The Monroe Project

Thomas Lavazzi

Introducation

In the critical performance, The Monroe Project, a dysfunctional product design team utilizes a semiotic methodos to dis/reassemble the Marilyn Monroe pop cultural assemblage—to remake" it—in an attempt to evade/undermine the constrictions of socio-cultural identity constructions. The primarily text-based piece, which also incorporates computer-manipulated images and sound bits, deals with issues of identity formation/construction and alternate modes of cultural and self (re)production, both in its content and in the form of its presentation.

Based on Monroe specifically as she appears in the film Niagara, and as she is configured in various pop biographies, The Monroe Project is not a conventional analysis of her identity construction, but a creative, theoretically driven response to it—a counter or parallel enactment musing along the edges of her performance (and her identity as performed, the Monroe body serving as medium). The piece is a multimedia performance that explores various aspects of the simulated phenomenon designated Marilyn Monroe: the filmic image/presence, the significance of this image construct to codes of femininity (from the fifties to today), and the meshing of the film icon with the biographical configuration: the social/economic/emotional/sexual/ideological nexus inscribed as the real" Marilyn Monroe, a reality effect ballasting the screen version. The Project is especially interested in the Monroe construct as a specular configuration of her audience's— those who buy and consume her— (self-destructive) desires. The investigation" of the popculture icon —the observations and conjectures, analyses and theoretical daydreaming spun around cinematic fragments and biographical inscriptions—takes the form of a brainstorming session carried out by (as noted above) a self-bemusing, procedurally-challenged, product development team, whose (ultimately aborted) task is to come up with a truly postmodern, yet commercially viable, "MM."

The Monroe Project was drafted from start to finish one August afternoon on Jones Beach, outside Manhattan. Its abstract rhythms are the mood of the surf, the surrealistic qualities a result of the imagination dwelling in the abstract. The piece doesn't personify that "dwelling," but questions such metaphoric maneuvering; the seduction of Marilyn Monroe is the seduction of a metaphor. The abstraction is also a departure: I knew I was leaving New York, probably for good, moving to a city in the south that was, at the time of writing, just an image, a mirage, a spatial illusion on the marsh—a city thriving, vampire-like, on its own insubstantial self-images, hiding (architecturally, for example) behind fin de siecle veils, feeding off the vanished blood of the "Old South." That's some of the "personal" grounding (i.e., my liminal position at the time of writing) for the texture of the piece. I was in transit, had no place, a body—i.e., as a physical presence rooted in a place—dis-embodied.

How does this tie in with the thematics of the piece? Abstraction is also de-reification of the MM figure, in its various positions/manifestations. The process of production works from the plane of ideology; there's also a system, and a technology, a methodos that guides production concepts, as well as structuring and channeling the flow of material from initial design stages to finished product. So we have to remember, whenever we talk about a "cultural construct," a cultural production, we are also talking about a systemic process, and a "being," "presence," an identity-commodity that is collaboratively produced: behind every cultural product is a socio-economic-ideological "team," not necessarily of particular "people," but of the key structural elements—the voices—of the culture itself (in The Monroe Project, the "Design Team" represents, or is the agency of, these cultural elements/values).

Let's take the mise-en-scene, for example. The primary tensions are established at the outset. There's a layering, a dialogue of images and rhetorical positions always on the verge of slipping into a reality effect: a digital head wears a sailor's cap (metonymic for Niagara); behind a scrim/veil of synthetic black (mourning?) stretch material, Hollywood images begin to glow and flow. Voices speak from behind a life-size cardboard serial of MM heads; team members often relate to the audience through real time synthesis—mediation of a "live" monitor—while their physical bodies are averted. The audience receives a text-Xerox of a melodramatic synopsis of Niagara from the back of a video box, representation of a representation of a representation: "femme fatale...seductively torments...mysterious lover...powerful portrait of human sexuality and passion." The surface impact of the blurb's language is heightened by a prosody of exaggeration: alliteration and over-coded contraries held in syntactic balance. Erotic body and evil mind; a "femme fatale" (French phraseology, stereotypically, for the feminine of the feminine) yielding a "double-edged sword"; a performance that is "at once fascinating and frightening." Language is itself the stage of conflicts, creating linguistic distinctions as it enacts a psychosexual doubling that troubles the boundaries of signifieds. While the excessive physicality of language is what "happens" in the blurb, the reality-claim of the language referring to an "actual" sexuality, an aestheticized cinematic representation of sexuality (the "referent" is yet another representation, continually deferred) is marked/mocked by the extreme melodramatic/surrealistic abstraction of the Project's mise-en-scene (set and performance gestures). The audience reads the blurb's narrative fragments in a bricolage environment, a mise en scene of synthetic "realities" constructed of mass-produced pop cultural products (most "props" are modifications/recontextualizations of "found" objects). The audience observes the process of Team members producing themselves as props too, costuming according to the Director's prompts; crucial, as well, is the (dis)arrangement of narrative continuity—narrative structure being the underpinning of reality effects, the experience, virtually, of "reality" as conscious codification.

