Introduction

Abstract

In The Stars, the French sociologist Edgar Morin argued that, for the audience, Hollywood film stars were god-like figures, the worship of whom implied a process of spiritualisation. At the same time, however, the stars were manufactured commodities. ‘The star is a total item of merchandise,’ he wrote. ‘There is not an inch of her body, not a shred of her soul, not a memory of her life that cannot be thrown on the market’ (Morin 1960: 137). Of all the stars produced by Hollywood cinema, Marilyn Monroe was the most marketable. Originally a classically curvaceous pin-up, she was fashioned by the alchemists of 20th Century Fox into a stereotypical blonde, the dream of all returning soldiers, something that ‘Michelangelo might have carved out of candy’ (McCann 1988: 20). Although she was neither the first sex symbol nor the first dumb blonde, she became important because she was turned into an image of desirable female sexuality at the precise moment when this sort of appeal could be combined for the first time with wholesomeness and innocence. In films such as All About Eve, Niagara, How to Marry a Millionaire, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and The Seven Year Itch, all made between 1950 and 1955, her sex appeal was normalised, even if it continued to be considered ‘something to be possessed, like a mistress bought with diamonds’ (Dyer 1988: 75).