Marilyn’s Dyptich: The Evolution of the Image from Pop Art to Thrash Art (to the 95th Anniversary of the Birth of the Actress)

Marilyn Monroe is already a mass culture personage. Andy Warhol created an image that removes us from the original source, on the basis of impressions associated with the life of a real person. The diptych has turned into a kind of template that can be easily filled with different meanings. The author of the article reflects on the characteristic features of this template, which is often used by contemporary artists to reproduce. The question of the citation of this diptych in the culture of the second half of the 20th century is quite well studied. But the experience of a specific kind of appropriation of this image by artists of the new millennium has already accumulated. Among them, the masters of thrash art are of particular interest: Vik Muniz and Jane Perkins. It is significant that they do not refer to the numerous photographic and film images of Marilyn Monroe. They refer specifically to the template created by Andy Warhol. They play with it, translating the substantive problems of this famous diptych into the plane of design.

Freddie Mercury

This chapter analyses and interprets the singing of Freddie Mercury. It is argued that the singer utilised four predominant voice types—powerful, gritty, sincere, exaggerated—which were defined by combinations of vocal techniques. These voice types often aligned with stylistic contexts but were also utilised to emphasise the structural dynamics of songs, such as moving from a lighter tone (e.g. sincere) to a powerful tone at the onset of a pre-chorus. Furthermore, Mercury’s deployment of these voice types in incongruous stylistic contexts (e.g. a breathy tone in a hard rock song), along with the ambiguity as to whether he possessed a ‘true’ voice, may be read as queer vocal strategies that challenge heteronormative conventions of male rock singing. It is argued that his vocal aesthetic was influenced by Liza Minnelli and Marilyn Monroe—theatrical voices—which underscores his ability to present a distinct performance identity.

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Trouble in the Mansfield/Hargitay marriage. Jayne films Panic Button in Italy in 1962, and has an affair with show-biz hanger-on Enrico Bomba. 20th Century-Fox -- bankrupted by Elizabeth Taylor's Cleopatra -- fires Jayne in July 1962. The death of Marilyn Monroe that August changes the game for all blonde sex symbols.

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In 1964, with no decent film offers, Jayne embarks on summer stock and dinner theater, starring in Bus Stop and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (both formerly Marilyn Monroe films). She falls in love with director Matt Cimber, which ends her marriage to Mickey Hargitay. Jayne and Matt marry on September 24, 1964. Jayne and Matt move to New York, abandoning the Pink Palace.In August 1964 Jayne meets the Beatles who (except for Ringo) are cruel and dismissive toward her. Jayne also promotes her delightfully silly Jayne Mansfield for President campaign ("The White House or Bust!").

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As the 1960s dawn, Jayne's career as an A-star is already waning, Fox losing interest in her; Marilyn Monroe is in the same boat. Jayne makes no films in 1960, but remains in the headlines through public appearances and TV shows. The changing 1960s fashions will be discussed here, as well as Jayne's increasing reliance on wigs and hairpieces.

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Jayne becomes an instant success with her role in Broadway's Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, and becomes the most publicized star in New York in 1955-56. She is talked-up as a successor to Marilyn Monroe (with whom Jayne attends a charity event). Jayne unleashes her publicity machine on New York.

How to see through a shoe: the fashion show sequence in How to Marry a Millionaire

This chapter analyses the fashion show sequence in How to Marry a Millionaire (Jean Negulesco, 1953). In this spectacle of sensory plenitude, which features a pair of translucent platform heels, gives objective form to the film’s overarching games of revelation. The shoes worn by Marilyn Monroe, with their versatility in function and meaning, offer a means of thinking through the shifting parameters not only of the culture of visibility in Golden-Age Hollywood, but also of the various screens on which they are viewed today.