The fragmentation and diffusion of image, text, and sound bits through trajectories of improvisation simulate the speed of the brainstorming session. For example, the piece proceeds rapidly through a collage of quotes (sources listed in the bibliography) and theoretical speculations, the play with props and costumes playing through (against/with) the theoretical terrain. In addition to the initial synopsis distributed to the audience, bits of plot are presented on large cards and or text slides throughout the piece, with a double purpose: practically, of orienting viewers unfamiliar with Niagara (though the recut version of the film, playing continuously on the center video monitor, is a collage in its own right, obsessed with certain images, some textual references to the film are perhaps clarified), while simultaneously entering into the overall dialogos of the performance; the narrative bits are brief, familiar rhetorical nodes/islands rising out of the overall flux; all rhetorical positions are placed "on trial" (Kristeva) by the piece.

And we can expand this position to say that all sign systems are put "in process/on trial." The audio appendix more fully describes sound clips, and the script attempts to cover performative actions/gestures, but the computer-manipulated slide images (approximately 100) and the "live," improvised computer image manipulations defy adequate description and escape comprehensive encoding/re-representation, syntactic/semantic capture by another sign system (it would take many more pages to "fully" describe the images, and you'd have to continue writing, since each performance—and each potential (re)performance—alters/will alter the already said/written/seen; imagine a series of progressively more abstract PhotoShop permutations of a serial image of Marilyn Monroe, veering off or back again, momentarily, to a referential stabilization, and you have a sense of one imagistic line of flight). Since The Monroe Project is a multimedia event, much escapes the printed text—or, put positively, much happens in the moments of performance, all of which is part of the larger, on-going "Ur" text; what you read in the text version of MP is a script, comparable to the text of a poem in oral-based cultures. The point is that (alpha-numeric) language is never all (as Lacan says of "Woman"—consider cuneiform and rebus writing); much escapes any single sign system. Contemporary cultural criticism must find a form equal to (commensurate with) its subject (as Hartman would say), working within the flexi/fluxability of a multiplex of sign systems (consider advertising, from mail-outs to demos, and product design methodologies based on models) and maneuvering to destabilize taxonomies—the sometimes paranoid separation of pop and academic culture, for example; the deadlock of mass-production/product design theory and high academic cultural theory.

I mentioned the dysfunction of narrative earlier, but characterization is also under fire in the piece. There are of course traces of characterological development—as when Team members appropriate/enter into the Monroe image-identity—cross-dressing, experimenting with the gesture and walk, acting to/for (the self reproduction of) the camera, speaking from within the product they are attempting to (re)produce—but, like the narrative bits, these remain traces, rather than centers of structuration, and do more to de-establish, prevent, dislodge or defer than to define character—a sort of motivated anti-characterization (even in an interviewer-interviewee situation, for example, one is self-conscious of the fabrication of the identity of a speaker or speakers). The semantic topography of The Monroe Project may seem substanceless, or at least rootless, but if we view identity formation as in part a process of orchestration, or (re)arrangement of cultural givens—who am "I" as spoken, and speaking, subject? what does a signature prove?—then it becomes disturbingly, or perhaps refreshingly, impersonal in this way. From one perspective, the Monroe figure can be seen as a celebration of the disjunctive potential of a fluid sense of self—the ability to put on, and put off, eluding the limits of character definition, an ontological mode/position design team members (re)enact when entering into/testing the "Monroe Effect." Though in our "own" lives, on the contrary, we often feel (culturally) compelled to find "ourselves," and failing to reify that "self," feel lost, in a state of free fall (i.e., a falling away from coded, stabilizing positionalities), anxious and depressed—as did Monroe, in "her" life.

