Few figures in 20th-century popular culture have been photographed, portrayed and reimagined as extensively as Marilyn Monroe. Yet, a century after her birth, her image continues to evolve. Following the National Portrait Gallery’s Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait exhibition and the BFI’s Marilyn Monroe season this summer, Maggie Gyllenhaal’s new short film Flesh Impact, which premiered at the Venice Film Festival this September, offers a fresh meditation on the actress, her legacy and the possibilities of the life she might have lived.
Commissioned to mark Monroe’s centenary, Flesh Impact imagines the actress beyond the age of 36, when she died in 1962. The 22-minute film stars Dakota Johnson as Monroe at the height of her fame and Ellen Burstyn as a version of Marilyn at 100 — the woman the world never had the opportunity to know.
A Century of Marilyn Monroe
The film follows a remarkable summer of renewed attention around Monroe. From June to September, the National Portrait Gallery in London presented Marilyn Monroe: A Portrait, an exhibition marking what would have been the star’s 100th birthday. Bringing together works by artists including Andy Warhol, Pauline Boty, Marlene Dumas and Audrey Flack alongside photographs by Cecil Beaton, Richard Avedon, Eve Arnold, Milton Greene and Sam Shaw, the exhibition explored not only Monroe’s fame, but the ways in which she participated in constructing her own image.
The exhibition offered a particularly rich perspective on the relationship between Marilyn Monroe and the camera. From her earliest photographs as Norma Jeane to the images created at the height of her Hollywood career, Monroe understood the power of photography and worked closely with photographers to shape the persona that the public came to know. The NPG placed this collaborative process at the centre of its exhibition, inviting audiences to look beyond the familiar image of the blonde bombshell towards the woman and performer behind it.
The BFI’s summer season extended this exploration into cinema, bringing Monroe’s films back to the big screen and offering an opportunity to reconsider her extraordinary screen presence within the context of her wider career.
Marilyn Reimagined
It is this question of identity that lies at the heart of Flesh Impact. Rather than recreating Monroe’s life, Gyllenhaal imagines an alternative future for her. Johnson portrays Monroe at the height of her fame, while Burstyn embodies an older Marilyn, allowing the film to consider the woman she might have become had her life continued.
The casting adds another layer to the film. At 93, Burstyn is close in age to the Marilyn imagined by Gyllenhaal, creating a striking encounter between the actress Monroe was and the woman she might have become. The film consequently moves beyond biography and towards something more reflective: a meditation on ageing, performance, identity and the complicated relationship between a woman and the image created around her.
Gyllenhaal’s decision to imagine Monroe at 100 is particularly poignant because so much of Marilyn’s mythology is bound to her youth. Her image has remained almost eternally suspended in the years of her greatest fame. To imagine her ageing is therefore to challenge one of the most enduring conventions of celebrity culture — the tendency to preserve famous figures at the moment when they were most recognisable.
Warhol and the Making of an Icon
Few artists understood this phenomenon more instinctively than Andy Warhol. In 1967, just five years after Monroe’s death, Warhol transformed a publicity photograph of the actress into one of the defining images of Pop Art with his Marilyn series.
By repeating and recolouring Monroe’s face, Warhol simultaneously celebrated and questioned the mechanics of celebrity. Her features become instantly recognisable, but repetition begins to separate the image from the woman herself. Marilyn becomes a symbol — endlessly reproduced, circulated and consumed.
This transformation is central to the enduring significance of Warhol’s Marilyn works. The portraits are not simply images of a Hollywood actress; they are reflections on fame, desire, mortality and the ways in which popular culture turns individuals into icons. The National Portrait Gallery’s centenary exhibition placed Warhol’s Marilyn portraits within precisely this wider history of image-making and cultural fascination.
More than half a century after Warhol immortalised her, Flesh Impact demonstrates that Marilyn Monroe remains an unfinished cultural subject. Her image continues to invite reinterpretation — through photography, painting, cinema and the imagination.
From the National Portrait Gallery to the BFI and now Venice, this centenary year has offered successive perspectives on an icon whose cultural presence shows little sign of fading. And perhaps that is the enduring paradox of Marilyn Monroe: although her life was brief, the image she created — and the images others have created of her — continue to evolve. In this sense, Warhol’s Marilyn remains as relevant as ever. The face is familiar, but the meaning is never quite fixed.
