Marilyn – la femme-fleuve

Marilyn doesn't exist – except as what the German sociologist Klaus Theweleit calls “Männerphantasie(n)”, male fantasies, that is a jumble made of torrid images, cheap obsessions, repressed urges and obscure desire... Marilyn is a Hollywoodian ready-made, a pure artefact, a jingle associated with imaginary pleasures and extreme lust. Marilyn is sham and pretence, a pure illusion but, what she extols as such is what Deleuze calls “the power of metamorphosis” (les puissances du faux), sheer intensity, pure expressiveness of the male fantasy. Marilyn doesn't exist, and this is why she is more than real, surreal.