Blog Draft

This is a fully written first draft for my blog. I know it still needs a lot of work in both the content and the wording, especially in the red and highlighted areas. I'm still trying to tie the Warhol piece more into Monroe's situation. Any suggestions on what to add?

What do we think of when picturing a 1950’s woman? Subservient, conservative, soft-spoken, and housewife are definitely some words that come to mind. Then there comes the picture of Marilyn Monroe, the face of the American film industry of mid twentieth century. She was youthful, voluptuous, blonde, flawless, sexy. To society, she was everything a man could dream of and everything a woman could dream to be. In some ways, she seemed to defy the typecast of the stereotypical, confined female, but at the core, she was a typical woman, exploited for her looks, objectified, and driven to madness from society’s expectations of her.

Unlike the film posters that advertise Monroe as a sex symbol, Andy Warhol’s “Marilyn Diptych,” created in the 1960’s shortly after the actress’s tragic suicide, paints a picture, both literally and figuratively, of the societal horrors that Monroe encountered. The medium of the piece is silkscreen consisting of fifty identical photos of Monroe, meant to symbolize the fact that the film industry stripped her of her unique personality and instead displayed her as a beautiful object. The first twenty-five images on the left side of the diptych are of Monroe’s “Barbie doll” face, made flawless with excessive makeup, a perfect haircut, and her signature smile. Warhol feels that she appears so falsely perfect that he transforms the photo that he copies into an image that looks painted and cartoonish. The photos on the right side are the opposite: drab, blurry, unglamorous, overexposed, just like Monroe’s private life. The left panel is how Monroe is portrayed in the media, and the right side her without the mask of perfection forced onto her face.

The Marilyn Diptych is a classic example of popular culture meeting fine art, a major characteristic of the “pop art” movement of the 1960’s. Andy Warhol’s first silkscreen paintings were of products like Campbell’s soup cans and bananas. In this piece, as well as the numerous others Warhol pieces featuring her, Marilyn Monroe is nothing more than a reproducible product off the grocery rack. The male artist chose her as a subject simply because of her beautiful, famous face that would bring his works more attention. This fact ties with the concept of male gaze and ideas of popular culture and society toward women. At the time, young women were faced with two paths onto which they could steer their lives: being a working-class housewife or a marketed sex object. Both options involved living under the expectations and eyes of a male-dominant society. Monroe experienced both of these situations during her short lifetime, and grew so overwhelmed by the physical and psychological expectations that men and society had of her that she ultimately committed suicide.

How does the Marilyn Diptych’s portrayal of Marilyn Monroe’s life connect to modern popular culture? According to Erin Johansen, an modern American feminist activist, states “Marilyn puts a face on the hardships that women have to face every day in this country - sexual abuse, unwanted pregnancy, abusive relationships, sexual objectification. I think in this way, a lot of young feminists see her as a sort of martyr for modern feminism, as a shocking example of how a woman can be torn apart by the greed, lust and coercion of the men in her life." Numerous waves of feminism since the 1960’s created new educational, political, and job opportunities for women, yet females continue to be portrayed as objects to be looked at under the male gaze and undergo male-induced atrocities. In modern media, images that showcase pieces women into pieces to advertise totally unrelated products are widespread, just as Marilyn Monroe was exploited by the film industry and artists for her face and figure. Furthermore, although the piece was not meant to have a feminist connotation by the artist, the time period and context that it was created in give it many parallels to the spark of the feminist movement. Monroe embodies the woman whose life was crushed by gender confinements and the effects of the male gaze. Her experiences, both before and after she obtained stardom, included multiple marriages, divorces, abortion, affairs, and sexual abuse, and much of this occurred due to societal expectations. These are the situations that the earliest feminists rose to overcome, and Monroe’s life circumstances and death were the final stretch of the slingshot before many women began standing up against a male-dominant society. Thus, she posthumously became a symbol of the rise of the feminist movement.

All in all, advertisements, pornography, and other forms of low culture are not the only means that portray women as objects to be gazed at. Even “high art” like the “Marilyn Diptych” takes advantage of the gender gap. Perhaps it is more than a coincidence that a die-hard feminist attempted to murder Warhol?