The British film industry has thrown a peculiar little party. A gaggle of Marilyn Monroe lookalikes, peroxide wigs and crimson lips trembling in the wind, gathered to mark what would have been the star’s 100th birthday. The celebration, of course, was not for a British actress. Monroe was as American as apple pie and atomic anxiety. Yet here we are, appropriating her ghost, draping it in Union Jacks and calling it a national triumph. This is not homage. This is intellectual decadence, a culture too timid to create its own myths, resorting to pastiche and impersonation.
Consider the irony. Monroe, the original, was a creature of celluloid chaos: a woman whose persona was manufactured by studios, whose beauty was a weapon and a cage. She was the product of a system that devoured her. And now, decades later, we worship the simulacrum. We do not honour the woman. We honour the wig. We honour the vulnerability that sold tickets. This is necrophilia dressed as nostalgia.
The British film industry, for all its recent successes, suffers from a chronic identity crisis. It cannot decide whether it is the gritty realist cousin of Hollywood or a quaint heritage theme park. So it reaches for Monroe, a safe, universally recognised symbol. But why not celebrate a truly British icon? Why not Diana Dors, the poor man’s Monroe, who at least had the decency to be English? The answer is simple: Dors lacks global brand recognition. Monroe is a product, a logo, a piece of intellectual property that transcends nationality. And in this, the celebration reveals a deeper malaise: the triumph of branding over substance.
We are living in an era of cultural recycling, a period that historians will likely compare to the Late Roman Empire, when citizens commissioned busts of dead emperors rather than forging new icons. Our cinemas are filled with sequels, reboots, and adaptations. Our art galleries display Warhol’s soup cans and Lichtenstein’s comic strips. We have become curators of the past, not creators of the future. The Monroe lookalike event is a microcosm of this. It is safe, marketable, and utterly devoid of risk.
To be clear, I am not arguing against celebrating Monroe’s centenary. She was a singular talent, a woman whose on-screen vulnerability masked a fierce intelligence. But the manner of this celebration matters. A gathering of lookalikes, each woman approximating a dead star, is eerily reminiscent of the Victorian obsession with mourning and spirit photography. It is not a celebration of life. It is a séance.
The British film industry, by claiming Monroe as an ‘UK-made icon’, betrays its own insecurity. It suggests that our native pantheon is insufficient. We must borrow from the American empire of fame. This is the cultural equivalent of importing New York bagels to London and declaring them superior to our own crumpets. It is a failure of nerve.
What does this say about national identity? That we are content to be a theme park of borrowed glories. That our greatest ambition is to perfect the imitation. This is the path of intellectual decadence, and it leads to a slow, pleasant decline, where every generation merely refines the same old stories.
I long for a new icon. I long for a British star who does not remind us of someone else, who is not a pastiche of a dead American. But that would require a culture willing to risk failure, to embrace the ugly and the new. Instead, we have 30 women in white dresses, standing in the rain, pretending to be Marilyn. How very British. How very sad.
