Coming in late, but I just finished this one. Holy crap! Ben and Sara gave this an amazing reading. Usually, I love Ben's readings but I totally lost Ben at points in the story here and heard something else. That was awesome. And Sara gave Marilyn Monroe's voice everything it needed.
Liked this very much, as I always have time for Mort Castle since reading "The Old Man And The Dead" years ago (which is about Hemingway, so he has a decided thematic interest in reinterpreting the lives of icons).
For those who didn't like that it was specifically MM, eh, well, I bet if it had been someone who was "Marilyn in everything but name", there'd be others who would be posting on "why couldn't he have just made it Marilyn Monroe and be done with it?", so six of one...
(I totally need to read that other Mort Castle story now...)
I am one of those people who would have probably complained (at least in my own head) if this had
not been Marilyn Monroe. By using her name Mort Castle's invoking quite a lot about culture, character, and our own perceptions. For me personally, it makes for a hell of a more complex and interesting story. If it had been some other unnamed actress, even
if they had alluded to it being MM (but why just wink and allude with your skirt flapping up?) I would have probably shrugged a lot of this one off. Playing with an actual icon did so much for me. (I understand YMMV.)
I thought it would have been a cheat *not* to have acknowledged the sexual element. YMMV, but that was a quintessential part of MM as icon. Needed to be done, and I didn't think it was masturbatory, but instead humanizing. I think some author who wanted to hack out a jerk-off fantasy about Marilyn Monroe would have spent less time and effort getting there. I like that Pseudopod can present stories like this that are horror, just not the type of thing people think of when they think of horror. Psychological, no external threat, the horrors of popular culture and history and the people ground up in the gears.
I agree. We're talking about a sex symbol here and it would've been a cop-out not to talk about sex. I especially liked the contrast between MM showing housewifes "You're supposed to like it" to the sex we were shown that was so disturbing.
As to the point - maybe I'm misreading (hearing), and I actually am hesitant at putting my thoughts down as a solid statement because I believe that its deliberately NOT spelled out for a number of reasons, but I believe the author's implication was that Marilyn was the victim of some form of molestation as a child, physical or mental - that's not the ultimate point, however, and I would leave the "Need"'s narration at the end to be re-examined by the listener with that thought in mind. Marilyn as pop icon, a screen that millions projected onto, but her "Need" and its origin was also part of that. The personal specific magnified out into a popular culture and finding resonances with her audience in ways not intended by her or her packagers, and what the arc of her "life story" then says to those who felt those resonances. Every person carries their secret damage, if they have some, but when one person becomes this large of a figure, their secret damage gets magnified as well, and when the root, the personal specific's life, ends in such a way, well....
The Need, at the end, has become an icon, just like Marilyn. It lives on after her, to our detriment.
Interesting. I'd take it one step further and say that The Need became the popular culture's need after Monroe died. All the daddy issues. All the feelings of abandonment and disillusion. The poor dog that got cut in half. America embraced it all. We got the assasinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK, went to Vietnam, elected Nixon and got Watergate and we channeled our fury through rock n roll and Easy Rider.
And I think you could make the argument in this story that they embraced it after Monroe's death. So, I don't know, but that's my reading of the story. (I wish Anarkey was still posting so she could tell me different, or eytanz had listened to the end so he could do the same.)
In the end, I'd say this is kind of a dirty little love letter to America of the 50s and 60s (and to some degree, maybe even the 70s), and I haven't read anything that struck me as pealing away the glistening facade of Camelot so much since James Ellroy's American Tabloid. Very well done, PP! Thanks for making me think about all this a bit.