27 February 2013

She dried off her tears, stopped believing in the realities of this ugly old world, made up her own set of rules and played by them.
If 100 percent of men in movies told her she had no talent, she decided, 100 percent of them would be wrong.

Today's Daily Quota is a review of the latest in Munroe biographies; Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox by Lois Banner.
Banner is a self-described reflection of Marilyn, thus her interest in the iconic figure, "an academic scholar, feminist biographer, and historian of gender".

The review does a great job of summarising the highs and lows point of poor Marilyn's life - doing so with the same post-feminist affection and empathy that seems to highlight her contemporary image.
A similar line of thought was adopted by former biographer Norman Mailer:

In her ambition, so Faustian, and in her ignorance of culture’s dimensions, in her liberation and her tyrannical desires, her noble democratic longings intimately contradicted by the widening pool of her narcissism (where every friend and slave must bathe), we can see the magnified mirror of ourselves, our exaggerated and now all but defeated generation, yes, she ran a reconnaissance through the Fifties, and left a message for us in her death, “Baby go Boom.”

Very elegantly put. For those of you interested in the life of Marilyn Munroe, this is an interesting article, and the biography itself is comprehensive to say the least.

READ IT HERE