“Right-to-work” is on the ballot.
Two midterm ballot measures, in states roughly 500 miles apart, offer two visions of labor rights in America.
The first referendum, in Illinois, would seek to codify collective bargaining rights in the Illinois constitution. It wouldn’t be the first time a state has done so — New York, Hawaii, and Missouri also have such state constitutional protections — but it would be the first time voters affirm union bargaining rights via ballot measure. Illinois would also become the first state in the nation with a constitution that bans laws that exempt workers from paying dues for union representation, colloquially called “right-to-work” laws.
In Tennessee, a state where unions have comparatively much less strength, voters will decide on the opposite question: whether to codify “right-to-work” in their state constitution. Tennessee is one of 27 states with “right-to-work” laws already on the books, but only nine have theirs enshrined in their state constitution. The last state to do so was Alabama in 2016.
Even though Tennessee has had its right-to-work law enacted since 1947, Republicans in the state say they need to take additional steps to protect Tennessee’s status quo, pointing to Congressional Democrats’ “Protecting the Right to Organize Act,” which passed the House in 2021. The Democrats’ omnibus federal labor reform bill would, among other things, ban state right-to-work laws. Tennessee Republicans also point to Democrats’ recent failed attempt in Virginia to repeal their state “right-to-work” law as more evidence that Tennessee’s law could come under future threat.
Over the last decade the number of states with “right-to-work” laws rose from 22 to 27, and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) has introduced the “National Right-to-Work Act” in an attempt to cement the anti-union statute country-wide.
Meanwhile, public opinion for unions is at its highest point in nearly 60 years, with 71 percent of Americans expressing support in Gallup’s most recent annual survey. The upcoming midterms offer a glimpse at how these favorable feelings may play out on the ground.
Tennessee’s constitutional Amendment 1: Codifying “right-to-work”
Tennessee has been a “right-to-work” state since 1947, the same year Congress passed the Taft-Hartley Act that restricted the power of labor unions. Supporters of codifying right-to-work in Tennessee’s constitution say their law has driven job growth and worker pay in the state, and will ensure Democrats can’t repeal or chip away at it in the future.
The state’s top Republicans are gunning for the amendment. GOP Governor Bill Lee declared a “Right-to-Work Week” in early March to honor the “Tennessee tradition” of respecting whether one wants to be in a union or not. More recently Lee and former Gov. Bill Haslam released a video urging voters to approve the amendment, saying the 75-year-old state statute has been “a key ingredient in the effort to bring high-wage jobs to Tennessee.”
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Erik Schelzig/AP
Tennessee is not a state where unions have much power, and workers lost two factory-wide UAW union drives at the Volkswagen plant in Chattanooga in 2014 and 2019. Still, UAW represents about 3,000 workers at the General Motors plant in Spring Hill, and unionized Kellogg workers in Tennessee went on strike last fall.
The Tennessee AFL-CIO and state Democrats are leading the fight against the amendment, launching ads seeking to educate voters about the consequences of codifying right-to-work in the state constitution. “We’ve seen big wins this year, last year, at John Deere and we can continue this momentum if we get unionization across this state,” said one Spring Hill UAW member in an ad released last month. “One way to do that is to make sure this amendment fails.”
Representatives from the coalitions fighting against and for Amendment 1 did not return requests for comment.
Business groups for now are expressing confidence about their chances, and point to a 2019 survey from the Beacon Center, a conservative think tank based in Nashville, that found 68 percent of Tennesseans back right-to-work, with 13 percent opposed and 19 percent undecided.
Illinois’s Amendment 1: Right to Collective Bargaining
Illinois, a state with trifecta Democratic control, is in a different position. Still, it was less than five years ago that the state had a Republican governor who prioritized weakening organized labor. As part of his economic development plan, former Republican Gov. Bruce Rauner promoted “right-to-work zones” — urging local towns or counties to vote on whether workers should have to pay dues when represented by a union.
Rauner was also behind the landmark Janus v. AFSCME Supreme Court case that ultimately barred public-sector unions from charging fees to non-members for collective bargaining.
When Democratic Gov. J.B Pritzker was elected in 2018, he quickly signed a law banning “right-to-work zones.” Still, union advocates say they don’t want to keep playing ping-pong with each administration, and see the Illinois constitution as a more sturdy vehicle for ensuring worker rights. The impact of the pandemic on workers, supporters say, also heightened their resolve to push for the amendment.
“I think the fundamental thing people are responding to is that collective bargaining is one of the most powerful ways to raise wages,” said Joe Bowen, a spokesperson for the Vote Yes for Workers’ Rights coalition. “And your workplace should never be less safe just because someone else is holding political office or because of the Supreme Court.”
