Beauty Archivist: Madonna vs. Blonde - Who’s Monroe Homage is Better?
On this cover of Vogue Spain 1990, under the headline ‘Superstar’, Madonna gives us a perfect rendition of one of her most iconic guises. Her hair is stiff and peaks upward, her eyeliner is winged, lips red, beauty spot in place. Her pearl white collar opens to almost her navel and around her neck she wears a truly American amount of diamonds. She is Marilyn Monroe, or rather, she is purely Madonna in her subversion of Monroe. To me this is a true deconstruction not a cosplay. If we pull apart the details there is so much text here to make this a rich and layered conversation between an icon and our cultural memory of another. A comment on fame and American culture, unlike just another of the many more exploitative Marilyn representations we are still obsessed with.
At first glance the reference is obvious, the broad strokes are so completely Monroe. Zooming in on details, we can understand where Madonna's use of her imagery diverges from pastiche, and in doing so how she creates something entirely new, with symbolic importance that most importantly doesn't feel… icky. If you suspect that I’m subtweeting the press shots of Ana de Armas in Blonde, then yes I am. More on those later.
Quick sidebar to acknowledge that Madonna has used this Marilyn guise for many years, including in some scenarios that have been more controversial, but for the purposes of this column I'm talking specifically about this 1990 photo set and its meaning at time of release.
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So! The details. Although Marilyn is famous for the contoured winged eye makeup that Madonna also wears, the difference in their structure really changes the effect. Monroe’s eyeliner peaked near the tear duct, was at its thickest before the pupil and thinned out as it extended, creating that famous eye closing, sleepy effect. Madonna’s peaks after the pupil, creating weight on the outer corner of her eye instead of on top of it, her eyes feel much more open.
Both lip shapes are very similar, the widened cupids bow curves outward into a rounded shape, focussed on width rather than height - it's a look that's very of the 50s. One interesting thing is that in all the publicity photos of Marilyn I have seen she either poses with her mouth closed or wide open, showing a gap between her teeth. Madonna poses with her lips open and teeth closed.
Madonna's bushy, archless eyebrows with their distinctive feathering at the nasal bridge are a real signature feature here and contrast hugely with Marilyn’s pointed brows, Monroe’s were plucked wider apart to widen her forehead which gives her face a much more open quality. Madonna’s hair owes as much to the New Romantics as it does to Marilyn with its hectic, stiff definition and corkscrew curls.
If it feels like I am getting unnecessarily granular here it's because I think these tiny divergences in application and pose are very much intentional and that their cumulative effect makes Madonna's imagery wildly emotionally different to Marilyn’s. Madonna wears the same face, but looks incredibly assertive, whereas Monroe’s appeal was built on the notion of her passivity. With this flip Madonna creates an image that comments on American culture and fame more abstractly - it's not even about Marilyn Monroe as an individual but the space she occupied.
The most obvious defense of the Blonde press photos is that in the movie Ana de Armas is literally representing Marilyn, making a likeness with no subversion necessary. This defense is built on the misrepresentation of the film as a biopic. Blonde is actually based on the Joyce Carol Oates novel of the same name, a novel whose intention is not at all to provide a biography of Monroe but instead to use her as an avatar in a wider treatise exploring fame, power, and the commercialization of female sexuality - much as I believe Madonna to be doing. To that end many events and characters in Blonde are totally invented. If both Madonna and Blonde are creating entertainment that references a fictionalised version of Monroe then I think they can both be critiqued together.
The main issue for me with Blonde has been how the press rollout has mostly just been about inviting us to compare how similar de Armas and Monroe appear in series of sexually charged recreations of iconic Monroe images. Blonde seems to be asking nothing more from us than to look at both actresses. The only real aesthetic difference in the way de Armas and Monroe are presented is in the very toned physique of de Armas. I find this difference to serve no purpose other than to make sure that de Armas better complies with current beauty standards. A cynical detail that underlines the intentions of the whole project.
“The main issue for me with Blonde has been how the press rollout has mostly just been about inviting us to compare how similar de Armas and Monroe appear in series of sexually charged recreations of iconic Monroe images.”
Ultimately, this boils down to the fact that Marilyn Monroe was never actually a person; she was an avatar played by an actress who was commodified and exploited in her lifetime. I think the obsession with engaging with her as if she was an individual only serves to further exploit. Representations of Marilyn that aren’t really about Marilyn but rather the legacy of our feelings about her have a valid place in a way that direct representations don’t. Madonna’s toying with her visual identity is part of a body of work that seeks to explore fame and sexuality rather than revel in the dark details of one woman's life. Subtle but significant changes to the details of Marilyn's appearance are enough for us to understand this difference on an instinctual level. It might feel silly to bring this down to the angle of an eyeliner but these are all things that make these two ghosts of Marilyn Monroe hit very differently.
Words: Grace Ellington
