So the Marilyn Monroe lookalikes have gathered. One hundred years after her birth, a gaggle of bleached-blonde impersonators in white halter dresses crowd the streets of Los Angeles, recreating the iconic subway grate scene for the amusement of tourists and Instagram feeds. It is supposed to be a tribute. It is, in fact, a perfect symbol of our age: the death of originality, the cult of the image, and a society so starved for meaning it must endlessly recycle the ghosts of a more vital era.
Monroe herself would have loathed it, of course. She was a woman who desperately sought to be taken seriously, to break free from the very caricature that now defines her. She read Joyce, campaigned for civil rights, and fought the studio system. Now she is a Halloween costume, a hashtag, a void where a person once stood. We do not remember her talent or her tragedy. We remember the dress, the pose, the breathless whisper. We have flattened her into a logo.
This is not merely tacky. It is the cultural equivalent of grave-robbing. We dig up the dead and dress them in our own shallow fantasies because we can no longer produce anything new. The Fall of Rome had its gladiators and bread. We have celebrity impersonators and social media trends. We have millenials who know Monroe only as a filter on TikTok, a ghost in the machine of nostalgia marketing.
And let us not pretend this is innocent fun. There is something deeply pathological about a culture that fetishises a dead woman's image while ignoring her pain. Monroe died of a drug overdose at 36, a casualty of the very machinery that now celebrates her. Her tragic life has been sanitised and repackaged as a product. We do not mourn Marilyn. We consume her.
What does it say about us that we cannot let her rest? We are a civilisation in decline, clinging to the icons of a past we half-remember and half-invent. The Victorian era at least had the decency to memorialise its dead with solemn monuments. We dress them in cheap replicas and take selfies. We have become a nation of antiquarians and necrophiliacs, obsessed with the surface of history but terrified of its depths.
One wonders what Monroe made of her own fame. She once said, 'It's better to be unhappy alone than unhappy with someone.' Perhaps we should take that advice. Let the dead be dead. Let Marilyn Monroe be a woman, not a brand. Let us stop this circus of impersonation and try, for once, to create something of our own. But I suspect that is too much to ask of a generation raised on reruns and reboots. Long live the queen? No. Long live the simulacrum.
