1. Blueprints Postmodern iconicity and the network society "What''s more American than Marilyn Monroe?" So inquires the title of a Kardashians episode that follows Kim''s preparation for the 2022 Met Gala. Fretting over dress measurements in her big beige closet and describing herself as a "shape-shifter," Kim prepares to don the nude sheath originally debuted by Marilyn in 1962 when she sang "Happy Birthday, Mr. President!" to John F. Kennedy. Of course, after the gala, public uproar across the press and social media inevitably coalesced into various hot-take factions: 1. Kim wishes she were Marilyn: "You can put lipstick on a pig but it''s still a pig. Marilyn Monroe in this dress presented the vulnerability, sexuality, and unappreciated talent that were uniquely Marilyn.
KK is a made-for-television plastic reproduction of Marilyn," a user commented on a New York Times article. 2. Won''t someone please think about the dress?: "It was so disrespectful to wear it, if she really cared about Marilyn & her legacy she would''ve just worn the replica. It''s not all on her though, whoever ok''d it gets blame too," @laura_gee13 opined on Twitter. 3. Kim''s crash diet to fit into the dress offers a dangerous precedent: "Kim Kardashian''s Met Gala Diet Stunt Is Both Outdated and Alarming," read a Glamour magazine headline by Michelle Konstantinovsky. 4. Kim is an icon, after all: "It makes perfect sense in 2022 why Kim K would be the one chosen to wear this dress.
She IS a modern day Marilyn. Incredible," tweeted @MisterPreda, voicing the minority opinion. I''m guessing that when you think of the term "American icon," Marilyn Monroe is one of the first names that comes to mind; it''s just a question of which image your hippocampus pulls up. (For me, it''s the white dress moment from The Seven Year Itch. ) Charles Casillo, author of Marilyn Monroe: The Private Life of a Public Icon and The Marilyn Diaries, tells me that an "icon" is a "person who is so celebrated that they come to represent a particular thing or field--often the era that they come to prominence in--like a music icon, movie icon, a sports icon, fashion icon, a political icon. But also, someone who has outstanding and unforgettable characteristics that label them. Like ''a sex symbol'' or ''genius,'' or a ''hero.'' " The other thing about icons is the enthusiastic emulation they inspire in others.
"Let''s face it," Casillo adds, "almost every female love goddess that has come after her has done a photo shoot or video dressed as Marilyn: Madonna, Drew Barrymore, Lindsay Lohan, Nicole Kidman, Naomi Watts, Scarlett Johansson, Miley Cyrus, Beyonce." What, exactly, does Marilyn''s image offer them? S. Paige Baty suggests an answer in American Monroe: "By virtue of her familiarity, Marilyn serves as . an instantly recognizable expression of a mood, an era, a sexuality. She allows an audience to draw from a common ground." This common ground seems to inspire biographers, documentarians, authors, and filmmakers to continually attempt to tackle Marilyn from some new angle. The most recent entry in this genre, as of this writing, is Blonde, the Netflix original adapted from Joyce Carol Oates''s impressionistic novel of the same name, which drew an accurate, albeit bleak, allegory about what it can feel like to be a woman in this world. Perceived as a posthumous assault on Marilyn''s dignity, the film was not well received, especially on the heels of Kim''s boundary-pushing stunt.