The amendment to the Illinois Constitution’s Bill of Rights would provide “employees” with “the fundamental right to organize and to bargain collectively.” The amendment also provides “that no law shall be passed that interferes with, negates, or diminishes the right of employees to organize and bargain collectively” — the aforementioned provision banning right-to-work.
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Seth Perlman/AP
Opponents have accused union advocates of intentionally misleading the public about who would benefit from the amendment, since the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) forbids states from interfering with private-sector labor law. On the Vote Yes for Workers’ Rights coalition website it states the amendment would “guarantee every Illinoisan has the right to join together with other workers to negotiate for better pay, improved benefits, and safe working conditions.”
Democratic state Sen. Ram Villivalam, a sponsor, acknowledged the amendment intentionally “refers to ‘employees,’ and not to workers or individuals” given the National Labor Relations Act’s power over private-sector workers. Bowen defended the language. “It applies to everyone in the state, but more specifically it applies to any employer-employee relationship not covered by the NLRA,” he told Vox. “There are hundreds of thousands of employees who do not currently have protection under the NLRA because they’re in exempt classes — like supervisors or agricultural workers — or they’re public sector.”
Conservative opponents also claim the measure would unduly empower public sector unions, leading to longer and more expensive contract negotiations, higher taxes to fund pensions and other benefits, and more political resistance to budgetary reforms. The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial board called the Amendment “a Big Labor Takeover.” The Illinois Policy Institute, a libertarian think tank, argues the amendment will raise property taxes by $2,100 over the next four years if the amendment were to pass, an estimate other labor experts say is unfounded and Bowen describes as “just fundamentally not true.”
A study published by researchers at the Illinois Economic Policy Institute and the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign contends the amendment would be good economically for the state, and that union workers have fared better and paid more in income tax than non-union Illinois workers.
While business groups oppose the amendment and say it will make the state less competitive, groups like the Illinois Chamber of Commerce are not actually spending big to defeat it, acknowledging that their resources are being saved for Illinois Supreme Court races and some state legislative seats.
Shaun Richman, a labor scholar at SUNY Empire State College, told Vox that unions in Michigan a decade ago tried to protect union rights and ban right-to-work via ballot initiative, but were unsuccessful. “The effect, however, was to piss off a Republican governor who had been willing to let the matter lie and turned around and pushed for the right-to-work law as a ‘fuck you’ to labor who wouldn’t leave well enough alone,” he said. “So, in that regard, I am a little surprised to see unions in Illinois try the same thing.”
What research says about right-to-work
The Taft-Hartley Act, which enabled state right-to-work laws, followed a period of strong labor organizing in the 1930s and ’40s. A dozen states, primarily in the south, passed the anti-union statutes following the Taft-Hartley Act, with laws spreading over time to the southwest where unions were also politically weak.
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FPG/Archive Photos/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
“Really, unions have only experienced right-to-work laws as an attack on union membership and financial resources in union strongholds since the Tea Party wave of 2010,” said Richman.
Interpreting the research on right-to-work can be tricky and economists have debated how much the laws can explain various patterns in wage and job growth. Additional confusion comes from the fact that sometimes the conclusions of right-to-work studies differ depending on the ideological leanings of the researchers. The right-wing National Institute for Labor Relations Research, for example, found that right-to-work states had an average job growth rate twice that of non right-to-work states between 2008 and 2018, and experienced greater economic growth and lower unemployment on average.
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), by contrast, has found that right-to-work laws did not boost job growth and are associated with lower wages and benefits for all workers. “By restricting the capacity of unions to bargain for workers and thus lowering wages and benefits, RTW laws lower tax revenues and reduce aggregate demand,” EPI said in a report published in 2018.
Two economic papers published in the last year also reached different conclusions about the consequences of right-to-work laws. The first found right-to-work laws associated with increased manufacturing employment, increased employment, and greater upward mobility. The second found that right-to-work laws lower wages and unionization rates.
Despite the high approval ratings unions have right now among the American public, Richman says banning right-to-work will always be a tough issue for labor to campaign on, since it doesn’t immediately impact worker power or win new unions for workers.
That said, Richman said he feels a rare bout of optimism regarding labor’s future on the federal level. “If the Democrats hold the House, make gains in the Senate, and end the filibuster in order to protect abortion rights there’s a good shot at following that up with fixing labor law,” he said. “It’s not lost on people that the map of abortion bans and the map of right-to-work states almost perfectly overlap for very similar reasons. I think people would be ready for an argument that some human rights are so important that they can’t be left to the states to play political football.”
Marilyn Monroe was an artist. Her magnum opus was her own image.
In 1953, Alfred Kinsey published his highly anticipated new report “Sexual Behavior in the Human Female.” The first edition of Playboy magazine hit newsstands. And three new movies made their premiere, one right after the other, all starring Playboy’s very first cover girl: Marilyn Monroe.
