One simple reason for her life story’s endurance is the premature end of it. Personalities and narratives projected onto the screen of our imaginations are far more haunting – and far more likely to be the stuff of conspiracies and conjecture – if they have not been allowed to play themselves out to their logical or illogical ends. James Dean’s brief life is the subject of a cult, but the completed lives or such similar “outsiders” as Gary Cooper or Henry Fonda are not. Each day in the brief Camelot of John Kennedy inspires as much speculation as each year in the long New Deal of Franklin Roosevelt. The few years of Charlie “Bird” Parker’s music inspire graffiti (“Bird Lives”), but the many musical years of Duke Ellington do not.
When the past dies, there is mourning, but when the future dies, our imaginations are compelled to carry it on.
Boot in the face : Monroe as victim - Gloria Steinem [fragment]
uit:
All the available light : a Marilyn Monroe reader - Yona Zeldis McDonough (samenst.)
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