I could tell you about the way he ate chicken curry with his hands but parsed a cupcake with a knife and fork, or the loud, actorly register of his voice across the room, or the way, during our brief exchange—the hell-or-high-water piece of him every person in that room was going to claim before he got away—he’d only pause from his uncomfortable flitting to grant eye contact when I paid him a compliment. I remember those things, as well as the view—out of the living room’s panoramic, southwesterly window bay—of what seemed to be endless harbor beyond Miss Liberty’s straining arm, and the horror I felt when a puzzled author with a blond bowl-cut approached the glass to ask if the lone child on the premises belonged to me. But beyond them is a memory of accrued and connective meaning. Beyond them is simply the sense of being engaged in a new and yet distinctly familiar way with Ethan Hawke’s face, and the felicities of time.
As a kid, probably around when I first saw that face, I nursed a secret conviction about how the perfect movie could be made. It would tell the story of a life, start to finish, only instead of makeup and lighting and showy acting, a commitment of decades would capture the effects of time. How had no one thought of imprinting the celluloid version of a story that spanned, say, thirty years with the truth by actually filming it over thirty years? It would be a life’s work, and a work shot through with life. If someone just took the time, I felt sure, by at least one measure of default it would be the greatest movie ever made.
I used to refer to myself as a nostalgic child: I mourned our kitchen garbage bin’s transition from paper to plastic as though it were the end of the belle epoque; when my father bought a new car, I took it as a personal insult to the past; and as far back as I can remember, I have been drawn to people and art beyond my lifetime’s reach. Ten was a tough birthday, as I recall; the ascent to double digits felt so total. How different, anyway, would twelve be from twenty-one, or seventy-two from twenty-seven, or thirty-three from thirty-three? Surely a person had to hit one hundred for time’s fullness to register in the same way; the rest is numerical noise.
But it’s something like learning of a movie that matches my ten-year-old specifications almost exactly, a film currently listed on IMDb as the Untitled 12-Year Project, which began shooting in 2002 and has a scheduled release date of 2015—it is finding out that this movie is being directed by Richard Linklater and counts Ethan Hawke among its cast that gives all of my early, instinctive jockeying with time and its tyrannies a kind of amber—not to say golden—glow. Like that drawing of the old lady whose nose becomes a young woman’s chin in another glance, time’s sorceries freeze under close scrutiny and flower when permitted a shift of perspective.
Had I known, had time allowed, I would have asked Ethan Hawke about the untitled twelve-year project, if only to game his attentions with another flattering word.
The Dream (Girl) Is Over
A(nother) Theory
True movie stars are born twice. The first birth follows the nativity story that has mineralized into cultural bedrock: centrifugal charm, talent, ambition, luck, and discovery combine to send a mere mortal into the sky, where she is nothing more or less than light to us. The second way is lesser known, which is its point. The second birth is also the seven hundredth, the six billionth: in individual memories and in the collective imagination, a star’s energy, once released, is endlessly refracted—orienting us to the archetypal landscape within and forming a kind of cohesive gloaming without. Celestial bodies hang in the sky for billions of years after their death; in theory light travels forever. The same is true of their fleshly namesakes, whom we recognize as uncanny not for their freakishness but their profound and utter familiarity.
What I am saying is that it is my solemn belief that I entered the world with the idea of Marilyn Monroe built into my dreaming mind, like a coiled box spring of memory beneath the mattress of consciousness. So that when I recently watched Niagara on the big screen for the first time, I knew a close-up of Marilyn’s melting-sundae face the way I know the color of my eyes and the length and shape of my fingers.
Science cannot yet back me up on this. It will come, no doubt, part of the project of reducing our every known and unknown to a matter of mitochondrial DNA. What I have for now is a story, and an attendant question: What if all of life, but especially the part of it that involves consuming art and images, is in some sense a reminder?