First noirish Niagara, then frothy How to Marry a Millionaire, and finally Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the movie that would become one of Marilyn’s most iconic. They were the first movies in which Marilyn starred rather than merely appearing as a featured player, marking her ascent into a new level of fame. In a cultural moment obsessed with sex and how women have it, Marilyn Monroe was the woman of the moment. She was seen as the embodiment of sex itself, all curvy pale flesh and bright blonde hair, radiating an easy, joyous sensuality.
She was also seen as tragic, unstable, even dangerous. Marilyn was rumored to be difficult on set. She was rumored to have lovers. She was rumored to have had abortions, maybe miscarriages. She was rumored to have a crazy mother. She was rumored to be depressed. She was rumored to be a narcissist. She was rumored to be a bitch. This darkness, too, was part of the Marilyn image, and intimately tied to the idea of Marilyn as sex symbol. Sex, after all, is thought to be dangerous.
Born Norma Jeane Mortenson in 1926, Marilyn Monroe began her career as a model. She was first discovered at age 18, working in a munitions factory while her husband was deployed with the Merchant Marines, and soon ditched both factory and husband to begin modeling full time. She did pinups, art photos, ads, and men’s magazines, and in 1946, she signed a contract with 20th Century Fox. When Niagara hit theaters in 1953, it was the payoff of nearly a decade of work.
In the 69 years since, our culture has not grown any less fascinated with sex or with Marilyn herself. She burst into fame as a sex symbol and so she remains, standing both for sex’s pleasures and for all its dark inverses. For a symbol from the mid-20th century, she remains bizarrely, intensely potent.
“Marilyn’s not done yet,” writes the scholar Sarah Churchwell in her 2005 cultural history The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe. “She is still out there, selling herself, and her culture is still consuming her image. In fact, it is consuming images of her producing the image. In our knowing, post-modern age, that’s what we like to see, the ‘behind the scenes’ footage, the outtakes, the effort.”
The “behind the scenes footage” of the current moment is Blonde, the new Andrew Dominik movie starring Ana de Armas, based on the novel by Joyce Carol Oates. While fictional, Blonde purports to show us the emotional truths behind Marilyn’s open-mouthed and bare-legged image. Perhaps because the image in question is that of a sex symbol, the fictitious truths Blonde reveals are all sexual too.
We see Marilyn ecstatic in a threesome, and we see her writhing in agony during an abortion forced on her unwilling body, not once but twice. We see a rapid, violent closeup of her vagina being opened up by a pair of forceps. We see her sexually assaulted, beaten and tormented by her lovers. We see her miscarry. We see her covered in vaginal blood.
There are few imaginable sexual humiliations that Blonde does not find a way to visit on Marilyn over the course of its 2 hours and 42 minutes. Meanwhile, few aspects of her life that don’t involve sex and its attendant humiliations make their way to the screen.
If Marilyn symbolizes sex for our culture, Blonde is about the sexualized body taking punishment. Ostensibly, it shows Marilyn being punished by the misogynistic society that made her into a sex symbol and then hated her for it. Yet so focused is Blonde on her miseries that it feels more as though Marilyn is being punished by the sadistic eye of the camera, which called her back to life for the sole purpose of reveling in her miseries.
At stake in all the misery in which Blonde wallows is one of the animating questions of our “knowing postmodern age”: Was Marilyn forced into becoming a sex symbol? Did Marilyn become Marilyn, do the voice and the hair and the clothes, make her cheeky dirty jokes for the newspapers, incarnate sex so vividly as to create a symbol potent enough to stick around another 70 years — did she do it all on purpose? Or did she do it accidentally, or because powerful men made her do it, and did she hate every minute of it?
Did she do it because she liked to do it? Or was she miserable the whole time? Was she in control of her own body when she made that body iconic? Or did someone else do it, did someone else craft her into a sex goddess?
Who, in god’s name, is in control of this woman and her body? And who should be?
“It was all an illusion.”
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Baron/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
One of the oddities of watching a Marilyn movie is being caught up in the contradictory play of naturalness and artifice. The Marilyn persona is so clearly fake — that hair, that voice, that wiggling hip-swishing walk. And yet her charisma is so bright and unforced; she is so magnetic without apparent effort. It seems impossible that someone could simply wake up in the morning and be Marilyn Monroe. It seems likewise impossible that someone built her.
When Marilyn was coming up in the ’50s, press coverage made much of her apparent innocent naturalness: she was sexy, they told readers, because she couldn’t help it; she was doing what came naturally. In fact, “the writing about Marilyn in the 1950s,” remarks Churchwell in The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, “insists with such obsessive redundance upon her naturalness that it seems to be trying to persuade itself of something it is afraid isn’t true at all.”
