Television Review: “Reframed: Marilyn Monroe” — A Feminist Tribute or a Reframe-up Job?
By Daniel Gewertz
The primary interest of Reframed isn’t film history; it is revisionist social statement, and a new twist on the celebrity documentary: star bio-cum-feminist essay.
Reframed: Marilyn Monroe, a “docuseries” on CNN. Part 2 airs Sunday, January 23, 9 p.m to 11 p.m.
Starlet Marilyn Monroe — Reframed substitutes new myths for old. Photo: CNN.
The CNN “docuseries” Reframed: Marilyn Monroe lives up to its bold title in its pure ambition: It reframes Monroe’s legacy “through an all-female lens.” But it turns the trick by means of an ahistorical overlay that portrays the 20th century’s most celebrated sex-symbol as a proto-feminist commando. The woman long known as weak and lost — to quote the fond words of her onetime friend Truman Capote, “a beautiful child” — now is shown to be a cool and savvy paragon of adult strength.
At various points, Reframed substitutes new myths for old. But considering how short in years and rich in cinematic magic Marilyn’s career was, it certainly deserves another life. And 60 years after her death is a fine time for a fresh, modern view. It is only the extremity of the present-day reframing that is dubious here. The series depends heavily on the book The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe by Sarah Churchwell, a professor of American literature at the University of London. In the competitive academic market, it’s not unusual for a radical, overarching take on a well-trod subject to receive prominent attention. But if Marilyn Monroe were truly the visionary powerhouse depicted in Reframed, she would have died an old and happy Hollywood honcho.
There have been many attempts to uncover the private side of this most public of movie goddesses. Reframed isn’t one of them. Excavating Monroe’s psyche takes a back seat to slanting her image to fit a generation of young female viewers hungry for heroines. It’s a kinder, more perceptive breed of exploitation than the tabloid hysteria Monroe suffered in the ’50s, but it does distort the real woman. (Calling MM the Kim Kardarshian of her day, for example, is neither complimentary nor accurate.) The older books and documentaries emphasized Monroe’s tragic youth and lonely, insecure, ultimately drug-addled adulthood — essentially, Marilyn as victim. Reframed desires nothing less than to obliterate that image. The doc’s Marilyn is a redoubtable superwoman who, though diminished by sex-symbol status, turned it all on its head and changed the world. When there aren’t enough facts to support the thesis, the producers just rinse and repeat.
Don Murray and Marilyn Monroe in Bus Stop. Photo: Wiki Common.
In what ends up as almost a hagiography, all career triumphs are painted as courageous. When Marilyn entertains the thousands of troops in Korea, wearing a barely-there dress in cold weather, it is depicted as heroism. When she dims her hopes for a long-term studio contract by turning down an especially indelicate sexual proposition by studio head Harry Cohn, the move isn’t just gutsy, it’s a valorous act of early feminism. (The episode itself doesn’t need adorning: after being offered a long-term contract if she spent the night with Cohn on his yacht, she simply asked if Mrs. Cohn would also be aboard. Witty as well as principled, the brave remark became Hollywood lore.)
Instead of the passive sex-symbol image she once was saddled with, Reframed shows Marilyn as a woman of agency and untrammeled ambition. There is clearly much evidence to back up this reframe job. But the doc goes too far. Previous versions of the Marilyn story were overly swayed by her magic chemistry with the camera: it often appeared that she was a tractable starlet thrust into prominence by photogenic accident. Reframed intelligently shows how hard she worked, and how many stones in the road she removed along the way to fame. But it fails to give credit to the gifted (and smitten) photographers she worked with, the wise screenwriters who saw where her strengths and weaknesses lay, the canny publicists who recognized what a gold mine they had. Even the studio producers may have done the young Marilyn a favor by not asking her to create more realistic characters and stretch her brand. The doc tends to give the impression it was all Marilyn’s genius plan and execution, temporarily felled by a few villains crossing her path. It ignores the context.
