Cannes and the magic of Marilyn Monroe

The Cannes film festival kicks off from 15th to 26th May 2013 and this shot of Marilyn Monroe had featured it last year on all its official posters. Does it matter that she never went?

Shaman-goddess … Marilyn Monroe on her 30th birthday. 

She is a perennially fascinating screen actress, the incidental subject of new TV drama Smash – and from next week she will be pouting down at us from every street corner in Cannes, the face of the official film festival poster. The photograph shows the beautiful, beguiling, funny leading lady of such pictures as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Some Like It Hot blowing out the candle on her 30th birthday cake, giving a seductive air-kiss to the lens. In a press release, the festival organisers explain: "The poster captures Marilyn by surprise in an intimate moment where myth meets reality – a moving tribute to the anniversary of her passing, which coincides with the festival anniversary [Cannes turns 65 this year] … Their coming together symbolises the ideal of simplicity and elegance."

Ah yes, her "passing". Fifty years ago, in August 1962, Monroe was found dead of an overdose of those prescription drugs to which she had become addicted (with the tacit encouragement of those who needed her to keep working). She had been clinically depressed and profoundly downcast by the physical and then mental abuse, respectively, of two former husbands, by the condescension of the male showbusiness world, and by the casual cruelty of the president of the United States, John F Kennedy, who declined to return her calls after their one intimate weekend.

Well, full marks to Cannes for wanting to pay tribute – but is this anything more than a champagne flute of glamour with which to launch the festival? The semiotics of Marilyn-in-Cannes are more complicated and interesting than the official press release implies. In fact, the rhetoric of that image belongs to two separate traditions – traditions you might call Starlet, and Highbrow Appropriation.

Cannes has long had a crush on Monroe and used her as a mascot only last year: she was pictured in a gorgeous blue bathing costume as the official face of its Un Certain Regard competition. Yet Monroe never came to Cannes, and only one of her films played in competition here: Joseph Mankiewicz's All About Eve, in 1951. It won the festival's Special Jury prize and Bette Davis was named best actress. (Monroe had the small but eyecatching role of an up-and-coming ingenue, described by George Sanders's acid critic Addison DeWitt as a "graduate of the Copacabana School of Dramatic Art". Oddly, the festival's archive website omits Monroe from the castlist.)

The nearest she came to Cannes was almost visiting Paris in 1957, when the Académie du Cinéma awarded her the Etoile de Cristal (a forerunner of the Césars, or French Oscars), for her performance in The Prince and the Showgirl, her unhappy collaboration with Laurence Olivier. Being pregnant, she chose at the last moment not to travel; the pregnancy ended in miscarriage.

If Monroe had come to Cannes with All About Eve, and staged a photocall on the beach, what a sensation that would have been. Cannes acquired its reputation for starlets frolicking in front of the paparazzi later, in 1954, when little-known wannabe Simone Silva took her bikini top off while posing next to a bemused Robert Mitchum. She said her inspiration was Monroe's notorious 1951 nude calendar shoot. The festival was intensely annoyed that its serious world-cinema event was being upstaged – and secretly tickled by the publicity. It's a doublethink that persists, something the Marilyn/Cannes poster acknowledges, absorbing and transforming the starlet tradition into something acceptably refined and Hollywood.

As well as reclaiming Monroe, the poster emphasises her distance from the intellectual world of art house. In this sense, it also belongs to the tradition of Highbrow Appropriation, which fetishises and exoticises Monroe from a distance. This is a tradition that was authorised by Arthur Miller himself when he married Monroe, and then wrote ungallant fictional versions of her in his play After the Fall and in his screenplay for John Huston's The Misfits, the 1961 film in which she made her final appearance. Acidly, but perhaps presciently, columnist Walter Winchell wrote: "America's best-known blonde moving picture star is now the darling of the left-wing intelligentsia."

Writers including Norman Mailer, Diana Trilling, Gloria Steinem and, more recently, Andrew O'Hagan, have been inspired by Monroe in a way that they might not be by any other star. It is partly to do with her tragedy, her loneliness, her child-like quality, but also I suspect because of an assumed primitivism in her genius, a primitivism that creates a space for upscale prose pyrotechnics.

In a recent edition of the London Review of Books, the academic and author Jacqueline Rose wrote a long and fascinating essay on Monroe, in which she wondered how the actress came to epitomise the destiny of American popular culture. She notes that, on the set of All About Eve, Monroe was reading a biography of New York journalist Lincoln Steffens; she speculates as to what Monroe might have made of his belief that a general passion for sex had triumphed over political idealism, as well as his belief that cinema, "the blindest, most characteristic of our age of machinery, will triumph over other art forms". Rose repudiates gossipy questions about whether Monroe committed suicide or was even murdered: "I am interested, rather, in what she, unknowingly, but also crucially for my argument, knowingly, is enacting on behalf of postwar America."

The "unknowingly" part of this is what has allowed writers to do the "knowing", the prose-rhapsodising, as well as all the critiquing and psychoanalysing of which Monroe was herself assumed to be incapable. Personally, I am more interested in the other half of the equation, what Rose calls Monroe's own "knowing". She was an inspired comic who understood the art and craft of comedy in cinema and could debate it, if she was allowed, with any critic in the world.

I am perhaps eccentric in finding Monroe slightly less sexy than Jane Russell in Howard Hawks's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Russell's performance is the more real: more worldly, knowing, tolerant, amused. But Monroe is effortlessly funny, and nothing Russell says matches Monroe's sensational speech: "Don't you know that a man being rich is like a girl being pretty? You wouldn't marry a girl just because she's pretty – but my goodness, doesn't it help?" There is a sublime quality to her delivery: when her character sees their cruise ship cabin, she says: "My, it's just like a room, isn't it?" Her talent was conscious, and she understood how comedy achieved its effects.

It wasn't until recently that I read her forthright, dyspeptic demolition of The Prince and the Showgirl in its final cut, expressed in a memorandum addressed to her colleagues, including Laurence Olivier: "I am afraid that as it stands it will not be as successful as the version all of us agreed was so fine. Especially in the first third of the picture the pacing has been slowed and one comic point after another has been flattened out by substituting inferior takes with flatter performances lacking the brightness that you saw in New York. Some of the jump-cutting kills the points, as in the fainting scene. The coronation is as long as before if not longer, and the story gets lost in it …"

This is not a vulnerable icon speaking, nor the shaman-goddess of America's unconscious, but a tough, shrewd professional with the sort of insight and technical knowledge unavailable to most critics and writers. (Every biographer broods on how Monroe inherited bipolar disorder and schizophrenia from her mother; I like to think she also inherited her cinematic professionalism from this woman, who was an assistant editor, or negative cutter, at Consolidated Studios, a job that nowadays gets you a name-check in the closing credits.)

Whether Monroe could have got more serious roles is beside the point. A more interesting question is: could she have been a director? I like to think that if she had been alive today, Cannes might have given her directorial debut a break – perhaps in the Critic's Week section. At any rate, Cannes 2012's poster is fine by me. I just wish the festival had gone further and screened some of her greatest films: Howard Hawks's glorious Monkey Business, with Cary Grant; All About Eve, in which the beguiling newcomer stood poised to steal the older star's crown; The Misfits, and Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. All these performances, in their various tonal registers – dark, light, happy, sexy, rueful – show again and again the quality that made her a poster girl in the first place: that sublime gift for comedy.