production system if they wish to break away from them, if not prevented from this ‘disidentification’ altogether. John Wayne and Humphrey Bogart, for example, are embodiments of the hero type, while others may correspond to the cliché of the villain, the naive girl, the giving mother, or the ravenous Femme fatale. In many cases, such figures are updated versions of those found in fairy tales and myths, and have a great capacity to stoke the collective unconscious. These dream images obviously also have historical significance and express desires, repressions or fears that condition the imagination when re-proposed. The icon of Marilyn appeared as an apotheosis of Beauty, devoid of complexity and, in essence, totally reassuring – in her lack of spirit – for the fears and imagination of the patriarchal male of the 1950s.

If, to use Carl Gustav Jung’s terms, this was the mask that the spirit of the times placed on Marilyn’s face, her persona, her deep spirit stood in stark contrast, a contradiction so violent it corroded her life instinct and led the death instinct to prevail. What interests us about her today is not only and not so much the sociological and psychological significance of the mask she was called upon to wear, but rather her desperate rebellion against the patriarchal power that had sought to create her: over time, the stereotype has been almost completely reversed, and Marilyn has come to represent a generation of women rebelling against the oppression they were destined to suffer, at the risk, however, of becoming the icon of the victim or scapegoat of the entertainment industry. There is nothing wrong with this, as long as the individual and specific qualities of her persona, and the shadow that accompanied it, are not lost. We will therefore consider these three aspects of Marilyn’s persona: the show business mask she wore, the life and sensitivity behind it (her ‘face’), and the shadow that ultimately destroyed her life. To this end, we will make extensive use of the actress’s own handwritten notes,¹ as she was aware, at least to some extent, of her destiny.

Let’s start with the Mask. As I have noted more extensively elsewhere,² the society of spectacle in which we live produces a systematic inversion of the imaginary and the real: ghosts and simulacra replace corporeality and materiality as much as possible and function, to use Lacan’s terminology, as objets petit a, fetishes endowed with auratic, magical power, destined to ward off any feeling of lack or emptiness, promising unlimited and complete enjoyment, yet always disappointing. In this sense, the spectacular stereotype of Marilyn has superimposed an immaterial ghost of happiness onto her real person and living body; the denial and sacrifice that this vampiric process inflicts on the soul and body of those who suffer it must themselves be denied and concealed, so that only the final fascination remains, destined to elicit the viewer’s identification: the icon of Marilyn is similar to Hoffmann’s perfect doll that arouses the perverse passion of the protagonist with its enchanted beauty and which is ultimately revealed to be an automaton, the product of a sophisticated mechanism.³ As in this story, the machinations of spectacular cinema remain hidden and unconscious, so that spectrality can assert its unchallenged dominance.

The spectacular image is a reversal of the real world: it must be all the more perfect, uncontaminated and shadowless, the more radical the emptiness or meaninglessness of the symbolic order it is meant to compensate for. The artificial and mechanically constructed positivity of a simulacrum must replace weakened and numbed life. The imaginary exhibition is all the more obsessive the more that immateriality and abstraction prevail in reality, and real bodies and desire for them evaporate. Ghosts are privileged objects of libido and must quell the unease caused by the crisis of experience and real bodily, sexual and emotional relationships, exerting a seductive force that makes loneliness tolerable. This gives rise to a collective imagination that seeks not so much as to embellish reality as to replace it with a general and widespread aestheticisation: ‘Where the real world is transformed into mere images, mere images become real beings, and the efficient motivations of hypnotic behaviour.’⁴

The spectacular icon of Marilyn has been endowed with a similar phantasmal power: and I am not referring so much to the films in which she starred, often directed by renowned filmmakers and sometimes imbued with irony and criticism, but to everything surrounding the films, to the construction of her public persona, of the myth that was to overlap with her real self in every aspect of her life. However, this construction is inevitably linked to a traumatic split in the psyche:

We find dramatic evidence of this split between the mask and the person in Fragments. Poems, Intimate Notes, Letters, written by Marilyn and found after her death, about which Tabucchi wrote in his preface to the Italian translation: ‘Marilyn is perfectly aware of being a myth (or a new myth) and at the same time questions its meaning’. In an undated poem, we read:

What are these two directions, these two divergent paths? Perhaps the first leads outward, in the construction of the mythical and public image, and the other inward, toward the soul, in the profound understanding of oneself; the two paths stand at odds with one another and place her in an intolerable and unsustainable limbo, a state of unceasing vertigo. Marilyn knows that she has both fragility and strength within her, like a spider’s web, fragile yet capable of resistance. She knows she has wonderful colours of unexpressed possibilities within her, but it is difficult to make them blossom because a deception prevents her from truly fulfilling herself. What deception is this? We can assume it refers to those who superimposed her external existence on her internal one, the surface of her mythical image over the depth of her person.

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