Last month, at a salon in West Hollywood, Emma Cooper tattooed Marilyn Monroe’s face on the underside of her arm. The director of the new Netflix documentary “Marilyn Monroe’s Mystery: The Unheard Tapes” did not initially belong to the fans of her site, he is simply aware of the basic building blocks in the mythology of her movie star: white dress, blonde hair, beauty mark, a natural sex bomb charisma, subjected to psychological stress, ending in tragedy. “But that’s the thing about Marilyn,” Cooper said. “She’s attracted to you.”
“I didn’t think I would have her as part of my body, but you’re getting obsessed with her,” she told the Guardian. “On my first research trip to Los Angeles, I went to see her grave and visit the Academy. While in town, I met one of her biographers. They said, “Fasten up. You’re going crazy about her. ” I thought, “Of course I won’t.” Cut me on Sunset Boulevard to do this.
The ink portrait is not a caricature of these features; instead, it is tested to uncolored outlines, so minimal that we can even look at the bones of the screen idol. The instinct to remove the look and reveal the basics of the image coincides with the goal of her latest project, which prefers fact-based reporting to capturing Monroe’s brilliance. Cooper’s film joins investigative journalist Anthony Summers as he recounts highlights from his 1985 book, Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe, her timeline and accompanying insights, repackaged for the visual environment. He was the one who sold Cooper the concept, convinced that she, too, would come to see the man behind the victim’s legacy. “For me, Marilyn has always been a bit one-dimensional,” says Cooper. “By the end of this process, she would have become a much more real person to me, with more modernity as a woman than I had ever seen in her.”
In the crowded market with a biography of Monroe, Cooper and Summers separate their work, branding it with a real crime angle from leather shoes. Both the film and its source material avoid talking segments of experts or obsessives, relying on a team of Monroe collaborators, confidants and closest people. In the course of researching his book in the 1980s, Summers amassed a gold mine from audio recordings of first-hand eyewitnesses in the star’s orbit. After searching countless hours in hundreds of his tapes archived at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in Los Angeles, Cooper brought this audio to life through a lip-synchronized reenactment, using actors in costumes. “This is the last film about Marilyn Monroe, populated exclusively by people who knew her, touched her life, felt her presence, really knew what it was like to be around her,” she said.
The many points of view are combined to form a prismatic view of a highly analyzed person who is already the subject of constant public reassessment and reassessment. From the dumb blonde of the Queen’s bees in Hollywood (said her star “All About Eve” Celeste Holm: “I thought she was pretty sweet and terribly dumb and my natural reaction was” Whose girl is this? “) She was elevated to one of the best. a saint from a silver screen, a martyr from the beastly tabloid media and the devastation of addiction.
“The truth is somewhere in the middle,” Cooper said. “It’s almost always like that.” She wanted to avoid being simplistic or cold-blooded in the chronicle of a life of scandal and intrigue, and focused on the content of Monroe’s character: the intellectual curiosity of the Method student, the passionate artistry of an actor who amazed greats like Billy Wilder and John Hilder. as her talents overtook her innate charisma.
“She was a lot of things,” Cooper said. “She was traumatized and it affected her relationship, but she was not a victim. She works very hard on herself… The way she could sometimes show her vulnerability and sometimes hide it is so tempting. And we know this now as something that is strong for all women. But then we didn’t all have the freedom to explore this in ourselves, as Marilyn did.
Monroe remains a figure with such constant fascination, commanding two documentaries and a biographical film only in 2022, in part because of all that is universal for her rare circumstances. Although the spotlight shone more fiercely on her than any other celebrity of her era, Cooper and countless other modern women see an integral part of the shared experience in the great expectations that have been heaped on her. While battling depression, insecurity, and the use of barbiturates, she had no choice but to maintain a facade of perfect brilliance in her paparazzi performances. Although Cooper’s favorite Monroe movie is “Seven Years of Itch” (“I really like sending male stereotypes into this movie; Marilyn is kidding”), she believes the most telling lyrics are the photos that capture the mask of the bomb and fear. that it cannot cover completely.
Cooper is intrigued by “the way he could sometimes show his vulnerability and sometimes hide it.” Photo: Courtesy of Netflix / Netflix
“The two archival articles about her that I was obsessed with were one, when she left Payne Whitney Psychiatric Clinic as if she were the premiere of a restaurant or a movie, even though she was held for three days. Eventually, she smashed a window, saying he was the crazy person everyone expected him to be. Eventually, Joe DiMaggio pulled her out. It was the most extraordinary, terrible time. For her to come out in full makeup and hair, it looks amazing. Half of me think it was awful that she felt she had to present herself that way, and the other half was damn amazed at her ability to do it. ”
She continues: “The second is when they announce her divorce and she can’t stop the emotion from manifesting. She’s crying and it’s hard to watch. You see the immense pain of this failed relationship. Young women today can still connect with this and with her. Even 20 years ago, people would have said she was everywhere, crazy, hysterical. Now I see this and I think, “It’s just being a woman.”
For the last half hour, the film’s main source approach has been based on a careful examination of the murky circumstances surrounding Monroe’s death and the auditory relationship with famous lovers John and Robert Kennedy. A search by Summers confirmed that while conspiracy theories suggesting that overdose suicide was a secretly ordered hit were fabricated fabrications, there was indeed some gossip about the official record to avoid negative PR for the Kennedy family. This is not exactly the smoking gun the onlooker can hope for; rather, a commentary on the continuing public impulse to treat Monroe’s existence as a juicy gossip. “I’m constantly trying to find a line where we recognize the conspiracy and try to tear its threads apart,” Cooper said. “People may say there’s nothing new here, but I think this film is a useful resource.”
She hopes that others can accept her film as a starting point for deep gratitude and respect for Monroe, putting them on the same path that landed the once indifferent Cooper under the tattoo artist’s needle. It doesn’t take much to show skeptics about the substance in a woman historically valued as a lavish sobbing story, how painfully human she really was. After all, as Cooper knows all too well, our attraction has always been Marilyn’s superpower.
“Every success in this film means that the younger generation gets to know her and gets a clearer idea of her than those who came before,” Cooper said. “They can take comfort in recognizing things they’ve been through in their own lives, happening to one of the most famous people of all time. This is reassuring. I have no intention of sounding rude. “
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