The Seven Year Itch

A hot summer’s night in New York: just as the couple emerge from the cinema, still replaying *The Creature from the Black Lagoon* in their minds, a draught from the underground shaft blows her dress up into the air – and then again shortly afterwards. “Isn’t it delicious?” Photos of this scene are later plastered across billboards in larger-than-life dimensions for advertising purposes – and Marilyn Monroe is thus definitively established as an icon of pop-cultural eroticism, not only of the Eisenhower years, whilst simultaneously exposing the gaze that creates her. Wilder transforms male fantasies (a boring bloke in his prime meets an exciting young neighbour) into a study of projection and self-deception, a point only emphasised by the namelessness of “The Girl”. A reduction that Monroe subverts with a healthy dose of self-irony.
(Florian Widegger)