Still Life with Marilyn

My heart sank when I first heard reportage of the Marilyn blowjob tape. Weird, right? Why on earth would such a video make me feel, I dunno, sad? Well, to be honest, every time another one of these celebrity sex tapes surfaces, I suppose I find it a just little bit sad. I think it's kind of crappy that the American cult of celebrity is so huge that we feel we have the right to invade the private worlds of people who get famous -- in a way that makes very little sense to me. I mean, watching celebrities have sex is really not much different than watching amateur porn-- their fame doesn't confer upon them superhuman powers of eroticism, by any means. No more than it confers upon them superhuman powers of being interesting outside of the respective fields from which they generated their fame. Celebrities, in their day-to-day lives, do not particularly interest me at all, actually -- with the possible exception of David Duchovny, of course... and that's just mostly because he's an ABD English lit scholar and, godDAMNit, I would give my i-teeth to read his take on "Magic and Technology in Contemporary Poetry and Prose." Oh, man, would I! And he could bring me lemonade and let me pet his hair while I read...

Um, anyway.

Even putting aside my general disinterest in the personal lives of celebrities, I was a little surprised to find myself having much of a reaction at all to the Marilyn tape. Particularly one such reaction that seems to be stemming from some strange desire to keep her distant, starlit and pristine. Marilyn occupies an acme in the collective imagination that no one before and no one since has been able to achieve-- and I dare say none who are to come will do so either. There was something very other about her -- something ineffable. I think perhaps it's that her public persona one that could be described as The Ultimate Receiver. With her wide open eyes and her plush open mouth and her sumptuously buoyant open, open body, it's as though she was designed to take on our fantasies-- of sex goddess, of movie star, of tragic beauty, of perfect, angelic fragility. The real woman, doubtlessly, was NONE of those things. She was notoriously lousy in the sack. She was a neurotic. An addict. A frequent public puker. And she became more and more unprofessional as her addiction progressed. And open? Who really knows the hearts of women?

So, why then, would I care if she got caught on camera giving head to some mystery man? I wonder if it's because I, too, want to believe in the fantasy of her. Because I want her perfect and distant and incandescently celestial. Because I hate old movies -- the pacing, the overacting, the film quality... gak! I just can't hardly sit through them! -- but every time I catch a Marilyn film on TV I stop, transfixed. What is it about this woman? For a woman so plagued with insecurity, how is that that she occupies every ounce of her luscious flesh with such vitality? Such conviction of bodily presence? She is just lovely. And she really does seem superhumanly erotic, in even the simplest of her gestures.

And now, I just can't get my imagined version of that video out of my head. Her cotton candy head, rendered aglow in stark, contrasty black-and-white, bobbing over some miscellaneous penis. Darkened mouth O-ed up, leaving streaks of lipstick in its repetitive wake. Luminous eyes shaded with an absurd overkill of false lashes, checking upwards every so often, obsequiously solicitous: is this right? Am I doing ok?

It's just so very human. So not goddess-like. And that's OK. She had every right to be a real person. Of course she did. But I must admit, I kinda like that she still elicits a gleam of the star-struck in me. She's Marilyn. The Marilyn. That she is of the same species as me seems not quite accurate. That she could be caught on tape rutting like the rest of us feels disorienting to me.

It is so stupid that I would feel like that. I'm not prone to sycophanticism. I don't see much value in either the demonization or the perching-on-pedestals of anyone, let along perfect strangers who just happen to have caught the eye of the public.

... but she's Marilyn.