The Horizontal Walk: Marilyn Monroe, CinemaScope, and Sexuality

In The First Place

Marilyn Monroe has: too much written about her—too much sex about her. There was too much breath in her voice and there were too many drugs in her body. Too much vulnerability, too much trouble, too much exposure. She read too many books, she had too many abortions, she put too much bleach on her hair, she had too much interest in acting, too much willingness to undress, too much talent, too much tardiness, too much anxiety, too much foster home, too much JFK— — —and these days there is too much paraphernalia associated with her. Her clothes were much too tight; her house was much too messy; her life ended much too soon. Too white, too childlike, too stupid, too manipulative, too sincere. Too awkward too undulating too intelligent too pathetic too diligent too lonely too lazy too funny—too, too much.

Surely by now we all know everything about Marilyn Monroe.

Marilyn Monroe did not play any part in my adolescent infatuation with Hollywood. She was from the 1950s, a place I just missed visiting, but felt I knew too well anyway—and knew I had to avoid. If I could not love her and her excessive visibility, it was because my teenage “homosexuality” could not find itself, or any tenable refuge from itself, with her. Instead, Carole Lombard kept me company; Barbara Stanwyck was a thrill; Katharine Hepburn, above all, kept me going. Despite the fact that these women were from a more distant past, they were legible, suitable for desire and identification. Monroe was disturbing and uncanny—at once more foreign and more familiar than they. Watching her with pleasure now, I know, has something to do with the different terms of my own visibility. It has to do with how I look. ¹ It also has to do with a different understanding of her excess.

As I suggested above, this excess—the sense that everything about her is too much—is itself overdetermined and contradictory. Reconsidering her extreme visibility and currency has meant, first, acknowledging the 1950s domestic ideology that I once found it necessary actively to ignore: analyzing the excessive inscription of women in domestic space in the post-war years, and paying attention to the domestic as a conflicted site of Monroe’s excessive visibility. It is remarkable how relentlessly the discourse on this star constructs her as a site of tragic non-reproductivity and non-existent or inept domesticity, as it positions her as the incarnation of “star-ness”: hyperbolically visible, female, and sexual.

At the same time, thinking about Monroe and excess has meant foregrounding the very hyperbolic technologies that characterized Hollywood production when Monroe was becoming a star. Marilyn Monroe was known at the beginning of her stardom as “the girl with the horizontal walk,” and she has a crucial and unexamined relation to the desperate, spectacular, and emphatically horizontal wide screen process called CinemaScope. ² CinemaScope itself, moreover, must be read as an important part of the articulation of domestic space during the postwar period, despite—indeed partly because of—its status as an entertainment that could only be experienced outside the home. CinemaScope’s wide screen condenses American dreams of territorial expansion and postwar ideologies of class and domesticity, and brings their relation to cinematic space into relief. Despite her very public construction, Marilyn Monroe has most often been emphatically located in her own private story—discussed in the most reductive psychological terms. Paying attention to some of the facts and rhetoric about postwar domesticity and the advent of CinemaScope is a way to think about the economy of excess in which Monroe circulates.

In Heavenly Bodies, one of the most compelling and rigorous studies of stars and the psychological structures of fandom, Richard Dyer argues that stars’ power comes from their ability to resolve issues that we tend to understand as fundamental contradictions, such as those between public and private, collective and individual, producing and consuming, artifice and nature. Stars, he says, both write over these contradictions and make them more visible. ³ In his chapter...