Baty adds, "Authorings of Marilyn claim to reveal the ''true'' subject, yet each new book or image will be followed by even more ''final'' rememberings. The images are not frozen in the past, but rather are often reconstructed in relationship to contemporary products, events, and icons." Kim Kardashian can be deconstructed and reconstructed according to all kinds of products, events, and icons, from her self-identification as a "Balenciaga Barbie" in an Instagram caption during a time when she was wearing hot pink all over town in the 2020s, to the 1995 O. J. Simpson trial, which many young people on Twitter claim to only know about thanks to her father''s presence, to, well, Marilyn herself--an amalgamation of semiological systems that the French theorist Roland Barthes (inspired by the Swiss structural linguist Ferdinand de Saussure) considers the foundation for myth itself. Semiotics are made up of "signs that are seemingly straightforward but that subtly communicate ideological or connotative meaning and perpetuate the dominant values of society." This book aims to identify and compile some of the semiotics Kim Kardashian has attached herself to throughout the years to become a living myth. Because her multiracial, intergenerational, blended dynasty has colonized such vast cultural ground, odds are you''re going to believe I omitted some crucial semiotics in my discussion--why isn''t there, say, a "courtroom" chapter, wherein I unpack the underpinnings of Kim''s besuited Elle Woods activist persona? Especially when, at the time of writing, the reality star and entrepreneur Kim, suddenly also an actress, has signed on to coproduce and star in a Ryan Murphy legal drama as a cutthroat divorce attorney? Or you might ask, what about Cleopatra, whose discourse-generating racial ambiguity and conversion of sexual prowess into political influence seem a worthwhile Kardashian comparison? I will say only that such omissions prove my larger point--that the Kar-Jenners, masters of contradictions, can be applied and deconstructed according to just about every aspect of American life.
Is earning an eternal legacy the unstated endgame of all pursuits of fame? The bad news for the stars on Casillo''s list is that--aside from, probably, Beyoncé--their iconic status will never approach that of the late starlet Monroe. The rest of us might get all misty-eyed about her singularity-- there''ll never be another Marilyn --but the truth is that there''ll never be another media environment quite like the one that made her: radio, film, newspapers, and some good old-fashioned razzle-dazzle (spoken with the transatlantic dialect that we hear in all media from those days, and which was in truth native to nowhere). Our collective conception of the "icon" is ever evolving as new media forms continually reformat our understanding of the world. But let''s first define what new media even is. Cambridge Dictionary says it''s "information or entertainment" delivered by way of "computers or the internet, and not by traditional methods such as television and newspapers." We live the ramifications of new media daily: There''s an overload of information online; information conveyed visually is easier to consume; we''re able to consume faster than ever; and we are frequently inundated by everyone else''s feelings and thoughts about all of it. Microsoft''s market researchers have even suggested that the attention spans of goldfish now outshine our own, which have shrunk from twelve to eight seconds since 2000 ("about when the ''mobile revolution'' began," as Time points out). This ever accelerating and expanding state of affairs affects how we think about icons because we can pull their images up on Google in seconds and skim their visual archives across websites, fan accounts, and social media conversations, and the process tends to elicit a spectrum of strong feelings: identification, nostalgia, yearning, fascination, disgust, and, sometimes, a belief that we have a better grasp of American history and culture.
Baty explains it this way: "The mass media have helped to make the representative character a common means of relaying stories and constructing histories which are easily circulated and imaged across great distances of time and space." The more representative characters put into conversation with one another, the better. As the Dress discourse swirled in the aftermath of Kim''s viral Met Gala appearance, rumors began to tide online that Britney Spears was a distant relative of Marilyn Monroe''s. Various Twitter threads and TikTok takes seemed to welcome this narrative in large part because it undermined Kim''s sartorial statement. Britney''s biography was certainly more akin to Marilyn''s: The pop star, recently liberated from an exploitative conservatorship and clearly haunted by the harms done to her by a fame she''d always been ambivalent about, is--as Marilyn was--a tragic figure. (Meanwhile, Kim''s legacy will never be defined by trauma because she willingly gives us all that we consume of her. Kim''s consent is part of the problem: It means she has a lust for fame.) As everyone worked out how they felt about the matter--some conservators spoke out against Kim''s violation of an archival piece, while Marilyn Monroe''s estate released a statement of support--those red-carpet images of Kim wearing Monroe''s dress further propagated the social media posts, the message board threads, the news headlines.
You saw the photos. Kim''s head is held high, perhaps because she knew she''d hacked new media''s defining economy--the attention economy--yet again. Plus, the feeds, the threads, the headlines, all of which had delivered the Kim content, show us what it means to be mediated . Mediation is what happens when "media," a noun, becomes a verb. Whatever we consume from social media, message boards, and the news has been mediated to us. Kim does not have tragedy in common with Marilyn. But she will share with her the legacy of having been hyper-mediated. *** In keeping with the high-tech nature of new media, many pop culture consumers.