Marilyn according to CG Jung

Elodie Frégé. Marilyn and I. Photo © Yury Li-Toroptsov

Marilyn Monroe, modern myth and living archetype, why her image still fascinates today

At the Cinémathèque française, a new exhibition opens this spring, dedicated to Marilyn Monroe, under a title that immediately establishes a productive tension between two registers that are too often confused, “Celebrating the star, exhibiting the actress,” as if the aim were not simply to present a well-known figure, but to reopen a question that has never truly been resolved, namely what we are actually looking at when we look at Marilyn.

This exhibition resonates in a particular way as it takes place within the centenary of Marilyn, a moment that does not limit itself to commemoration but acts as an invitation to revisit the question anew, to think both of the person, now outside the realm of the living, and of the myth, which does not die, does not age, does not disappear, but is transmitted, transformed, and reactivated by each generation that encounters it as if for the first time, a movement that is now visible on an international scale as Marilyn is being celebrated simultaneously in Paris, at the National Portrait Gallery in London, and at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, as if several major cultural centers had aligned to recirculate this image at the same moment.

This shift in perspective is essential, because it allows us to move beyond a strictly biographical approach and enter a broader understanding of what a figure like Marilyn represents, not merely as an actress situated in a specific historical period, but as an image that has gradually become autonomous to the point of turning into a symbolic form in its own right, circulating within culture far beyond the concrete conditions of its creation.

Myth as psychic reality

Stars, when they reach this level of presence in the collective imagination, cease to be mere individuals and become projection surfaces onto which successive layers of desire, identification, fantasy, and contradiction are deposited, and it is precisely this accumulation, this density of gazes that eventually produces a mythological figure whose coherence no longer rests on biography but on symbolic intensity.

In the case of Marilyn Monroe, this transformation is particularly visible, because the gap between Norma Jeane, the real woman with her singular history, and Marilyn, the constructed image, disseminated, amplified, and ultimately detached from its origin, is such that it becomes necessary to think of them as two distinct levels, not opposed but heterogeneous, one belonging to lived existence, the other to an imaginal construction that continuously reconfigures itself in the gaze of others.

If we broaden the perspective further, it becomes possible to understand that mythological figures have not disappeared with modernity, but have changed form and place of expression, leaving ancient narratives to inhabit images, bodies, and public figures of our time, something that Carl Gustav Jung expressed strikingly when he wrote: “The gods have become diseases; Zeus no longer rules Olympus, but rather the solar plexus, and produces curious specimens for the doctor’s consulting room…,” thus indicating that the symbolic forces that once structured myths continue to operate, but in displaced forms, often internalized and sometimes pathologized.

The Jungian gaze and archetypal force

From this perspective, the persistence of Marilyn in the collective imagination, decades after her death, cannot be explained solely by mechanisms of fame or media reproduction, because these factors, powerful as they are, do not suffice to account for this capacity to traverse eras without losing intensity, which leads to a deeper hypothesis, that of a genuine archetypal force at work within this image.

The figure of Marilyn, as constructed by Norma Jeane, seems to draw from timeless forms that exceed the cultural contexts in which it emerged, allowing it to remain active today with striking immediacy, as if this image touched something fundamental within the human psyche, something that does not depend on trends or historical periods but reappears in different forms across time.

In this light, Marilyn is no longer reduced to a historical figure; she becomes a point of condensation where multiple archetypal figures converge, the figure of innocence and that of seduction, fragility and power, exposure and vulnerability, tensions that do not resolve but instead sustain the vitality of the image by keeping it in a state of fertile instability.

It is precisely this dimension that helps explain why Marilyn continues to attract, not as a fixed memory, but as an active presence, an image that still acts upon those who look at it, shaping their perception without their necessarily being aware of it, and continuing to generate meaning far beyond its origin.

“Marilyn and I”: entering into relation with an image

It is this active power of the image that led me to work on Marilyn in a personal project, Marilyn and I, which can be discovered here: https://www.toroptsov.com/photographe/marilyn-and-i

This project sought neither to represent Marilyn nor to recount her story, but to enter into relation with this image by testing it against reality, and so, with her dress in my photographer’s bag, I went to meet people in different parts of the world who still feel a connection to Marilyn, with the intention of listening to them, gathering their stories, and understanding what remained alive in them of this image, a process that resulted in an exhibition at Le Bon Marché as well as a photobook to which Catherine Deneuve contributed.

Working with an image of this nature implies accepting a certain loss of control, relinquishing the idea of mastery in order to be guided by the associations, resistances, and displacements it generates, in a process where the image becomes less an object than a partner in reflection.

An invitation to look differently

The exhibition at the Cinémathèque française operates within this tension between celebration and displacement, and this is precisely what makes it compelling, because it opens up the possibility not simply of recognizing a familiar image, but of looking at it again, as if it were appearing for the first time.

I am curious to see how it is handled, how this institution chooses to navigate between myth and person, between fascination and analysis, and above all how it succeeds, or fails, in making perceptible this archetypal dimension that escapes any attempt at reduction.

If you are in Paris in the coming months, go and see this exhibition, not to accumulate information about Marilyn, but to observe what this image continues to produce within you, because it is perhaps there, in this direct experience, that the myth reveals itself most clearly.