I saw only the first half of the four-hour series, which aired on January 16. It concludes with a two-hour segment on January 23. I enjoyed the first hour without reservation. I view Monroe as one of the top dozen stars in Hollywood history. She was one of cinema’s most complex and unknowable personalities, and the camera loved her more than any mortal did. Marilyn Monroe inhabited the sensual while adroitly poking fun at her own image and our own sexual appetites. It is an unparalleled screen invention. (You could say Mae West preceded her, but by the time West moved from Broadway to Hollywood, she was 90 percent parody, 10 percent sex.) That she didn’t get nominated for Best Actress Oscars for Bus Stop (1956) and Some Like It Hot (1959) is criminal, proof that the Hollywood establishment was always ashamed of her despite all the money she made for them.
The first hints that there is something amiss in Reframed are purely cinematic history issues. The rundown of Monroe’s many small parts and cheesecake walk-ons from 1947 to 1950 is well documented. The famous walk-on part in Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) is shown and cogently commented on. (Her character’s line about Broadway producers was often repeated: “Why do they always look like unhappy rabbits?”) But why not even a passing mention of Marilyn’s other famous walk-on in a much-awarded 1950 movie, John Huston’s The Asphalt Jungle? And, even odder, why no reference to her first substantial part in a critically respected, top-talent film, 1952’s Monkey Business? With Howard Hawks directing and Cary Grant and Ginger Rogers at their comic heights, the film features a plum part for Monroe, close to a leading role. The fact that she plays a dumb, leered-at secretary hired specifically for her physical assets may have convinced the CNN/RAW crew to place it in the exploitative category, a film not worth mentioning. But it was a breakout role for Monroe.
The answers to these questions soon become clear. The primary interest of Reframed isn’t film history; it is revisionist social statement, and a new twist on the celebrity documentary: star bio-cum-feminist essay.
While propping up Monroe as a feminist icon is often a bit much, there are several points when the biographical info matches the claim well. Sometime after the Harry Cohn incident, Marilyn wrote, with the help of a journalist, an exposé of Hollywood’s casting couch called “Wolves I Have Known.” At first a cover story in a movie mag, it was picked up by newspapers coast to coast. Remarkably, this action, which seems both canny and scary for the ’50s, did not damage her career.
The nude calendar scandal was another undeniably fascinating episode with a feminist underpinning. A naked photo, taken in 1949, was sold to a calendar company in 1951. In ’52, the nameless model was finally recognized as Marilyn, and a press deluge followed. Her career, barely off the ground, was endangered. The studio execs wanted her to deny it was her body sprawled, with artful grace, on the red velvet. Monroe freely admitted it was her, and breezily explained to the press how she was unemployed and behind on her rent at the time. But it was her eloquent, full-throated moral defense of the nude shoot that turned it all around. “I’m not ashamed of it,” she was quoted as saying at the time. “I’ve done nothing wrong.” An audio clip from Monroe is used twice in Reframed, to fine effect. It is a rush, even in 2022, to hear her say these bold words: “We all are sexual beings, thank God.” Time Magazine — whose sister publication, Life, put her on the cover in April 1952 — simply concluded that “Marilyn believes in doing what comes naturally.” As film historian James Monaco wrote many years later about the way Monroe combined sex appeal with innocence, “Her sexuality was never seen as a threat, but as something harmless and benevolent.” (Marilyn was asked if she really had nothing on at the photo shoot. Her famous reply? “I had the radio on.”)
Marilyn Monroe — the documentary distorts and simplifies the star and the woman. Photo: CNN
This is certainly one instance when Monroe shook up the social mores of the era. But even here, the doc goes a little too far.
In 1949, Monroe was paid $50 for the photo shoot. In 1952 the bad publicity quickly came and went. Late in 1953, Hugh Hefner legally bought the photo for $500 and published it in the first issue of Playboy. Where Reframed goes overboard is when one of the talking heads lambastes Hefner, labeling him immoral for not warning Marilyn in advance of the publication date. At the time Hefner was no magazine magnate. He was a 27-year-old creating the first issue of Playboy in his kitchen for chump change. At first, he had no distribution deal. The thought that this debt-ridden nobody could even make contact with Marilyn Monroe in late 1953 — the same year she starred in both Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and How To Marry a Millionaire — is comical.