I have a suspiciously clear memory of being conned into accompanying my father to a literary event when I was six or seven, thirty years after the last lighting rig and negligee on the Niagara shoot was packed up and shipped home to Hollywood. Whether the con was explicit or the result of a misapprehension is in dispute, but in my memory my agreement to the outing was rooted in the promise of an assignation with Marilyn Monroe. Like many born after her death, my awareness of her is not something I can accurately source. Her presence seems innate and my response to it pure but patterned, like the vocal freestyling that precedes the shaping of language. Rather than a clear moment of introduction, my memory ends—which is to say begins—with the certain knowledge of what she represents: everything beautiful and true.
To think of such a creature alighting in London, Ontario! I put on my best dress, smoothed my hair, and hupped into the front seat of my father’s oxblood Monte Carlo, ready to be borne to the unthinkably swell part of town where the movie stars hang out.
Where we wound up was between the slanted white teeth of a university-district parking lot. I remember the sunlight pinging off the hood as I gave the car door a two-handed push, and the dawning of one of the biggest letdowns of my short-limbed life as I was piloted into a bookstore and presented at the table where a smiling Alice Munro sat between stacks of her latest story collection. Lovely and gracious despite my dejection, she was hardly the out-of-body encounter I had in mind—the sort I would have when I finally read the book Munro was signing, fifteen years later. It’s a memory whose existence suggests the violence of my disappointment.
The Serpent of the Nile
It’s probably not a coincidence that chimerical superlatives like dream girl, dreamboat, dreamy, and man/woman of my dreams are largely postcinematic. Film’s power to build and rebuild romantic ideals penetrated the core of human memory, itself a fluid and highly fungible storytelling concern. Something about the moving image spoke to the phenomenon of dreaming, even felt stolen from it, in a way that written narrative and live performance did not. So that as often as the movies infiltrated our dreams, they seemed to have emerged from some hidden place within us. From the first experiments in film its strange sympathy with the unconscious was harnessed to create archetypes—good guys and bad guys, foxes and fainting ladies—and to enshroud actresses in particular in a reptilian haze.
The effort went beyond the screen. Studio publicity departments often invented an exotic provenance to blur a star’s edges with mystique. Press materials for Theda Bara—born Theodosia Goodman in 1885, a Jewish girl from Cincinnati—insisted she was raised in the shadow of the Sphinx. If her blend of Egyptian, Italian, and French blood didn’t awe you, her name, it was pointed out, was an anagram for Arab death. Claiming otherness freed Bara to play the vamp as nakedly as she pleased. Release from the familiar also freed up viewers to imagine her as a creature who existed only on-screen and in their dreams.
Naturally a more virtuous, ethereal counterpart emerged to both complement and complete Bara’s barefoot Hottentot. In 1916, Cecil B. DeMille directed a five-reeler called The Dream Girl, launching the film career of silent star Mae Murray. That film has been lost, but recently footage surfaced of the first color screen tests: shot in 1922, they feature a wildly emotive Murray looking for all the world like an archival snippet of déjà vu. Like Bara she is a beauty of her time, with fine features, an imperious, heavy-lidded gaze, soft jaw, and a marcelled bob that undulates in the light. But there is something beyond normative beauty in every bona fide dream girl: you know her, even if you don’t.
Their Bodies, Ourselves
Nowadays, when we talk about the shape-shifting of the feminine ideal, the discussion quickly boards the bullet train to “body image,” bypassing what’s less directly quantifiable for a more straightforward destination. I’m loath to talk about the body. No: I’m loath to argue about the body. The yield is sure but limited, and never, ever late. It is, of course, and always has been all about the body. Preferred size and shape, symmetry and ratio, horsepower and shocks, spoiler and chassis—all change in striking and sometimes significant correlation with the times. Yes. But so often this observation is presented as its own argument against the current ideal, and reactionary sound bites stand in for meaningful thought about not just how she should be drawn, but what a woman, at her best, is.
