A psychiatric doctor once said, “I would have liked to treat Marilyn Monroe,” but there are so many answers for that it doesn’t seem likely. In downtown Chicago there is a building sized statue of her in her classic move, standing over a street vent with her skirt blowing up, except this time she is standing over a fountain. Apparently, it’s a traveling art exhibit, which has found its way onto the miracle mile. A business woman interviewed in a NY Times article complains that when she looks out of her 5th story office window Marilyn is blocking her view across the street. She says it’s strange to have your site stopped at Marilyn’s ass.
When writing my notes at the psychiatric hospital if I make a mistake I have to cross out the line and write “error” and my initials. I also learned that the carrot points into the sentence, not out. This doesn’t seem obvious to me. Aren’t you looking for a word that was left out? I don’t like admitting my own mistakes. I have this theory that the problem with the people here is that other people have been trying to force them to admit theirs.
The problem with Marilyn is that she killed herself and no one wants to think it’s her fault. It’s like that Godard film, or all of them, “I am evil sometimes but no one cares because I am so gorgeous,” or something. It works the same way with the statue. It’s not Marilyn’s fault that her ass is exposed, it’s our fault, for making a 3 story statue of Marilyn’s bottom. If this was the artist’s intention its kind of a nasty trick, if you ask me. First you think that the statue is scandalous and then you realize that it is. The times article took a picture of it with two children gazing up at Marilyn’s bottom from underneath. When I think about criticizing the psychiatric hospital I work for I don’t want it to be like this. It’s not fair to the people who haven’t killed themselves yet.
Besides, it’s not in style, killing yourself. What is in style is women with short hair wearing transparent button down shirts. They look kind of masculine, but also kind of French, since you can see their undersized perky breasts. I was on that look two years ago, minus the breasts, since mine are anything but perky, but now that it’s in the NY Times magazine it looks like I am no longer going to be able to flirt with the line between looking sexy and looking like a man. So I’m growing my hair long and wearing makeup and tight shirts. I’m still French, just the old fashioned kind.
The fact is, for me at least, that only way to get around not being quick is to be classic. The only way to become more feminine is to spend time with more men. Platitudes. Women will always resent you for not doing enough work. They’ll barrade you for being absent minded. They’ll tell you your breasts look saggy in your bathing suit. They’ll never read your blog. Men will lend you books and talk to you about things, or if they are talking to each other about things they won’t think its strange if you just listen. They’ll make fun of you for what you talk about with other women, though, and they still won’t hang your cabinets. It’s a cruel world.
It’s no surprise, then, that gender bending is the modern day solution to mental illness. Marilyn Monroe was just in a fix she couldn’t get out of. Being miserable didn’t make people not like her. Now people get into different sorts of fixes, like that nobody respects you because you are miserable. Ugliness, on the other hand, has never made people respect you. People in the hospital are very ugly, by definition. So it’s obvious now that the best thing for Marilyn to do would have been to masquerade as a man, a handsome man. What if the statue had been, instead of exposing the exploitative powers of a scandalous picture, Marilyn dressed as Charlie Chapin? It’s so perfectly French and Freudian. How much happier we all would have been? Schizophrenic, maybe, but happier.
