Performance and Self-Creation

Performance and Self-Creation is the book’s recurring idea that identity can be made through performance, but that self-invention is neither purely voluntary nor safely contained by a role. Norma Jeane Baker tries to shape herself as an actress and as a person; yet the very intensity that makes her performance arresting also exposes her to judgment, exhaustion, and the demands of those who would claim to have made her.

Acting and the Problem of Technique

The idea first appears as a proposition about life beyond the stage: it is not accidental, but may later be regarded as inevitable. The Actor’s Handbook and the Actor’s Life supplies this principle, linking performance to the larger story of how a person comes to inhabit an identity. A scene can be rehearsed, but a life also takes shape through repetition, audience, and the interpretations imposed upon it.

At acting school, the distinction between technique and feeling becomes painfully concrete. The class has been taught to simulate emotion rather than become its subject. Norma Jeane, by contrast, seems to undergo what she performs. After an exercise, she is escorted to a chair among the folding seats arranged in a semicircle, breathless and trembling, caught between crying and laughing. The classmates describe her work as more than acting: its force frightens them. Her body registers the scene as an experience rather than merely demonstrating an emotion.

The contrast is sharpened by the other students’ confidence in their craft. They feel relaxed because they possess technique; Norma Jeane, one of the youngest in the class, appears to possess only a luminous pallor, dark blue eyes, and an uncontrollable current of energy that leaves her depleted. Asked what she thinks about while acting, she says she may remember, though she does not consciously think through the performance. Her uncertainty and physical intensity coexist: she approaches each exercise trembling, sometimes needing several minutes to enter the role, yet once inside it her usual timidity recedes.

The Classroom as Audience and Judge

The class does not treat this difference as a gift alone. Its members describe how they punish Norma Jeane by making clear that she is unwanted, unlike them, and mismatched with the image expected of her. They suggest that she would be more convincing as a prostitute and that what is inside her does not correspond to what is outside. The cruelty turns acting into a test of belonging: she is judged not only on what she can perform but on whether her apparent self fits the role others have prepared for her.

Her presence in the classroom makes that judgment visible. While the other students arrive casually, she comes early and meticulously dressed, often in a neatly pressed blouse and gray skirt, with straight-seamed stockings and high heels. She reads or pretends to read while waiting, and takes notes with the formality of a schoolgirl. The classmates see her as awkward and out of place, even as they recognize that entering a role changes her. Her effort to meet the room’s standards becomes part of the performance, but it does not secure acceptance.

This conflict exposes the limits of a simple claim that acting is a matter of becoming oneself. The school’s lesson is that acting requires technique, not mere self-expression. Yet Norma Jeane’s classmates understand her as lacking the protective distance technique gives them. Her performances seem to strip away that distance, leaving her vulnerable to both the scene’s emotion and the audience’s response.

Remaking the Self in a Changing City

The city offers another model of self-creation. In a reflective passage, Norma Jeane notices Los Angeles remaking itself after the war: trees have been cut, hills flattened, and new buildings, roads, and sidewalks rise amid the noise of cranes, bulldozers, and pneumatic hammers. She identifies herself with this transformation, thinking of herself as a daughter of the city and imagining that she, too, can invent herself without thinking about the past. The parallel is not a claim that the past has disappeared; it gives her ambition a landscape in which change seems materially possible.

That ambition meets the mirror. At acting school, the long horizontal glass reflects a figure she experiences as wavering and awkward, like someone in a silent film. The sight recalls Elsie Pirig, whom Norma Jeane remembers as having loved and betrayed her, and brings the lost life behind her into the present. The mirror does not offer a stable image to adopt. It makes self-creation look like an encounter with a frightened, familiar stranger whose history cannot simply be left behind.

Public Performance and the Gaze

At Schwab’s, entering the room feels like going onstage. Norma Jeane reminds herself that she is an actress and that good acting requires self-control. She has carefully ironed a white satin dress and notices the people who turn to look at her new hairstyle. Their attention divides: some women’s eyes narrow, a few men admire her, and many patrons quickly return to what they were doing. The brief attention gives her visibility without ensuring that she will be recognized as a person of importance. The actress must manage the public gaze while measuring, almost moment by moment, whether it has granted her significance.

A different encounter there offers a glimpse of possibility. After exercising, Norma Jeane sees Richard Widmark at the counter, drinking coffee and smoking. He asks her name, whether she works at The Studio, and who represents her. She trembles but manages not to stammer, and takes care to use a brighter, more assured laugh. Widmark suggests that they may work together someday. The exchange is both professional attention and a performance of composure: she tries to answer the promise in his interest without losing control of herself.

Roles, Recognition, and the Cost of Intensity

During the filming of La tua bocca brucia, Norma Jeane becomes so absorbed in playing Nell that she scarcely notices I. E. Shinn watching from the set or the other observers around her. Between takes, she runs away to hide; she avoids interviews and does not make herself sociable with the other actors. The performance that had once alarmed classmates now changes her working relationships. The actress playing opposite her is impressed by her intensity but distrustful of her, while Widmark is described as sexually attracted to her and increasingly unable to tolerate her.

Shinn advises her not to push herself so hard or be so intense. By then, Norma Jeane feels distant from the role and inwardly resists his attempt to regulate how she performs. Her response marks a shift from the vulnerable student seeking approval: she can recognize that the role has overtaken her attention, and she no longer accepts every instruction as authoritative. Still, the episode does not resolve the tension between technique and immersion. The same intensity that gives her work its power can isolate her on set and leave others unsure how to approach her.

Elsewhere, Shinn’s claim to have invented her makes the ambiguity of self-creation especially clear. He leads her by the hand through a crowd, and she experiences the evening as magical, like Cinderella finding that the glass slipper fits. She feels newly beautiful and noticed, even as she knows his claim is false and is not yet ready to rebel. The moment binds her exhilaration to dependence: recognition seems to confirm the self she is creating, while the person who offers it asserts ownership over that creation. Across the classroom, the mirror, Schwab’s, and the film set, performance gives Norma Jeane a way to become visible, but it also places her identity in the hands of audiences and authorities who may misread, reject, or claim her.