So in that first issue of Playboy, Marilyn is “natural sex personified,” making her “the most natural choice in the world” for their first centerfold. While “it seems perfectly natural to ask why” she’s such a phenomenon, Playboy has the answer at the ready: she’s “the real article.”
(Incidentally, Playboy declined to seek permission from their “real article” for the use of her image. They bought the negatives for a nude photo shoot she did years before as a starving young model, for which she had been paid $50. It would be one of many cases of men profiting off Marilyn’s image, while Marilyn herself got nothing.)
“Monroe, so much set up in terms of sexuality, also seemed to personify naturalness,” notes scholar Richard Dyer in his 1986 study Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. She had to be natural, because that was what it made it okay for her to be sexy; it meant that it wasn’t something she was doing on purpose. “Her perceived naturalness not only guaranteed the truth of her sexuality,” Dyer goes on, “it was also to define and justify that sexuality.”
Even as the culture at large celebrated Marilyn for her easy, organic sexiness, it also turned a suspicious eye to the question of just how natural it might be. Could anyone really be that natural? Or was Marilyn a product?
Churchwell found that after Niagara premiered, the press focused obsessively on the question of how Monroe developed her “walk” for a long steady shot of her walking away from the camera, hips twitching. “Emmeline Snively, the head of Monroe’s former modeling agency, said her walk was due to weak ankles; Monroe’s acting coach, Lytess, claimed to have invented it; and gossip columnist Jimmy Starr said that Monroe shaved off part of one high heel so that her walk would become uneven,” Churchwell reports. (Marilyn’s eventual husband Arthur Miller would later assure the public that she just naturally walked like that.)
Other commentators fixated on the way Marilyn used makeup and cosmetics to put together her face. She wasn’t really a beauty, they insisted; she just painted herself to look like one. “She knew every trick of the makeup trade,” Marilyn’s longtime makeup artist Whitey Snyder said in one frequently cited quote. “She looked fantastic, of course, but it was all an illusion.”
For Marilyn’s early biographer Maurice Zolotow, her artificially bleached blonde hair brought her past the point of no return: once she bleached her hair, he wrote, she became forever fake.
“A bleached blonde is not natural; therefore she cannot wear ordinary clothes or make-up, or be ordinary,” says Zolotow in his 1960 Marilyn Monroe. “She becomes, in a sense, an assembled product. To be artificially put together by modistes, couturiers, cosmeticians and coiffeurs, leads to a profound loss of one’s identity. Motion-picture actresses often lose all sense of who and what they really are. They are wraiths, reflections in a mirror, existing only in an audience’s reaction to them.”
This idea that Marilyn’s highly stylized, glamorous look doomed her is part and parcel of the Marilyn myth. The fable here is one in which an ordinary girl named Norma Jeane (sometimes misspelled Norma Jean) falls into the clutches of powerful studio executives, or the horrors of her own ambitions, or both. Together, they render her the extraordinary Marilyn Monroe. But unbeknownst to Norma Jeane, the creation of Marilyn will destroy her.
“Her biggest enemy was Marilyn Monroe,” explained the photographer George Barris, typically. “Her true self was little Norma Jeane.”
(Cue “Goodbye Norma Jeane.”)
As Churchwell points out, the Marilyn/Norma Jeane split is a cliché that consistently insists, bizarrely, upon its own profundity, as though it’s not so banal it’s the subject of an Elton John lyric. It is also an idea that seems to be specific to Marilyn, despite that many studio actors of her era used stage names, and many of them developed public personas discontinuous with their private lives.
“Judy Garland was similarly addicted to drugs and is popularly held to have been ‘destroyed’ by Hollywood, but ‘Judy Garland’ as a persona is not perceived to be pathologically false,” Churchwell writes, “nor, indeed, does anyone lament: ‘Goodbye Frances Gumm.’” What is part of a normal Hollywood story for other stars appears to be uniquely sinister for Marilyn.
What seems to worry us is the idea that Marilyn might be deceptive. Marilyn Monroe is supposed to be the world’s most desirable woman, in part because the ease and naturalness of her sensuality makes it feel safe to want her. “Marilyn suggested sex might be difficult and dangerous with others, but ice cream with her,” wrote Norman Mailer in his 1973 book Marilyn: A Biography. But what if Marilyn is in fact constructed to deceive, to bewitch? What if when she makes you think it’s safe to want her, it’s a trap? Well then: whose trap? Who made her like that? Who made Norma Jeane into Marilyn Monroe?
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Silver Screen Collection/Hulton Archive/Getty Images
That question can be misogynistic: a woman with this much (sexual) power must be the product of a man’s imagination. It can also be asked with more feminist inflections.
