Belated Comments on the Marilyn Monroe Superbowl Ad

     It may be a bit late in the game to comment on Superbowl advertisements, but there is one in particular that still bothers me. It was the Snickers advertisement featuring William Dafoe as Marilyn Monroe when she's "not herself" because she is hungry. It's ironic, because this commercial makes me as cranky as the people in Snickers ads, and the logical answer should be for me to eat a Snickers bar, but now I don't want to because it's Snickers that is making me cranky... 

Anyway, here is the advertisement:

 

     This advertisement annoys me for many reasons. First and foremost, I find it very insensitive to the memory of Marilyn. I don't think it's funny to make light of the amount of trauma that shooting this iconic scene caused the actress. It had to be done twice. The first time was on Lexington Avenue in New York, as a publicity stunt, amid hooting and harassment from male onlookers. Her husband, Joe DiMaggio, was extremely upset, and after the shooting was finished, the couple had one of their biggest fights. They divorced soon after. The footage collected was unusable, and had to be redone in a studio.

     I also dislike the way that Marilyn Monroe is portrayed in this ad. When Marilyn is hungry and “not herself,” she actually calls out the director for the stupidity of this scene, which is basically nothing more than an opportunity to show off Marilyn's body to ogling men. When Marilyn is given the Snickers bar and returns to her normal self, she becomes more than happy to pose suggestively for the shot. She no longer complains, either because she is enjoying herself or because she is no longer thinking for herself. This reinforces the idea of Marilyn Monroe as nothing but a brainless sexual object. That wasn't Marilyn at all. She was a complex, intelligent, and very troubled person. That side of her, unfortunately, wouldn't sell as well as her beautiful body and photogenic face. She was always forced to play the role of the “dumb blonde,” and this sent her into depression. While it was amusing to see William Dafoe in Marilyn's white dress, I think that on the whole the joke was in poor taste.

      If you want to read deeply into this ad, which I do, the wider rhetoric is that when women object to displaying their bodies for male pleasure, they are “cranky” and “not themselves,” and that the proper response to the objectification of their bodies is complacency and passivity.

I might be taking this ad a bit too seriously. I'm sure that no offense was intended by its creators. I just think it was careless, and I am disappointed.
 
     (Here are links, if you want to know a couple of places I got information about Marilyn, and especially this scene:
-http://thoughtcatalog.com/m-j-pack/2015/05/6-tragic-things-you-didnt-know-about-marilyn-monroe/3/
-https://setouq.com/marilyn-monroe-quotes/)

     (Also, just to clarify, I'm not actually intending to boycott Snickers, and I'm not saying that anyone should boycott Snickers. Obviously they aren't the first or last company to air an insensitive ad.)