During LIFE Magazine’s recent effort to digitize it’s famous photo archive, negatives were discovered of an August 1950 photo shoot with a 24-year-old Marilyn Monroe. Looking at these images from almost 60 years ago, I was left with two overriding thoughts: “What the fuck has happened to our collective idea of beauty in the past sixty years?” and “How do we get it back?”
(Hit the Arrow to Navigate Through the Slideshow…)
I’m not a Marilyn fetishist — let’s just say that I’m a Gentleman Who Never Preferred Blondes — but ferchrissakes LOOK at her! A face that hasn’t been Botoxed into paralysis — one that can show human emotions, thoughts… a personality… it’s beautiful, right?
To find a popular figure with a natural, Non-Animatronic face these days, it seems as if you have to either travel outside the borders of America or get in Doc Brown’s DeLorean and punch it until you hit 88 miles per hour.
Don’t believe me? Watch Penélope Cruz side by side with Scarlett Johansson in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Sure….there are a lot of natural, beautiful women here in the U.S.A. — but they are becoming harder to find represented in our popular culture.
Here’s my Two-Part Thesis:
- Beauty — that very faint, almost frail glow that animates a person’s features — comes from the character behind the eyes, not from the body itself. A corollary: Human character is often formed by overcoming hardship.
- Many of today’s icons are installed in our pubic consciousness through the family connections to the media that “gave them their break”, not by overcoming genuine adversity and hardship.
Americans — men and women — certainly seem spoiled when compared to their grandparents’ generation (or when compared to people from other parts of the world). Case in point: Marilyn Monroe never knew her real father, had a mentally ill mother, was put in an orphanage and shuttled between foster homes until she was 12. At 16, she married a neighbor to avoid being sent back into foster care. At 17, her husband was off fighting in the war and Marilyn got a job in a factory, spraying airplane parts with fire retardant and inspecting parachutes.
Angelina Jolie — our generation’s summa sex symbol — is certainly a more interesting person than most of her contemporaries, and has taken an Audrey Hepburn-esque approach to her fame by becoming a humanitarian ambassador (and, seemingly, a sincere one).
But…adversity?
She had a movie star for a father, was “traumatized” by having to wear second-hand clothes while attending Beverly Hills High School and, at the age of 14, rebelled by dropping out of her acting classes, wearing black clothes, dying her hair purple, and “moshing with her live-in boyfriend” (when not working as a fashion model in Los Angeles, New York and London). At 16, she wasn’t avoiding the orphanage man or working a factory job: She rented an apartment above a garage a few blocks from her mother’s home, “returned to theater studies”, and graduated from high school.
I don’t want to take anything away from Angelina — She is a lovely woman and, after all, you can’t pick your parents. But why does it seem that, despite Marilyn’s incredible childhood hardships and deprivation, her gaze seems warm and present — while Angelina Jolie has the “thousand yard stare” ?
Norma Jeane Baker from Hawthorne, California swam through a sea of poverty, abandonment, abuse, neglect, and manual labor to reach Hollywood as Marilyn Monroe — a distance far greater than the roughly 15 miles that separates the two towns.
Am I wrong on this, or did the swim through all that cold water do something good for her face?
Does experiencing genuine hardship engender pathos from our very appearance — a feeling that still makes it interesting for us to behold long after its bodily death? Is that feeling the thing that makes something beautiful?
Before you answer, here’s a final little pop quiz….Which face do you find more compelling — the “Old School” beauty or the modern one? (And, just for fun, let’s see if you can guess which face matches up with which story!):
Representing the “Old School” — Audrey Hepburn:
Representing our Modern Era — Paris Hilton:
One was abandoned by her father at the age of 6, fled to the Netherlands to avoid a German attack, adopted a pseudonym when they invaded, secretly danced for groups of people to collect money for the Dutch resistance, had to make flour out of tulip bulbs to bake cakes and biscuits during a famine, had a half-brother who spent time in a German labor camp, developed acute anemia, respiratory problems, and an edema from malnutrition. When asked to recall a moment from her childhood, she said:
I have memories. More than once I was at the station seeing trainloads of Jews being transported, seeing all these faces over the top of the wagon. I remember, very sharply, one little boy standing with his parents on the platform, very pale, very blond, wearing a coat that was much too big for him, and he stepped on to the train. I was a child observing a child.”
The Other is a beneficiary of a hotel magnate’s Billion Dollar Estate and is best known for her appearance in a sex tape in 2004, an appearance on a reality television series, a few minor film roles, and a drunk driving conviction. When asked to recall a moment from her childhood, she said:
Everyone was so excited that I was born, they would always take pictures of me… Ever since I was little, it’s what I knew I wanted to do — be a blond icon.
Your answer please — our time seems to be up.
You're right. There is real humility and depth in the eyes of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn. They seem so real and tangible, unlike many of America's pop culture icons today. Because America has just come through an era of such prosperity, we now look for absolute perfection in life and from our public figures (and with surgery, botox and Photoshop we can have it). But to me, a lot of today's faces (and much of our culture in general) feels plastic.
However, there's one woman that comes to mind as a modern beauty: Michelle Obama. She's graceful and stylish in a way that our favorite old school beauties were. She's smart, steady, and visibly loving and nurturing. She's my modern day heroine.
Michelle Obama is a great example of what I’m talking about! She actually earned what she has over many years and I think that you can see that in her presence.
Which is not to say that some of the Paris Hiltons of the world aren’t working hard but, qualitatively, it’s a different kind of work when the consequences for failure are so different.
I think the nature of the struggle shows up in our eyes. If Michelle Obama didn’t succeed, she would be struggling to take care of her family on the South Side of Chicago right now; If Paris didn’t make it…I’m not sure things would be much different for her. No wonder she looks bored!
You're right. There is real humility and depth in the eyes of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn. They seem so real and tangible, unlike many of America's pop culture icons today. Because America has just come through an era of such prosperity, we now look for absolute perfection in life and from our public figures (and with surgery, botox and Photoshop we can have it). But to me, a lot of today's faces (and much of our culture in general) feels plastic.
However, there's one woman that comes to mind as a modern beauty: Michelle Obama. She's graceful and stylish in a way that our favorite old school beauties were. She's smart, steady, and visibly loving and nurturing. She's my modern day heroine.