Perhaps the best way to "play" the piece is in this spirit of experimental self-decentering, rather than as a conclusive whole driven by plot and character, per se; or, more subtly, to play through the various discourse positionalities both the anxiety and exhilaration of the simultaneous loss of and expansion of Self.

The Monroe Project

D = the team director

M1, M2, M3 = team members

[The set: a bare table. On one side, a computer and monitor topped with a blue sailor's cap; on the other a podium. Behind the table, occupying a central position in the set, a video monitor draped in black stretch material; another monitor is off to the side and a third monitor, between these two, will display live video—M1 & M2 use it to "rehearse" lines and to try out bits of physical business. Marilyn Monroe Project mobiles dance on either side of the central monitor; the mobiles are fashioned from various fragmented images: photographs of MM, publicity stills from Niagara, graphs and charts, Niagara posters, marked over sections of the performance script, etc.; some of the images have been palimpsested. The following plot synopsis, taken from the back of a video carton, has been distributed to the audience:

Set against the dramatic backdrop of Niagara Falls, Marilyn Monroe portrays Rose, a femme fatale possessing two of the most powerful weapons: an erotic body and an evil mind. Planning to murder her troubled husband (Joseph Cotton), Rose first uses her double-edged sword to drive him to the brink of total insanity. Then she seductively torments a series of strangers while her mysterious lover waits in the shadows....Marilyn's classic performance...is at once fascinating and frightening, painting a powerful portrait of human sexuality and passion. 89 Minutes, color, 1953, recorded in Hi-Fi.

D enters and sits before his/her computer and monitor. M3 is standing at a podium, dressed in a conservative though insipid suit with a bright red out-of-fashion tie.]

D: Heads! [Enter the 5 faces of MM on two pair of legs—M1 & M2. Each head of the serial life-size stand-up strikes a slightly

 1-3: Customs Inspector: "Where do you live?...where were you born?...are you bringing in anything besides your clothes and personal belongings?...How long do you plan to be here?..." [the last three questions replay]

different pose; three of the heads have been concealed in pillow cases, on one of which is a cheap platinum wig. M1 and M2 frequently deliver their lines from behind these heads, using one head as a "home head." All prepare: lay out props—robes (draped behind), white gloves

 1-3: Customs Inspector: "Where do you live?...where were you born?...are you bringing in anything besides your clothes and personal belongings?...How long do you plan to be here?..." [the last three questions replay]

(on table in front of MM); other props are placed behind the cardboard stand-up (a small red beacon, black leather cap, fireworks, a cigarette lighter, etc.).]

D: Lay out props...beauty mark! [M2 puts on a pair of dark blue stockings and dark blue heels. M1 gives M2 a red "beauty mark." M2 wraps a white scarf

 1-3: Customs Inspector: "Where do you live?...where were you born?...are you bringing in anything besides your clothes and personal belongings?...How long do you plan to be here?..." [the last three questions replay]

around M1's head. M1 puts on a dark sleeveless fur vest, a pair of mirror shades, and a blue

 4. Ray: "Honey, you can see it from here!" [laughter].

beauty mark. D puts on the sailor's cap and speaks into a little recording machine, which she then places on the table in front of MM and plays back "here kitty, kitty." M2 finds the machine, places it elsewhere, replays—"here kitty..." M1 finds the machine after two replays, speaks into it—"here kitty, kitty, kitty"—and plays it back; all look about. M1 then places it on the podium next to the prop table. M3 picks up the recording device and places it on the other side of the podium; D, M2, and M1 look, but M3 does not play it. Throughout the piece, D experiments with the MM image (Niagara is the source for most of the slides), manipulating/permuting it in various ways. Some of the "finished products" are displayed as large image slide projections, on either side of the central video monitor. The audio tape is composed of brief clips from the soundtrack of Niagara, montaged to short-circuit narrative continuity. Text, visuals, and sound bits cluster improvisationally, in a field of open interpretability. What follows is just one possible synchronicity]