The death of a Hollywood paragon like Elizabeth Taylor cues editorial hand-wringing and commentariat blowback about the streamlining of the female movie star. Men queue up to log specious, self-congratulatory elegies, ascribing vague laments for an earlier era’s voluptuousness to the bodies of the women who inhabited it. Women, meanwhile, get lost in arguments about the scourge of vanity sizing. But the body’s centrality is what sets it beside the point: Marilyn Monroe’s measurements were handed out by the same press agents hawking Theda Bara’s false passports; I knew Elizabeth Taylor’s eighteen-inch waist size before it matched my age. Because they look to our hourglass-starved eyes like more generous, “normal” shapes doesn’t make it so, nor does it retro-exempt former standards from their status as standards. There is a certain freedom in accepting their lead-fisted rule.
What Is True
More and more we deal in images at the expense of imagination. We ingest them at a pace that promotes instant judgments and insanely regimented standards. We live in viciously scrutinizing times, with the body a site of displaced moral fervor and woman pared down to her parts and posed—an ideal without an animating idea. And yet a reasonably straight line can be drawn from Bara’s Cleopatra days to the plastic-surgery makeover programs and tabloids inviting us to identify actresses by their bikini bottoms. No one point in the twentieth century—the moving-image century—is disconnected from any other. To mourn for a beauty norm of the past is to forget that we have traversed a spectrum and this is its far side.
The process by which culture-defining dreams are dreamt is unchanged: it requires time, space, and willing energy, in a collective and its individuals. If there is something to bemoan, it may be our confinement in imaginative limbo. The attention of the culture and its consumers is currently too scattered to generate something as massive and dynamic as a new ideal. We have been left to our own tastes and devices, and manage both like small media conglomerates. And they are savvy outfits too—we know too much about the mechanics of the business to fall for the same old star-making routines. Very little that is visual feels new, and this boredom breeds a certain contempt, especially with regard to images of women. A return to the enforced slowness of the serial novel produced the last decade’s fully imagined heroines: Bella Swan, Lisbeth Salander, and Katniss Everdeen. Young-adult and fantasy fiction seems to be filling a void in this regard. What began as a seemingly limitless mythmaking tool—the movies—is now one of the toughest arenas for launching an old-school archetype, the kind where it becomes impossible to tell what came first: the dream or the girl.
Just Wanting to Be Wonderful
By her own reckoning, no one dreamed harder of being a movie star than Marilyn Monroe. That longing is manifest in Niagara, Henry Hathaway’s lusty, Technicolor noir. The first and last director to cast Marilyn as a femme fatale, Hathaway captured some of the most heart-stopping images of the actress committed to film. Before the glittery musicals, bombshell photo shoots, and her diaphanous materialization on a fire escape in The Seven Year Itch, Niagara ushered Monroe deep into the cultural imagination. Hathaway’s canny direction—an almost absurdly long shot of her simply walking away in a pencil skirt and heels is astonishing, as is a ravishing close-up of her sleeping face—and the intensity of the actress’s wish to lend herself to our dreams led to the double inception of a movie star.
In one of Monroe’s many lingering entrance and exit scenes in Niagara, she’s wearing a lush, persimmon-colored sundress with sloped shoulders and a peekaboo cutout beneath the bow gathered at her bust. Jean Peters, playing the perfectly lovely earthling to Marilyn’s astral projection, and her husband (Max Showalter) are guests at the Niagara Falls motel where Marilyn and her embittered old man (Joseph Cotten) are holed up. During the first evening’s festivities the new guests watch her slither by. “Why don’t you ever get a dress like that?” Showalter complains. “Listen,” Peters replies, “for a dress like that you’ve got to start laying plans when you’re about thirteen.”
Even more striking than her wit is Peters’s shared appreciation. Marilyn was so fully the dream that it was impossible to begrudge her appeal; she didn’t need rivals or homely best friends to temper her threat. In this she is characteristic of the classical Hollywood dream girl: Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, Marlene Dietrich, Carole Lombard—all pansexual creations who stood alone. There was no argument about setting unrealistic standards because there was no question: this is pure fantasy. You might dream of looking like Greta Garbo or dancing like Ginger Rogers, but you didn’t actually expect to. At their most magical, movie stars sail past that kind of expectation—relieve us from it, really—to delve straight into the muck of our most basic ideas about what is and should be. Brigitte Bardot has spoken of the Marilyn imperative in these terms: “She always was for me what every woman—not only me—must dream to be. She was gorgeous, charming, fragile.”
