Date: Tue, 1 Aug 1995 12:16:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Louis N Proyect <lnp3-AT-columbia.edu>
Subject: "Deconstructing" Marilyn Monroe?


Louis Proyect:
Is the bloom fading from the postmodernist rose?

Some paragraphs from Michiko Kakutani's review of "American 
Monroe: The Making of a Body Politic", by S. Paige Baty in today's 
NY Times:

"Pretentious, solipsistic and utterly devoid of humor and common 
sense, "American Monroe" embodies much of what is wrong with 
academic writing today. Ms. Baty, an assistant professor of politics 
and women's studies at Williams College, draws heavily on the 
theorizing of Foucault and Derrida, and she has managed to produce a 
virtually unreadable book that tries to deconstruct Marilyn Monroe and 
her fame. Or, as the author puts it, her goal is 'to interpret and 
genealogically track some of the ways of being and knowing expressed 
through mass-mediated rememberings of Marilyn Monroe.'"

"As far as Ms. Baty is concerned, every aspect of Monroe's life can be 
debunked or deconstructed. The actress's dysfunctional family 
history('her mother was diagnosed as a paranoid schizophrenic, as was 
her grandmother, and she herself suffered mental illnesses throughout 
her life') becomes a mirror of American society's fragmentation and 
'cultural schizophrenia,' while her suicide becomes 'perhaps one of the 
strongest elements in the opening up of her possibilities as a 
representative character.'

Such 'readings' of Monroe completely ignore the reality of her life and 
art, never mind such unfashionable, humanistic concepts as emotions. 
Indeed, Ms. Baty has succeeded through this book in furthering the 
'commodification' of Marilyn Monroe. By using the latest tools of 
deconstruction and gender studies, she has done her best to turn a 
human being into a bloodless text, an object, a toy for pompous 
academics."




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