* * *

D [D's voice is amplified throughout the piece]: Video, please. [M1 turns on the marginal monitor: Stop action, blurred image swipes: walking along the Falls at night, hand-held camera. Soundless. The tape plays out during the piece, eventually going to snow]

 5. Cabin manager: "The Falls are that way..."

[text slide:

After brief interrogation by a Canadian border guard, Polly and Ray arrive at Niagara Falls, Ontario, sure of their identity. Ray hopes to meet his boss, Mr. Kettering, owner of the Shredded Wheat factory at Niagara; Ray has just won a prize for a turkey stuffing recipe using Shredded Wheat. Checking in to Rainbow Cabins, they meet Rose, who claims that her husband, George Loomis, is ill. We later learn that Loomis, a failed farmer, met Rose at a bar in Duluth; her background is uncertain...She walks away; Ray's eyes, then his body, begin to follow...Polly reaches out...]

Gloves. [all put on white film handler's gloves] The Project Development Team [all freeze in tableau; D continues, reading from Production Design and Development, Ulrich and Eppinger, New York: McGraw Hill, 1995] "team diversity":

Successful development requires many different skills and talents. As a result, development teams involve people with a wide range of different training, experience, perspectives, and personalities [M1 and M2 sit behind MM].

[begin image slides]

M3: [reads a few minutes of biography from one of several standard biographies of MM he has at his podium; as the piece progresses, M3 will occasionally confuse facts, and interpolate sequences of autobiography. However, by the end of the piece he is able to successfully integrate these fragments—or so he thinks—into a "Monroe ME." This pseudo characterological development is suspended between bio. segments, when the M3 member reverts to an inanimate object; when not reading, he is not]

M1 [interrupting M3]: We have means of transport.

M2: Silence of the bells. Rising from shadows on the diagonal...

M1: We will spin around the cultural hot zone (knot of dialogic activity) Marilyn Monroe...

D: (MM, mmmm...) "Familiar examples of products composed of polymers are...

M2: Legs, lips, a mouth opening in laughter, a corpse...

M1: Our props cultural theory: a Deleuze cigarette lighter, a Baudrillard wig, a Sorkin backscratcher, mirrored Berger glasses, Bakhtin mobiles...[digitized laughter]

D: paper—cellulose, a natural polymer."

M2 [kicking off a heel, spinning it]: as "she" (the elusive image complex) reels off...

M1: projects through American popular culture [M2 hands M1 one of her blue heels]...a second hand shoe... [considers the possibilities, but comes up blank]

M2: destabilizing images of femininity.

M1 [up]: To codify the Monroe-event (ME) into a vacuous blonde, goldbricking, or femme fatale "stereotype" is to overcode (oversee), to reproject a projection, re-present...

 6. [Parody of Niagara theme music, as Ray observes Rose's walk]

M2 [interrupts, excited, head popping out the side of MM head 5]: The King of Shredded Wheat pilots his red/white/blue motor launch into Chippewa Slip, on cue, according to script!

M1 [forward—to live camera]: To fabricate a stereotype is also to entangle it in all that it cannot (fore)see, its surplus valencies: The stereotype—as any product stylization—occupies only one (of many possible) discourse positionalities; absorbing a representation (as the abstraction "MM" = ME) into an image field, into variable articulations/ agglomerations of movement, light, and sound, is also to set the representation free from any single formulation, or from the mandate to "represent" at all.

M2: "Avedon yelled 'go!'"...

M1: Team! [fist up, turning from live camera]

M2: "and she pursed her mouth around her cigarette, kicked a balloon, shot the fan out forward—and she made a world. ...Suddenly she was all angles, suddenly the wig had become her own hair and the costume her own dress."

M1 [trial appendage extensions]: Her "own"? Who "owns"? We go' wheels, mon. Anthropomorphic balloons in a holiday parade, severed from their cords, colliding with lamp posts and building edges; taut skinned plastic pears of breath popped with pins or the hot coals of cigarettes. Skin grafts, silicon remodeling, celluloid reification, hermeneutical (re)fabrication:

M2: Good pitch. [adding to above] "Wore a latex bridge to widen the cinematic effect of her profile."

D: Ok—send it to engineering!