The upshot of generating an ether-penetrating idea of womanhood while bound to corporality was much in Marilyn’s mind. Her moment occurred as cinema reached the final peak of its power to create fantasies out of human faces. Modern celebrities deal with different pressures—most a product of the disappearing boundaries between audiences and performers who work hard to seem “relatable,” risk-free, real. It’s tough to imagine one of them complaining, as Marilyn did, about being punished for not fulfilling the superhuman expectations an intimate hitches onto a relationship. “I’m a failure as a woman,” she said shortly before her death in 1962. “My men expect so much from me, because of the image they’ve made of me—and that I made of myself—as a sex symbol. They expect bells to ring and whistles to whistle, but my anatomy is the same as any other woman’s, and I can’t live up to it.”
Of course dreams are not meant to be met, made out with, or married. Dante required distance to dream of Beatrice, and I would no sooner encounter Cary Grant than the star of last night’s quasi-nightmare—a giant, feral squirrel that chased an old friend out of a window on her wedding day. Every former infatuee knows that the tendency to invent one’s dream lover extends beyond movie stars (or Florentine debutantes). The drive to generate and transfer affections is a basic part of the human profile. Since long before the first woman besotted the first man on the big screen, our desires have followed paths as deathless and unbroken as a blighted star’s beams, derived from and carried off to places we can never fully know. If our anointed stars serve any singular purpose, it is as both a source and a safe hub for similarly undefined longing, stored in the same cumulous server as the curious dream blueprints—all those crumbling teeth, public nudities, and dead babies—for our shared anxieties.
La-Di-Dah
The starlight generated during the first sixty years of cinema enjoyed a healthy afterglow, due in large part to classical Hollywood’s embrace of archetype and untroubled allegiance to the architecture of dreams. Still, Monroe’s popular persona—the giggling sexpot, the dumb blonde, the tragic beauty—does seem like a poor fit for the first postfeminist generation. How is it that Marilyn annexed the part of my mind concerned with what a woman could be?
Certainly by the mid-1970s the erosion of the movies’ classic dream girl had begun. The culture’s REM needle went berserk for the decade or two I spent growing u
p, and representations of women veered across the charts accordingly. In between Diane Keaton’s patriarchal shutout in The Godfather and stuttering redefinition of feminine charm in ironic, oversize menswear, we were slashed, sportified, fetishized, suited up as superheroes, and stripped down to our post–Hays Code glory. What there was little room for during those years was fantasy: the male gaze had been bagged and tagged as part of the feminist project, and to think in terms of a traditional ideal was to earn a lashing with someone’s discarded Wonderbra. In the same year that Keaton was anointed as the alpha shiksa in Annie Hall, she was martyred to the cause of sexual liberation in Looking for Mr. Goodbar. Make of it what you will that both films are set on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
My mother was of the generation of women—Keaton’s generation, as it happens—that was educated to the teeth and then sent into an unreconstructed job market. In the late 1970s, she lost interest in the life of raising children and hobby jobs and enrolled in an M.B.A. program. Before I hit the double digits the call of a corner office took her to Toronto, where she has remained ever since. I spent my preadolescence reeducating skeptical friends and neighbors about the arrangement, always careful to stipulate that her removal from our home was not the end of my parents, or my family. They would nod with sober courtesy and I would nod back, until mutual dizziness obscured the original concern. I made the proper noises and decorated the appropriate Mother’s Day cards with reassurances that she was doing the right thing for womanity, if not her daughter. My mother donned the chunky power suits, striped the blush up her cheeks, and upgraded a pair of self-gifted diamond studs with every promotion. During visits, I learned to approach her only when she was scrubbed and dressed for bed; the executive armor seemed to transform more than her skin tone. Though I genuinely admired her ambition, echoing it with a near-deranged dedication to whipping the academic ass of every kid in school, about the time that my mother realized her generation’s feminist dream, I tucked away all my Wonder Woman costumes and tuned in to a prior frequency.
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