Reframed is well worth seeing. But there is a sense, by the midpoint of the four-hour documentary, that the enterprise distorts and simplifies the star and the woman. Monroe was simultaneously tenuous and brash, a victim and a goddess, loved, pitied, and lusted after. Her life tragedies and innate vulnerability made her popular with women. Her onscreen persona cast her as the delicious blonde who loved sex. By 1955, The Seven Year Itch made it clear she was the one sex siren who was neither snooty or dangerous, the perfect sexpot fantasy for shy, bumbling, unattractive men to fantasize over. In almost all her roles she was both vulnerable and a celebrant of unalloyed sexual pleasure; she was the attainable sex goddess. She was not a threat, a very good thing in an era that was so easily threatened. She is still the one and only Marilyn, a star big enough to withstand frames and reframes, myths new and old. It is simply good to see her again.
For 30 years, Daniel Gewertz wrote about music, theater and movies for the Boston Herald, among other periodicals. More recently, he’s published personal essays, taught memoir writing, and participated in the local storytelling scene. In the 1970s, at Boston University, he was best known for his Elvis Presley imitation.
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A very good analysis. Trying to turn a woman from the past into a symbol of feminism is a n unwise and anachronistic undertaking.. Well done.
Exactly.
Nice pushback! The group of woman who commented on MM’s life were guilty of misandry . They narrowly sanitized, misrepresented and misinterpreted MM’s personality and needs to meet their own hateful, chauvinistic narrative.
If NJ was alive to day she would say thank for writing this. So people do not continue perpetuating the wrong story. MM was a lesson & must stay as a lesson. She would say Amen! Not a feminist icon aside from starting her own company WITH someone else. MM happened as a form of therapy & escape. Deep down NJ wanted to be NJ & never got to be. A mother with a family & her own house & piano.
Sincerely , fan of her visual work.
Can you imagine if she became a photographer & musician?
The next time you are going to do a critical review of series, at least take the time to watch it in full! Your criticism is lacking qualities before hand and it is clearly evident! The mini series does make a clear and objective analysis looking at it from the perspective of recent times. And if photographers, reporters, directors are mentioned, many of those who do the analysis are women, film critics, actresses, the relatives of those photographers who worked with her! For 60 years since her death, many have sold the story they wanted or invented because Marilyn is not here to defend herself! If it came to my attention that in the end Darryl F. Zanuck, the Fox executive who never believed in Norma Jean, sought her out, renewed her contract and offered her a million dollars as salary! It was the lousy movie Cleopatra that ruined the study because it looks more like a catwalk with Egyptian motifs than a historical film. Norma Jean was persevering, determined, intelligent, determined and while others had mom, dad and family to lean on, she came alone, without family, an illegitimate daughter with a crazy mother admitted! and she made it. She did take it very seriously, and she succeeded! only she left too young!
The fact that I wrote this piece after only seeing the first 2 episodes is absolutely no indication that I did not care enough about the subject or rushed my judgement. After seeing the first broadcast I felt driven to propose an essay/review, and also felt it was important to get the review written, edited and online before the next episodes aired on CNN. (It appeared too late to arrange a critic’s screening of the entire project.) Admitting this as part of my piece may not have been necessary, but during my many decades in journalism, I have learned the virtues of honesty. My respect for Marilyn’s talent and career is fully evident in the piece. The only bone I had to pick was with the extreme and sometimes openly dishonest portrayal. If I had seen both nights (as I have now) the review would have been more negative, not less. There were some real whoppers in the last hour!
Interesting that the critics of the Reframed Marilyn Monroe are men. She was more than the vulnerable sex goddess.
Exactly! I scrolled up to confirm the gender of the writer of this quote:
“But if Marilyn Monroe were truly the visionary powerhouse depicted in Reframed, she would have died an old and happy Hollywood honcho.”
Sure.
The line you obviously thought was over-the-line may have been edgy, but it wasn’t lunkheaded. I know about the extreme sexism of Hollywood. And Marilyn was its victim more than possibly anyone. The line was my way to comically emphasize how ridiculously exaggerated the doc’s claims were. I like the word honcho because it can mean any kind of mover and shaker, not just “the big boss.”