M2: "The way we got her shade of platinum is with my own secret blend of sparkling silver bleach plus twenty volume peroxide and a secret formula of silver platinum to take the yellow out."

M1: [simultaneous]: ash blonde, sliver blonde, amber blonde, honey blonde, golden blonde, smoky blonde, topaz blonde, unbleached dark blonde, platinum blonde...[as he recites this list, M1 is lulled into a trance-like state, followed by a moment of catatonia; he slips into these states periodically throughout the piece]

 7. [Maid of the Mist fog horn]

[from within his trance state, M1 "sails" the dark blue heel across performance space into catatonia]

M3 [simultaneous bio., undertone, almost a murmur]

D: MM dialogizes the stereotypes, carnivalizes them, a play of pure signifiers. To take the mask at face value is not to see the mask, as put(-)on.

M2: Satisfied customer? "When you came on the screen we almost lost our eyeballs. We didn't...know who you were."

[text slide:

Polly and Ray tour the Falls on the Maid of the Mist; they kiss, their raincoats touch. Rose kisses a lover at the foot of the Falls (later). Mr. Kettering's boat—a trim red white & blue cruiser—is wrapped in celluloid, waiting...

D, M1 [snapping out of it]: Ha, ha. [M3, as always, is looking through his books.]

[pause slides]

D: Vid., please... "videotape—thermoplastic film extrusion" [M1 removes the black stretch material from the central monitor, switches on the video, stretches the material away from the image, drapes it around himself, walks back toward MM, freezes. The video is a montage of fragments from Niagara, cut to evade narrative continuity—focusing on image rather than story or plot. There are moving shadows, moments of laughter, a stocking being put on, bands of light and dark—the striating effect of blinds—cutting across, or through (since it's all a matter of light and image in cinema) figures, a piercing gleam of light from a lipstick case, etc.; the video bits are speeded up, slowed down, taken out of sequence, replayed, played backwards, etc. This video runs until its imagery avalanches into snow]

M2 [as M1 drapes himself]: a tag knotted around the big toe.

M3: [more bio. D stops M3 abruptly]

 8. Ray [dramatic music] "Farther back honey" [posing Polly at Falls]

[continue slides]

M1 [flattening himself against the wall/image of mmpermutations with a stagy arm gesture—Polly in bed, cabin 2, screening her eyes from intense window light]: The filmic MM is already a doubled image—a multi-D reverberation of images, which its buxom voluptuousness teasingly acknowledges, within a 2-D image plane (in the 50s and 60s, special glasses were worn to blend the red and green, slightly offset repetition of contours—self mimicking, self-reproducing, imitation of an imitation—into a single black and white illusion of three dimensionality; what happened when the glasses were worn outside the illusionistic dark of the theater? did the real—unreeled—world seem flatter?).

D: [simultaneous]: 36-24-34, 36-24-36, 37-23-34, 36 1/2-23-34, 37D-24-35, 38-23-36, 35-22-35, 37-23-37, 38DD-26-37...

M1: Doubled image—the play of within through about, a certain representation, and the escape (flight) from culturally codeable (i.e., culturally visible) images of femininity. It is this un(in)formed, elusive image presence "MM," dedoubled, out of phase with it "self" (its culturally recognizable manifestations), rather than humming in the clear voice of primary colors sharply resolved into familiar contours, that our simulations here attempt to trace, to project (the unprojectable).

D: [simultaneous]: color graphic, head and chest of a typical MM pose; black and white graphic; color collage, using photos and headlines, charcoal and/or pencil sketching, color abstract, cartoon-like graphic, patchwork wall hanging, various larger-than-life cut-outs; semi-abstract painting featuring MM applying makeup, various oil paintings; color silk-screen, featuring eight different-colored MMs; color graphic, featuring MM getting into bubblebath....

M2: "Anybody who knows me better knows better."

M1 [laughs]: Could be logo?

M2: ("We" = five masculfeminine thinkers, by gender mixed.)

 9. George [Rose in shower, humming "kiss"] "Rose...[more forceful] Rose?"

M1: Wha...whose missing? Role call!

D [M1 & M2 gesturally mark off players, images, props]: a boat rower, a waitress, a mistress, a burlesque queen, a fish cannery worker, a beauty contestant, a psychotic baby sitter, a girl in trouble...

