Identify Yourself - Definition in Bus Stop

Today, we learned how to define terms in our own words.  Mr. Lewenstein promises this strategy will add important dimension to our writing.  Below I isolated on the word "chanteuse."  In the stageplay Bus Stop, this is how Cherie identifies herself.  Understanding the word tells us a lot about how she is.

A chanteuse is a nightclub entertainer-  a woman - that sings slow ballads or torch songs. The ballads are slow because they usually express the devastation of a broken relationship.  The “torch” probably refers to the emotion burning deep inside.  A chanteuse doesn’t have to be French.  She doesn’t have to speak French.  She doesn’t have to be in France.  But a chanteuse has to have an attitude.  The songs are serious.  The women who sing them are committed.  They’ve all been hurt really bad.  In Bus Stop, Cherie identified as a chanteuse.  When Elma asked her what she did for a living, she didn’t say she was a singer or a nightclub performer.  She said, “ I'm a chanteuse. I call m'self Cherie.”  I doubt she spoke more than a few words of French, but here she uses two in one sentence.  It’s clear, Cherie has lived a hard life.  By referring to herself as a “chanteuse,” she seems to lift herself up a little bit.  She feels a sense of sophistication.

It’s not lost on me that the person most responsible for bringing Bus Stop to the big screen  is Marilyn Monroe. Like Cherie, Marilyn was a dreamer.  From an  early age, when she was separated from her mentally ill mother, she lived her life bouncing between orphanages and foster families. She grew up lonely and vulnerable.  It was the movies that gave her hope.  She identified with the glamorous stars on the screen. Cherie was a second-rate cabaret from the Ozarks, who saw herself as a chanteuse.  For her, the word has a ring of class.  Before Marilyn began shooting Bus Stop, she enrolled in The Actors Studio in New York.  She had little reason to – she was already one of the biggest movie stars in the world.  But Marilyn had greater ambitions than that.  She wanted to be known and respected as a world-class “artist.”  This brings me back to my definition.  Singers sing.  A “chanteuse” is a woman people listen to.

 

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The Death of Marilyn Monroe - Sharon Olds

In English 110, we're reading about Marilyn Monroe.  We are reading about her life.  We are reading about her death.  It's been almost sixties years since "they" found her dead, face down and naked in bed, in her Brentwood home.  Who is "they"?  They were the first responders.  The ambulance drivers.  Two men who Sharon Olds writes about in her poem, "The Death of Marilyn Monroe."  

Below is my response to the poem. 

When Norma Jean Baker was just starting out her career, she posed for a nude calendar.  She was desperate for money.  This was before she became Marilyn Monroe.  In those days, the scandal could have destroyed any chance of stardom, but in fact this particular photo shoot would elevate her legend.  Later when asked what she had on when she posed, Marilyn famously replied, “The radio” (Nolan 238). 

Marilyn was witty, beautiful, talented, seductive and tragic.  That’s why  the ambulance men in Sharon Olds’ poem “The Death of Marilyn Monroe” would never be the same after seeing her corpse.

 They weren’t the only ones who would be affected.  For fifty years now, conspiracy theorists have been investigating the details that led to Marilyn’s mysterious death.  Crime  investigators found  Marilyn’s house littered with pill bottles. Some of them contained chloral hydrate, a prescription sleep aid, that would become dangerous if taken in large amounts (Summers 318).  The official autopsy announced “barbiturate poisining” as the cause of death (Brown 334).

But how could someone so glamorous and illuminating commit suicide?

Here is where we are so crazy for Marilyn.  At the time of her death, she was supposedly carrying out affairs with both the President and his brother.   When they stopped taking her calls to avoid scandal, Marilyn sunk into a deep depression.   She began a telephone call frenzy.  She called the White House.  She called John F. Kennedy.  She called Bobby Kennedy.  She called Kennedy’s intermediaries.  She called her friends and doctors.  She needed to talk, but no one had anything they could tell her (304).

 Many believe Marilyn’s death was not a suicide at all but an elaborate murder.   She just knew too much…

Days after the autopsy report, police investigators learned that it would have been very difficult for any one person to physically swallow the amount of pills that had entered Marilyn’s system.   They put forth the theory that the fatal dose had to be administered by a second or third party, by “another mode of entry” (Summers 325).     Proof of the drugs administered by injection or enema would end any discussion of suicide.   

