Love, Marilyn

I want to start a new series of posts called Things that Broke My Heart (In a Kind of Good Way).

Long title, I know.

I just watched the 2012 HBO documentary Love, Marilyn. It tore me to bits.

It has actresses like Glenn Close, Elizabeth Banks, Uma Thurman, and Jennifer Ehle reading some of her very personal letters and writings that were recently found in an old storage unit while showing clips and photographs of Marilyn, set to an amazing soundtrack. I was impressed by Monroe's constant, desperate work at educating herself to become a "fine actress." Her writing is poetic, intelligent, and heartbreaking. You see how how she battles her self-doubt and depression, and how she loves herself and hates herself at the same time. She is so brave, so insecure, and so darned relatable.

To make sure we get a fair portrait of her, we also hear writings and see interviews with people who she frustrated and irritated. Laurence Olivier is particularly brutal in his opinions of her.

And I now hate Arthur Miller more than I did in high school when I had to suffer through Death of A Salesman. He comes off as a real jerk. You see the way she looks at him so adoringly, and how she prays that being loved by this Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright is an affirmation that she is someone smart and gifted and more than the blonde sexpot persona she created but got entrapped within. Miller fails her utterly.

The film makes me think a lot about what I would do if my personal diaries were real aloud like this after I was dead. I'd look like such an idiot, seeing that I've been writing the same, boring drivel about the usual boring things that all women worry over for fifteen years. But maybe if Jennifer Ehle read aloud my tirades on why I can't motivate myself to wake up early and exercise they would seem more profound than they really are.

I wonder what Marilyn would think of this documentary.

I hope she wouldn't hate us for hungrily getting into her business and eating up her words.

To me, it feels like Marilyn Monroe finally gets to show the world how serious and multifaceted she was as both an actress and a person.

I just got HBO Go and it is wonderful.

If you haven't seen Love, Marilyn, go watch it now!