 10. George [to Polly, in his room]: "I suppose she sent you to find out if I cut it off..."

[pause slides]

M3 [interrupts with more bio.; he seems excited, or upset, and loses his place several times. M1 gets quickly behind MM]

 11. George: "but that...song..."

[slides blank]

M1 [popping up, stuttering]: ki...ki...ki...k...k...kitty...

M2 [simultaneous]: "Here kitty, kitty..."

All: Here kitty, kitty...

[Tape B, from a Niagara

trailer: MM singing "Kiss";

voiceover— "She sang of love

just as she lived for love,

like a Luralie, flaunting her charms

as she lured men on and on

to their eternal destruction";

simultaneously, overhanging this last word

—"per fec tionnnn..."]

[text slide:

Rose sings along with her favorite record, "Kiss," during a patio party at Rainbow Cabins. In the window of her cabin, behind blinds, the watching shadow...

 12. Polly: "it's a stunning dress"

M1 [a new tack]: MM, the image in transit. Allow us to drift for a while longer...[fastening on elbow and knee guards]

[start slides]

[to live camera] A simulation, representation of a representation without a referent (an orphan? who is her mother, where is her father? her "real" changing names and the names she played with—and through—lasting the duration of a few reels: evading the articulation of them while within a film, if possible, letting others sound them...

 13. George [to Polly]: "that's some confession to make, idn'it..."

a simulacra, yet more real then the reality-effects produced by the culturally reified images/models...

M2: the various biographical versions?

M1: All "real" [two white fingers up like ears] wo/men—the "everyday" woman...nurturer, domestic worker, independent professional...

D: v. the reel real?

M2: did you survey?

 14. Polly: "What's that?" George: "It's 8:30...look out the window."

D: Development time, development cost, development capability—are the team and the firm better able to develop future products as a result of their experience?

M1: Fashion models make the everyday seem more real, but MM's reality is not to reaffirm the "truth"...[behind MM, pacing]

 15. Polly [peering through "Venetian" blinds]: "OH!"

to prove (yet again) the intractableness of the code of the "everyday" (tough this may be one of her cultural functions)—but to bring us into contact with pre-subjective lines of flight. She is a form/body all but breaking out of idealized anthropomorphic outlines [bouncing on trampoline], the exaggerated contours of conventional sexuality/femininity parodically stressed to the limit, un-fashionably: the dresses too tight, the lips too bright—makeup in contact with the full lips catalyzing a burning chemical image [leaps off trampoline, disappears behind MM].

 16. George [to Ray and Polly]: "you make different models from little kits..." [white water: the Falls]

M2: "The truth was that with all my lipstick and mascara and precocious curves, I was as unresponsive as a fossil. But I seemed to affect people quite otherwise."

[text slide:

Loomis smashes the record; it cuts his hand...

D: Bakhtin heels, Baudrillard pillow cases, Sorkin Kimono, Deleuze fireworks...

[pause slides]

M1: [assisted by M2, springs into demonstration/magician position, with a telescoping light wand]: Problem decomposition assuming an external energy source and commodifiable real: energy [outside head (1)] > convert energy to translational energy [covered head (2)] > accumulate translational energy [covered head (4)] > apply translational energy [covered head (5)] > altered state [beyond head (5)]

 17. George: "Oh but she's got a reason you'd bet on that...she's got a reason..."

D: Product architecture: responsibility for the detailed design of each chunk is usually assigned to a relatively small group within...careful resolution of interactions, geometric and otherwise, among components within the chunk.

[continue slides]

M1 [twist, torque, extreme body distortions before live camera, further manipulated with digital in-camera "art" effects]: She is pure signifier, sign of excessiveness, and in her excessiveness begins to molecularize; the body flies apart, hips shoot over the dolomite shelf that shapes the flesh of the Falls—contours of waist, thighs serge through other forms—riddle the horseshoe, "thunder 160'" [M1 throws himself against a wall or door] with annihilating force" to the talus-strewn basin [tumbling back over himself on blue floor mat] hidden seductively within the deadly "fluff" of spray.