“What was she, this breathless, blonde supplicating symbol of sexuality, the lips anxiously offering themselves as the surrogate orifice, the whisper unconsciously expressing trepidation?” wrote the film critic Molly Haskell in her 1974 study From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies. “And who made her what she was?”
Either way, at the heart of the question is the unspoken belief that there is absolutely no way that Marilyn Monroe, that poor dumb blonde, is the author of Marilyn Monroe, that iconic goddess.
“MARILYN MONROE was a robot designed by The Studio.”
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Courtesy of Netflix
Joyce Carol Oates’s novel, the source material for Dominik’s Blonde, is clear on the question of whether Marilyn can be said to be the author of Marilyn: she isn’t.
In Blonde, Marilyn’s name is chosen for her by men who “ignored me speaking earnestly to each other as men do as if I wasnt there” (punctuation original). Her look is inflicted on her by men whose choices she goes along with. When her nude calendar photos leak, her agent screams at her, “‘Marilyn’ was mine, you dumb broad. ‘Marilyn’ was beautiful, and she was mine; you had no right to despoil her.”
“MARILYN MONROE was a robot designed by The Studio,” says a studio executive later in the novel. “Too fucking bad we couldn’t patent it.”
Yet Oates’s Norma Jeane is able to inhabit Marilyn fully. “Marilyn” is forced upon her, but within that role, Norma Jeane delivers a performance of bewitching radiance. Oates’s Norma Jeane is a great actress, with Marilyn as one of her standout roles.
Sometimes, “Marilyn” appears to emerge out of Norma Jeane as a trauma response: “Marilyn” is the reaction the camera has to Norma Jeane’s pain, panic, and dissociation. Oates offers readers their first glimpse of Marilyn when 16-year-old Norma Jeane’s first husband pressures her into putting on lingerie and letting him take pictures of her. Although Norma Jeane was “squirming in embarrassment” while the pictures were taken, Oates writes, once the photos were developed, her husband saw only “a bold, complicitous girl with a sly, teasing smile.” When Norma Jeane takes her famous calendar nudes, she simply removes herself from her body. The results are stunning.
Norma Jeane herself responds to “Marilyn” with disdain. “She’d disliked the name, which was concocted and confectionary,” Oates writes, “as she disliked her synthetic bleached-blonde hair and the Kewpie-doll clothes and mannerisms of ‘Marilyn Monroe’ (mincing steps in tight pencil skirts showing the very crack of her buttocks, a wriggling of her breasts as someone else in conversation might gesture with his hands).” Still, she’s surprised to find that Marilyn “had meant something to her.” She plays the role with genius.
Always, though, in Blonde, creating Marilyn is a torment and a torture: she must be summoned out of the mirror laboriously, moment by moment, like a demon being conjured. Norma Jeane associates Marilyn with submission, with sexual humiliation, with things happening to her body that she does not want.
“She could not recall how she’d gotten to this place, who brought her here,” thinks Norma Jeane, dissociating as JFK assaults her in a hotel suite. “Was it Marilyn? But why did Marilyn do such things? What did Marilyn want?”
In Oates’s Blonde, Marilyn/Norma Jeane is the trap that all postwar American women faced, writ large. Marilyn is the sex object women were told to aspire to be, bleached down to her pubic hairs, convinced she will find love if she can only embody the fantasy correctly, but instead humiliated and ridiculed. Norma Jeane is the ordinary woman ruined by the attempt to become Marilyn.
Blonde the movie, meanwhile, sweeps smoothly over the manufacture of Marilyn Monroe, the great star. We meet Norma Jeane first as a child and then as a young actress on the come-up, and pause only to depict her rape by the head of the studio who gives her her first break. Like Oates’s Marilyn, Dominik’s Marilyn is Norma Jeane’s trauma response, but here Norma Jeane is responding to the abuse of her mother when she begins to embody Marilyn. It takes the additional abuse of a series of powerful men to push Marilyn into being. Whether Marilyn is Norma Jeane’s idea or not becomes irrelevant in this version of the story: the point is that Marilyn is, as always, a path for Norma Jeane’s self-destruction.
If Oates’s Marilyn was a cipher for postwar American women, Dominik’s Marilyn is a cipher for an abused child turned self-destructive adult. Norma Jeane is the hurt, fatherless child inside of a sexpot who has been designed to rain more hurt down upon her. When we see her act, she does it brilliantly, but Norma cringes away from the version of herself she sees on screen. “That’s not me,” she says.
In both versions, Blonde posits a Marilyn who is endlessly humiliated, endlessly broken. Her body has never been under her control, and neither has her image. That she occasionally found a way to build art out of what was done to her is besides the point: the point is that Marilyn Monroe is a grotesquerie built on the corpse of Norma Jeane.
