Timeless Stars and New Spotlights: Looking for Marilyn Monroe on Youtube

Louise Elali and Catalina Vázquez

I've never fooled anyone. I've let people fool themselves. They didn't bother to find out who and what I was. Instead they would invent a character for me. I wouldn't argue with them. They were obviously loving somebody I wasn't.

- Marilyn Monroe

In 2006, PBS aired a Marilyn Monroe tribute entitled Marilyn Monroe: Still Life (dir. Gail Levin), which featured American feminist icon Gloria Steinem, who, in her 1986 essay 'The Woman Who Will Not Die', wrote that,

It has been nearly a quarter of a century since the death of a minor American actress named Marilyn Monroe [...] If you add her years of movie stardom to the years since her death, Marilyn Monroe has been a part of our lives and imaginations for nearly four decades. That's a very long time for one celebrity to survive in a throwaway culture [...] As I write this, she is still better known than most living movie stars, most world leaders, and most television personalities.

More recently, University of Southern California Professor Emerita Lois W. Banner, author of MM-Personal: From the Private Archive of Marilyn Monroe (2010) as well as Marilyn: The Passion and the Paradox (2012), wrote an opinion piece in the 5 August 2012 edition of the Los Angeles Times, which marked the 50th anniversary of Marilyn's death:

Why is Marilyn Monroe still an American icon 50 years after her death? She is end-lessly analyzed in films and biographies; her image appears on T-shirts and posters; her popularity is reflected in the 52,000 Marilyn-related items for sale on EBay. My USC students, fixated on contemporary pop culture, know little about 1950s Hollywood stars, except for Monroe. Like everyone else, they puzzle over her death, respond to her beauty, and recognize her paradoxes: the ur-blond child-woman, the virgin-whore of the Western imagination.

Although it might be hard to explain why, it is rather easy to observe that Marilyn's figure is still as effervescent and inspiring as it has ever been, even more than half a century after her death. In a culture where celebrities are 'the flavour of the week'-they quickly gain exposure, become over-exposed and fade away – Marilyn seems to be more popular than ever, and interest in her persona has only increased. She is often featured in an array of mass media productions, from television shows like NBC's Smash (Theresa Rebeck, 2012-13) and its 'duelling Marilyns' – as the press referred to Ivy Lynn (Megan Hilty) and Karen Cartwright (Katharine McPhee), the show's characters competing to play Marilyn in a Broadway musical based on her life – to Michelle Williams's lauded and award-winning portrayal of the star in the film My Week with Marilyn (Simon Curtis, 2011), to countless books about her life [Editor's note: see the chapters elsewhere in this volume about Smash and My Week with Marilyn]. The test of time has proven that Marilyn Monroe is a lasting cultural icon as the quintessential sex symbol and pop culture motif.

Indeed, Marilyn remains avibrant presence in the world's collective memory to this day. However, what does she truly represent? While alive, Monroe longed to be seen as a serious actress, but she struggled with the reality that many people only saw her as a sex symbol. One of her famous quotes describes her thoughts on this matter: 'Some people have been unkind. If I say I want to grow as an actress, they look at my figure. If I say I want to develop, to learn my craft, they laugh. Somehow they don't expect me to be serious about my work.'

While she was indeed a successful and highly recognized actress, it seems she felt that her on-screen roles did not match her off-screen strength and individuality. Although she often played the stereotypical dumb blonde in comedy films, she ultimately wanted to be accepted as a serious artist, taking steps like moving to New York so she could participate in classes on the Method, a highly disciplined acting technique based on the great Russian director Constantin Stanislavski. In her final interview, Marilyn pleaded: 'Please don't make me a joke. End the interview with what I believe. I don't mind making jokes, but I don't want to look like one [...] I want to be an artist, an actress with integrity.'

Although biographies state that Marilyn herself never managed to change the public's perception of her while she was alive, she now has many fans that defend both her on-screen and off-screen personalities with incredible fervour, which piqued our curiosity. We wanted to find out if these fans have managed to do the very thing that Marilyn could not accomplish during her lifetime: are they indeed turning Marilyn's iconic sex symbol image into that of a serious actress? In order to answer this question, we decided to take a look at the 'Marilyn Monroe' videos posted on YouTube. More specifically, we wanted to see what Marilyn-related content is being produced and reproduced these days, and equally as important, what that means for the star's time-honoured iconic image.

YouTube is the perfect social media platform to use in addressing such a socially complex query. Not only is it currently the third most visited site in the world (coming in just after Facebook and Google), but this social media-based website seriously gives way to a growing bottom-up, user-generated approach to creating stardom, since it is guided by 'prosumption' – a word used to describe the users' role in social media platforms by combining 'production' and 'consumption'. On the other hand, it still incorporates the long-standing Hollywood star system. In this newer and visual space, Hollywood idols reclaim their status as timeless icons that are found, re-found, reintroduced and re-created within this cluster of participant-led content.

Like Marilyn Monroe herself, the YouTube platform came from left field, unexpected but explosive, and, like the beloved actress that demanded and gained attention from people all over the world, this social media tool we have all come to know – and in many ways, depend upon – has requested and received participation from all kinds of people.

It has become truly...