 But the case was never re-opened.  You can guess why.

“These men were never the same,” writes Sharon Olds of the ambulance men.   They were first to respond.  And the first to surpress what they saw.   That can’t be a good combination.

Works Cited

Brown, Peter Harry.  Marilyn: The Last Take.  New York: Penguin.  11992. Print.

Nolan, Tom. Artie Shaw: King of the Clarinets.  New York: Norton.  2010. Print.

Summers, Anthony. Goddess: The Secret Lives of Marilyn Monroe.  New York: Macmillan. 1985. Print.

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Hollywood Time-Bomb

We've reached the point and time in the semester where we are learning about character analysis.  Below I write about Marilyn Monroe.  She has a lot of character to write about, but where do you start? We know where it ends...

 

On the surface, Marilyn Monroe was always the picture of glamor, but whatever went on inside the famous Hollywood actress will always remain a mystery.  As a child, Marilyn grew up without a stable family.  She didn’t know who her father was.  Her mother had been committed to a mental hospital. Until she was sixteen,  Marilyn bounced from one orphanage to another.  She dreamed of being loved, but she didn’t really know what love was. Consequently, at age 16, Marilyn entered an arranged marriage with a neighbor just to be free of another orphanage and another foster family.  The falseness of this relationship may have affected her relationships with men for the rest of her life. She could never maintain a love relationship for any length of time.  As she got older, she must have become so desperate and lonely.  She wanted to be loved so badly, but she didn’t know if she could ever trust a man.  The high point of her life may have come when she transitioned from Norma Jeane to Marilyn. This came after she divorced her first husband.  She learned a path to becoming an independent woman through modeling and acting. She decided she could make her own decisions in life.  Marilyn wanted to be a star, but in a way people would regard her as a serious artist. To reach her dreams, she worked hard at every component of the job. She was willing to do whatever it took to make it happen.  As a result, Marilyn’s greatest strength may have been her willingness to sacrifice.  She left all three of her marriages because her husbands’ controlling behavior.  Along the way, she gave up security for her art.  This separated her from all the other beautiful Hollywood starlets.   Marilyn was often referred to as “The Blonde Bombshell.” This metaphor may have expressed Marilyn’s impact on her public.  However, it may have explained Marilyn’s nature.  She knew of her family’s history of mental illness.  It may have been just a matter of time before she herself would explode.

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Girl, Interrupted : Living in a Parallel Universe

In English 009, we are reading the memoir Girl, Interrupted.  It's about a young woman who is forced by her parents to enter a mental hospital. Her name is Susanna.  She's having difficulties coping with friends, family, and school.  Inside, she faces an entire new set of challenges, but she learns more about herself than she could ever imagine.  Below I try to share her description of "insanity":

Insanity is living in a parallel universe.

Insanity is the battle between the rational and unconscious. Insanity is not doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. That’s a cliché. Insane people really don’t know what to expect. Their world is a nightmare. 

In the memoir Girl, Interrupted Susanna is a depressed and tortured young woman who is thrust against her will into a home for the mentally ill. But she is both very intelligent and compassionate. In fact,  she spends much her time inside helping other patients and recording her reflections in a personal journal.

That’s her rational side. But there are other times when she drifts out of the present moment and we see her suffer uncontrollably. In one frightening scene, she fears she has lost all the bones and bites open the flesh in her hand for relief. In the blink of an eye, Susanna drifts back and forth between reality and a parallel universe.

Her normal life was like a prison to her. Her life in an institution offers her a sense of freedom. She’s trapped either way. That’s an insane way to live.

This Is What I Believe: Insanity is in the eye of the beholder. Often, people who dare to be different are labeled crazy by society. Occasionally I see the poet Charles Bukowski’s famous quote on a bumper sticker: "Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must lead." Susanna couldn’t handle her life on the outside. In her mental institution she developed love and friendship that was always missing in her life. To me, “Mad Poets” like Susanna and Bukowski play an important role in our world. They are the ones with the courage to take on the fakers and liars while the rest of us hide in fear.

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