In The Many Lives of Marilyn Monroe, Churchwell argues that in the end, all the Marilyn Monroe stories come down to dead bodies. That’s where the biographies and the novels and the movies begin and end: with the thrilling, titillating idea that sex symbol Marilyn Monroe became a dead body lying in a morgue. “The real Marilyn Monroe is a corpse, pure body, and utterly powerless,” Churchwell writes. “The focus on her naked sexual body has shifted, and we are left gazing upon her dissected dead body.”
“I can make my face do anything.”
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Ed Feingersh/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images
Andrew Dominik, Blonde’s director, recently described Marilyn to a journalist as “this huge cultural thing in a load of movies that nobody really watches.” This statement is untrue on its face (even choosing to discount the bulk of Marilyn’s filmography, Some Like It Hot remains a beloved classic and perennial pick for one of the greatest movies ever made), but Dominik appears to be trying clumsily to get at an idea that does have some truth in it.
Marilyn probably is more famous and more iconic for her image than for any one individual acting performance. That’s not because she wasn’t a great actress who delivered a series of strong and varied performances across a tragically short career, but because her image on its own is so strong, and remains so strong. As Churchwell said, Marilyn isn’t finished yet. So I would like to propose that it is worthwhile to take that image seriously as an artistic work.
What happens if we imagine a Marilyn Monroe who was the author of her own persona? Might we have room to imagine Marilyn building her star image not out of self-hatred and internalized misogyny, not dumbly obeying sadistic and powerful men, but for its own sake, and for hers?
In the documentary Marilyn on Marilyn, Marilyn matter-of-factly tells an interviewer the story of how she got her stage name. In her version of events, the choice is a collaboration. “I wanted the name Monroe, which was my mother’s maiden name,” she says. “He [Ben Lyon, a talent agent at 20th Century Fox] always said, you know, I reminded him of Jean Harlow and Marilyn Miller. He said, well, Marilyn goes better with Monroe.” Here, Marilyn isn’t inflicted on Norma Jeane. The name “Marilyn Monroe” is part of a creative choice, one Marilyn herself helped to make.
Marilyn’s longtime makeup artist, Whitey Snyder, tended to say the same thing about the establishment of the iconic Marilyn look: that it was a collaboration, and that Marilyn was intimately involved. “Slowly but surely we changed the eyebrows and the eye shadow and things like that,” Snyder says in Richard Buskin’s Blonde Heat, describing the period around the filming of Niagara, “and the look was established.”
The dress designer Billy Travilla quotes Marilyn as saying, “I can make my face do anything, same as you can take a white board and build from that and make a painting.” Travilla thinks Marilyn was being narcissistic in her claim, but as Churchwell notes, the boast seems to be less about Marilyn’s beauty and more about her craftsmanship.
“Her body was her work of art,” writes Churchwell. “She knew it was her instrument (likening it once to a violin), but if she was at once artist and work of art, she lived in a world that could only let the beautiful woman be picture, not painter; object, not subject.”
Marilyn even talked about her own sex appeal in the way an artist might, with detachment and a close attention to the ironic effect she wanted to achieve. Graham McCann’s scholarly study of Marilyn quotes her as saying about Mae West, “I learned a few tricks from her — that impression of laughing at, or mocking, her own sexuality.”
So let us imagine, then, that Marilyn knew what she was doing. Imagine that she did it on purpose. Imagine that powerful men took control over her body (because Marilyn, like all of us, lived in a world in which powerful men do so) and that Marilyn struggled with depression and self-loathing, and yet that these dark facts do not define either Marilyn herself or her work.
Imagine that Marilyn Monroe was an artist and that her star image was her great work of art: an icon of sex, radiant with joy and shining with the possibilities of danger and tragedy. Imagine what happens if we do her that courtesy.
Would she stop being a corpse of herself at last?
China’s catastrophic summer shows its climate adaptation plans still have a long way to go.
China just finished one of its most disastrous summers on record, with record-breaking heat, drought, and wildfires leading to water shortages even into the fall. More than 900 million people — or about 64 percent of China’s population — faced brutal heat waves alone, highlighting how much further the nation has to go to protect itself against worsening climate-related disasters.
As weather historian Maximiliano Herrera told New Scientist magazine last month while the heat waves were ongoing, “There is nothing in world climatic history which is even minimally comparable to what is happening in China.” In at least 17 provinces, more than 240 cities saw temperatures exceeding 104 degrees Fahrenheit. (Normally, a metropolis like Chongqing, at the center of this heat wave in southwestern China, only sees temperatures as high as 92°F.) China’s largest river and freshwater lake mostly dried up, reaching record-low water levels due to drought, all while wildfires raged. As in the United States, while some places baked, others flooded.