Agree with every word of this. It is a totally revisionist view of Marilyn’s life, and excludes all kind of nuance or recognition of the era and other areas. This is what happens when you have an agenda – you have to omit facts that detract from this one-dimensional, single-track agenda.
Regarding setting up her production company, it wasn’t a sign of her feminism or “beating the male studio heads”. Many top stars did so in the 50s, men and women. It was a tax shelter, plus a way of putting together a package or independent production deal when the studios had lost their stranglehold on the industry.
Marilyn was no intellectual. She was naturally bright, very sensitive, who leant towards the arts. One reason she fell out with Amy Greene was because she was intimidated by her sophistication and knowledge. Marilyn had left formal education early, and her course in the early 50s in literature was largely a publicity stunt.
And Mae West reportedly said, when Marilyn became famous: “She stole my act”. Very smart comment from a smart woman.
Mae West was also a big Marilyn fan.
“[i]f Marilyn Monroe were truly the visionary powerhouse depicted in ‘Reframed’, she would have died an old and happy Hollywood honcho.” Nailed it! What was truly infuriating to me was that it was so wedded to its “all men are scum” take (ironic, as the last episode features the truly reptilian Lawrence Shiller!), it intentionally ignored Joe DiMaggio’s reentry into Monroe’s life after her divorce from Arthur Miller. Contrary to what Sarah Churchwell wants you to believe, Marilyn didn’t “somehow” get herself out of Payne Whitney — DiMaggio did. It was DiMaggio who helped her in her last two years (to the extent that she would allow him), claimed her body, and arranged her funeral. He also quit his job with a post-exchange supplier the Wednesday before her death because he had decided to ask her to remarry him. All of this was deliberately ignored. But, then again, this is CNN: when do they ever let the facts get in the way?
Interesting details about Joltin’ Joe Dimaggio! (And let’s hope he didn’t do any joltin’ with MM!) I do recall he was appreciatively chivalrous in her last, distressed years. A much nicer guy than Miller, especially considering his 1964 play “After The Fall.”
I missed the 4th episode
Hate to miss the last part after the first 3 hr build up
Where could I view the 4th episode. Is it coming to Netflix / Prime etc?
Help
With most cable connections, I think the full CNN series should be available.
Upon seeing parts 3 & 4, I felt the series grew increasingly more dishonest and extreme, and my review now seems a bit on the mild side. I’m not referring to the anti-male bias, which — however repetitive or occasionally overstated — does have a place in the doc, considering it was a feminist take on iniquitous 1950s Hollywood. I’m talking about stretching and ignoring the truth. Some of the commenters were far worse than others. The theory, for example, that Marilyn Monroe purposefully messed up take after take of “Some Like It Hot” because she didn’t like the way the scenes were panning out… is quite insane, and, I would surely hope, untrue. The great Billy Wilder was patience personified in that torturous shoot, including the famous incident where 30+ takes were needed for Marilyn to knock on a door and say “Hi. It’s me, Sugar.” As Wilder says in Volker Schlondorff’s wonderful interview film, “Billy Wilder Speaks” — ‘I didn’t have problems with Marilyn, Marilyn had problems with Marilyn.” Her Sugar ended up to be one of the most wonderful comic acting portrayals in all of Hollywood history. There is so much good to say about the magical Monroe. The doc padded that with all sorts of exaggerations, half-truths and a few all-out lies, and for that it should not be respected. Marilyn was a once-in-a-lifetime talent. What “Reframed” did was create a portrait of a saint. It claims, every step of the way, that Monroe was a film genius, a picture of perfection, who knew more about making movies than virtually everyone she worked for and with. Isn’t it enough to portray her truthfully as a brilliant comic actress who defined an age, and will live way beyond it?
Great essay, full of information and insights–and thanks, Daniel Gewertz, for the Comment in which you describe episodes 3 and 4, thus fleshing out (and reinforcing) your comments in the essay.
This series is really not about Marilyn Monroe. It is about the desperation of a group of feminists who have twisted themselves into a pretzel to try to claim a woman they have always been jealous of, and have always detested.
Quite agree with this analysis, I watched the programme last night and was dismayed to see such a distortion of the truth . Sadly, it is common practice today to change history to fit the current agenda.