I’ve always loved this particular shot of Marilyn Monroe by noted photographer Richard Avedon. He relates a valuable bit of insight about this particular image of her in one of his publications:
“For hours she danced and sang and flirted and did this thing that’s—she did Marilyn Monroe. And then there was the inevitable drop. And when the night was over and the white wine was over and the dancing was over, she sat in the corner like a child, with everything gone. I saw her sitting quietly without expression on her face, and I walked towards her but I wouldn’t photograph her without her knowledge of it. And as I came with the camera, I saw that she was not saying no.” Avedon managed to capture one of the most photographed stars with her public façade down, producing an image that provides a rare glimpse of her inner life. (MoMA)
So as I sat, bewildered, at the height of the pandemic, eating my breakfast at 2 PM, I was accompanied by a cereal box mascot futilely trying their best to make everything delightful and pleasant again. The characters on cereal boxes are always like this. Without fail, they are perpetually gleeful, one-dimensional, and ageless. Don’t they ever get old, or have a bad hair day, or miss a mortgage payment? To me, the inner lives of cereal mascots became a mysterious and inaccessible thing, much like the real Monroe was for the public until Avedon took this famous shot of her.
Imagining that these mascots, while they were not adorning our breakfast cereal boxes, had other unseen lives to lead was an entertaining thought experiment. So how would they fair against a pandemic that has disrupted nearly every aspect of our lives? Would they remain perpetually gleeful and optimistic? Or would they be much like everyone else? Could their idealized countenances fall away and reveal their mundane and perhaps even tortured lives, their shortcomings, their aspirations and desires? Could we manage to catch a glimpse of them being real?