All this is taking place as China, the world’s largest current emitter of greenhouse gases, has positioned itself as a leader on mitigating climate change. With President Xi Jinping committing to net zero carbon emissions by 2060, China is already investing heavily into clean energy domestically and plans to stop financing coal-fired power plants abroad.
However, while China has increasingly focused on carbon mitigation efforts over the last decade, the country is just beginning to seriously tackle the equally difficult question of adapting to the effects of climate change. China’s complex geography and large landmass spanning various types of climate zones have always made it vulnerable to extreme weather events like droughts and floods. Due to the worsening factor of climate change, Beijing will need to step up its game to future-proof the country. As the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports emphasize, both mitigation and adaptation work is key to reducing vulnerability to climate change — and China still has a long road ahead of it.
“The climate story is a China story”
As Jeremy Wallace, a professor at Cornell University focusing on the effects of Chinese politics on climate and cities, told me, “The climate story is a China story.” China’s rapid industrialization and recent rise to becoming the second largest global economy was mostly fueled by coal. As a result, China was responsible for 27 percent of global greenhouse emissions by 2019, the most in the world and greater than every country in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) and European Union combined. That carbon-heavy energy load helped drive prosperity and historic poverty reduction, but there was a steep environmental cost for China, too, including major air and water pollution, desertification, ecological devastation, and the rise of extreme weather events.
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Mounting concern and political pressure, mostly internal and to a lesser extent international, forced Beijing to act. Over the last two decades, the Chinese government passed domestic climate legislation, and made commitments to the international community, most notably when it signed the 2015 Paris agreement.
Scott Moore, director of China programs and strategic initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania, told me that the Chinese government acknowledged opportunity and risk, with the latter especially playing a big role in climate policymaking. “Of the world’s large economies, China is probably the single most exposed to climate risk,” he said.
The first factor is that many major cities, like Shanghai or Tianjin, are located in low-lying coastal or river valley areas that are vulnerable to flooding. Second, glacier melt from China’s portion of the Tibetan plateau is increasing floods downstream. And finally, China’s highly urbanized landscape, and the concentration of population and infrastructure that comes with that, makes China more vulnerable to disasters like floods.
There’s self-interest, too. The Chinese government also saw a huge opportunity in investing in the global clean energy market, which today is worth trillions of dollars. “China is the world’s largest investor, developer, deployer, and manufacturer of clean energy across the board,” said Michael Davidson, professor of global policy and engineering at the University of California San Diego. China invested $380 billion in renewable energy in 2021 alone, accounting for almost half of new renewable energy capacity worldwide. Because of entrepreneurship and large government subsidies, the country has built out an enormous domestic network of wind and solar plants, and become the global leader on electric vehicles.
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These changes are reflected in the very air that people living in China breathe, with the air quality in cities like Beijing markedly improving over the past decade. “It’s hard to say that they’re lagging” on tackling climate change, Davidson told me, and indeed, a recent report by Carbon Brief found China’s carbon emissions have seen their longest decline in a decade.
On the adaptation side, despite the severity of the current floods, far fewer people are dying today from floods in China than they used to. Floods are a historic problem in China, but because the Chinese government invested in flood control over the past two decades, the risk of death isn’t as high as it used to be, Moore told me, when the worst floods could kill people in the millions. The flood adaptation measures included the construction of large dams and reservoirs, but also the improvement of early warning systems and emergency management strategies such as evacuation.
The dam projects came with sizable environmental and human costs, ironically, including the destruction of wetlands that may have otherwise absorbed floodwater. Floods in recent years have also called the effectiveness of megaprojects like the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project ever created, into question. The central government recently acknowledged the unintended side effects in its climate adaptation strategy, finally passing a wetlands protection law last year to not only conserve but restore wetlands. China is also increasingly embracing nature-based solutions like “sponge cities,” retrofitting and designing cities to better absorb floodwaters, which could help reduce the severity of future floods.
Beyond its carbon mitigation efforts, the Chinese government also released an updated climate adaptation plan in June to better prepare the country by 2035. Its aims include improving early warning systems for extreme weather, shoring up food security, and boosting conservation efforts both inland and along the coast. Notably, the plan is a follow-up to a 2013 adaptation plan that heralded China’s “war on pollution” and led to China decreasing as much air pollution in seven years as the US did in three decades. This new plan will hopefully be similarly ambitious, because it aims to have a nationwide climate impact and risk assessment system by 2035. This would ensure major infrastructure projects consider potential environmental consequences, like the aforementioned dams used to control flooding and generate hydropower.
China has a plan to adapt, but is it enough?
