Lo sfruttamento hollywoodiano dell’immagine femminile

Lo sfruttamento hollywoodiano dell’immagine femminile is the novel’s account of a system that converts women’s appearance into saleable labor and keeps control of the resulting image beyond the moment of work. Through Norma Jeane Baker(Marilyn Monroe), the system appears not as one villain’s scheme but as a chain of agencies, studios, photographers, publishers, and spectators: each can extract value from her body or public persona, while she has little control over the images once they circulate. The contrast between her modest pay and the fortunes made from her photographs gives this exploitation its clearest measure; her later performances, meanwhile, show her trying to turn a commercial image into an artistic instrument of her own.

From wartime labor to public image

Before Hollywood made her famous, Norma Jeane worked nine hours a day at the Radio Plane Aircraft Factory in Burbank, California, and took pride in contributing to the wartime effort. A photograph of her at work, published in a wartime magazine, showed her in factory clothes presenting herself as both a working woman and a young wife. Buchanan Glazer recognized her in the magazine and announced that the woman pictured was his wife; his fellow sailors seized on the image and teased him, making her photograph an object of public curiosity even before her screen career had taken shape. The episode links ordinary industrial labor to the emerging pin-up image: the camera records the worker, but the public response recasts her as an attractive spectacle.

After joining the Preene Agency, Norma Jeane was assigned a succession of promotional jobs. She appeared as Miss Aluminum Articles in a fitted white dress, then as Miss Paper Goods in a dress made of crepe paper; she also promoted surgical equipment, dairy products, hotels, a restaurant, and a boat show. At the rodeo in Huntington Beach she was presented as Miss Rodeo in a cowgirl outfit, and the evening’s emcee periodically lassoed her as part of the show. These assignments made her appearance the product being displayed, while the work itself required long hours of standing, distributing samples, and attracting attention. The agency paid twelve dollars a day for the first assignment and ten for the second, including minimal meals and tram fare.

The agency’s rules formalized the unequal relationship. Models were forbidden to make appointments with clients or accept tips; clients had to pay the agency directly, and breaking the rules could end the relationship. The prohibition did not prevent the agency from earning money through the women’s public-facing work. It instead restricted their ability to negotiate directly or receive payment outside the agency’s control. Norma Jeane’s body and manner were central to the service being sold, but the intermediary controlled access and payment.

Photographs, ownership, and unequal returns

The same imbalance became more stark when Otto öse offered Norma Jeane nude-photo work. She had refused his proposals for three years, while still hoping to build a film career. By the time she called him, however, the Studio had dropped her, the Preene Agency was preparing to drop her, she was behind on the rent for a furnished room in West Hollywood, and her used car had been repossessed after missed payments. She accepted a calendar session for fifty dollars. Otto kept the negatives, and the photographs would eventually become among the world’s most famous nude images. The model received a small one-time payment; others would make millions from the resulting fame and circulation.

The later publication of the image made the question of ownership explicit. Years after the session, a popular newspaper placed the photograph on its front page, and the image was subsequently reprinted in Playboy. Norma Jeane told reporters that she had not authorized the publication, but the negative and the rights were no longer hers: she had sold them for fifty dollars in 1949 when she desperately needed money. When Leviticus wrote appreciatively about the image, she sent him a copy with a personal dedication. The Studio had prepared copies for such occasions, turning the scandal into another opportunity to circulate and manage the Marilyn Monroe image. Her willingness to send one photograph to a sympathetic correspondent did not undo the larger loss of control over its reproduction.

The manufactured star and its audience

As Marilyn Monroe became famous, the Studio’s images reached audiences through films, publicity photographs, posters, and newspaper coverage. Devotees sent letters from across the country, including people who were ill, disabled, elderly, or confined to veterans’ hospitals. The Blonde Actress initially read the letters and wept over them, then personally answered some with the help of her assistants. She understood the correspondence as a responsibility attached to acting, but the scale of attention also unsettled her. Publicity therefore worked in two directions: it sold an image to spectators, while creating an expectation that the woman represented by that image would answer their feelings in return.

The public image could also intrude into private space. When Norma Jeane went alone to see The Seven Year Itch, she felt pride in the laughter her performance brought to the audience. A man nearby watched the screen and her in the dark; she moved several rows away and continued watching the film beside a couple who were laughing. The incident separates the comic pleasure of the performance from the possessive attention directed at the woman watching it. Her screen image could entertain strangers while encouraging some of them to treat her presence as an extension of what they saw on screen.

Resistance through performance and comedy

Norma Jeane’s conflict with the Studio was not simply a rejection of exposure. She objected to being offered films she understood as erotic vehicles for the Marilyn Monroe persona, and she described the Studio’s conception of that persona as a curvaceous doll to be used up and discarded. Her husband shared this criticism and warned her about Hollywood’s exploitation, though his judgment of her public appearances also became part of their marital conflict. His disapproval, like the Studio’s commercial pressure, threatened to define what her image meant and what work she could do.

Her response was to seek what she regarded as serious acting, including mime lessons and the possibility of studying in New York. In The Seven Year Itch, she found a way to recast earlier humiliations as comedy rather than tragedy. She saw the comic use of a beautiful woman in advertisements for consumer goods as funny rather than inherently degrading, and explained to Billy Wilder that the film allowed Norma Jeane to revisit painful experiences through Marilyn Monroe as comedy. The famous skirt sequence also changed form in production: more than four hours filmed in New York were omitted, and the brief final scene was shot on a Studio set, with the character laughing and trying to hold her skirt down. The finished scene, as the novel presents it, was neither scandalous nor especially provocative.

This comic transformation does not erase the commercial machinery around her. It shows instead that the same image can be sold by the Studio and reworked by the performer, who can use timing, character, and genre to make the audience laugh at the world rather than merely consume her appearance. The novel’s critique rests on that tension: Norma Jeane’s image brings employment and fame, but ownership, earnings, and the terms of public attention remain largely in other hands. Her artistic agency emerges within those constraints, not outside them.