Still, for whatever progress China has made toward mitigating climate change, its adaptation strategies may not be enough to meet the current moment. The consequences of climate change are coming faster than most governments, policymakers, and even scientists anticipated. “The reality we’re facing now is that the carbon emissions that are already in the atmosphere are baked in for a period of time,” said Jonas Nahm, professor of energy, resources, and environment at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. “Things are going to get worse before they get better, even if we do everything to meet the Paris agreement models.”
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The realities of the baked-in effects of climate change were in full view in Sichuan, the southwestern province at the center of this summer’s heat wave and drought. Hydropower systems there faced a serious electricity shortfall due to reservoirs and rivers drying up. “For all of this sort of anticipation, and planning, China’s also scrambling to try to figure out how to respond to this in the same way that the Europeans are with all these rivers running dry,” Nahm told me.
While hydropower makes up 16 percent of China’s total power production (almost equal to its other renewable energy sources combined), it’s more than 80 percent of Sichuan’s power production, and in fact, it usually has so much excess hydropower that it delivers a third of what it produces to the rest of the country. However, drought affected Sichuan’s hydropower generation, and because it couldn’t curb its power sharing with other provinces, rolling blackouts had to be implemented to prevent the grid from being overwhelmed by demand. Even as the drought eases, there are worries that Sichuan and other parts of China will face power shortages in the winter.
“You’ve seen over the last several years that some of the existing infrastructure just isn’t prepared,” said Nahm. A key example of this is the South-North Water Transfer Project, the largest water diversion project in history, and perhaps even the most expensive infrastructure ever built, period. Built over the past two decades, the project aimed to bring water from water-abundant southern China to water-scarce northern China, which, despite containing around half the country’s population, only has about 20 percent of the country’s total water supply.
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But at best, the South-North Water Transfer Project has served as a Band-Aid to buy the government more time, and has done little to solve the issue of water scarcity. More damning, it has actually worsened the issue of water pollution. As Jennifer Turner, director of the Wilson Center’s China Environment Forum, told me, water pollution doesn’t make the headlines like air pollution, but is probably China’s biggest environmental problem. And the water pollution problem is so bad that it actually exacerbates China’s water scarcity problem. The resources that went into this megaproject could have gone to less flashy solutions like better collection of rainwater and water recycling. Ultimately, Turner said, the Chinese government has to address both the short and long term if it wants to fix its water problems.
China’s infrastructure issues go beyond just its water projects, however. Wallace, the Cornell professor, said China may also need to fundamentally rethink how it builds urban areas. As in the US, Chinese cities have a tendency toward sprawl that is more polluting and carbon-intensive. “Once you build the city,” Wallace said, “it’s really hard to go back, right?” There is some research to suggest that sprawling cities have to deal with more extreme heat events than do more compactly designed cities.
In the meantime, UC San Diego’s Davidson told me, there are still things China could do to protect provinces like Sichuan from extreme weather in the future. For one, the central government could ensure that it has a more unified power system that can better respond to energy shocks, such as a spike in demand for air conditioning when it’s boiling hot.
Another is better urban design: More efficient air conditioning, better insulation, planning, and cooling centers can help Chinese cities better cope when there’s a heat wave. China could also improve monitoring systems for extreme weather, support the agriculture sector, reevaluate current infrastructure projects, and bolster reforestation and flood control efforts to not only control flooding but also prepare for future drought scenarios.
With the advent of its new 2035 climate adaptation plan, which will implement a road map to bolster China’s risk assessment and its “climate-sensitive sectors,” it appears the Chinese government is looking to implement many of these policies. But this will require upending what Nahm described to me as the economic and engineering approach that China has largely taken to its infrastructure up to this point, green or otherwise. Rather than building dams or water diversion systems, China will have to double down on nature-based solutions.
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At an environmental conference in Beijing, Ge Le, director of the climate change and energy program at the Nature Conservancy in China, pointed to recent reforestation efforts in China and trying to integrate more greenery into cities, like the aforementioned sponge cities, as positive examples for China to expand on. She also brought up the oyster reef restoration projects in Alabama, which aim to strike a balance between ecological restoration, climate adaptation (as reefs function as seawalls), and commercial benefit for the communities that harvest oysters.
To some observers, China’s catastrophic summer may appear to be an indictment of Beijing not having done enough to meet the current climatic moment. But the truth is that China has done a lot to mitigate the effects of climate change, as well as adapt to its effects. And while the Chinese government could certainly do more, the unveiling of the 2035 adaptation plan makes it clear that there is a lot more to come. The problem facing Beijing, then, is the same faced by Washington, Brussels, and elsewhere: Climate change is already here, and things are going to get worse before they get better. China, like the rest of the world, is going to have to buckle in and work harder than ever.