 18. George: "occupational therapy!" [smashing his model car against the cabin wall, kicking over a coffee table]

[slide: poster]

M1: Plastic flesh over a bone frame: This is the image on the '53 poster promoting the film Niagara. "She" reclines quite at ease in the artificial slopes and curves of a gargantuan hypersexualized body, carefully posed on the lip of the Horseshoe, bridging the borders of two territories—a mouthful...

 19. Rose [telephoning, a boarding house, coding ("signifying") to lover]: "Hello is...is this the bus terminal? I'd like to know what time the buses leave tomorrow for Ottawa." "No no no! Ya got the wrong number..."

M2: What territories?

M1: Not thrown over by the torrent (5720 m³sec.) because its force passes through her: They are one and the same, the flesh of the Falls streaming from the rise of thigh (the power of the Falls is not diminished in the reconfiguration—its energy now relayed through the humanoid body, creating the new form body-falls) [leaping on, off trampoline].

M2: "I want to reproduce, such as television and all ki(n)ds of things."

M1 [M2 "accessorizes" M1's body: diskette nipples, rubber "starlet" wig over crotch, telescoping pointer between legs; pushes M1 off toward live camera for feedback]: She does not so much anthropomorphize the Falls as de(hu)manize—demanufacturize—the feminine...not "So much," but both stratagems must be actualized so that all is set (in) motion, a passing through, slipping between forms/substances, articulated stances, cultural imaginings (the equation of "nature" with sexual wild(er)ness, for example); one colossal cultural construct straddling another—the Falls, too, no more (or less) than the accumulation of its popcultural presences [seeing himself in video monitor]—wrong slide!—when she walks she falls...

 20. [Rose's lover whistling "Kiss"]

D: In product development, everything has to do with everything and everything proceeds into everything.

M2: "Why haven't I the right to grow and expand like everybody else?"

[pause slides]

M1 [lets all add-ons fall]: They won't buy it.

M2: "When she's there she's there—all of her is there." [M1 freezes]

M3: [more bio. M1 picks up props, positions himself before live camera, waits for cue]

D: Hold! [directs M1 to continue]

 21. Ray [posing Polly on the chaise lounge for a typical "cheesecake" snapshot; just before Ray releases the shutter, Rose's sudden unexpected presence briefly darkens over the posed body]: "wha...oh [nervous laugh] oh, just a minute please, wou..would ya mind"your shadow..." 22. Chief Inspector Starkey: "bring in the missing persons file!"

[slide: Microfluff; hold]

M1: Analogical development: In the 1950s, a scientific wonder enters the cold war stage combat of ideologies of progress—the merging of science and fantasy not so critically assessed as in today's technoculture—Microfluff [displaying a ball of blue polka dot nylon], a synthetic material that has no macro identity of its own, no recognizable shape; ads for the material in popular science magazines of the decade omit detailed information about its chemical makeup, so it even seems to be without articulable form or substance, truly mysterious.

[continue slides]

It can adhere to anything—becoming all becoming it—enacting the truth of mass commodity culture, the "melting pot," endless chemical flow amassing into imagery held on the cusp of deformation...

 23. Inspector Starkey's assistant: "a transient..."

M2 [simultaneous]: 5454 Wilshire Blvd., Unnamed street. Los Angeles Orphans Home, unnamed street. 11248 Nebraska Ave., 4524 Vista Del Monte, Unnamed street. Hermitage st., Studio club, El Palaccio Apartments, Bel Air Hotel, Beverly Carlton Hotel...unnamed street. Outpost Estates.

D: Is this practical accessorizing? [M1 steps away from live camera]

M2: "It doesn't make any difference where a kid like M comes from. The shortest distance to stardom is from the screen to the seats in the first row..."

M1 [simultaneous w/ final prepositional phrase, above]: Marilyn Mon roe...

 24. Rose [at the entrance to "Scenic Tunnels"]: "You've heard something about my husband." Inspector Starkey: "Just that he is your husband."

[text slide:

Polly is in the George and Rose's cabin, nursing Loomis' wound. He darkens the room to show Polly the "Illuminated Falls" through venetian blinds. Ray enters. Loomis tells the story; he smashes the model car he's been building against the wall, kicks over a coffee table...

D: A product: an object that functions in a psychological sense and embodies cultural values. A technical-physical system that has to function efficiently and reliably. Something that can be manufactured, often in large numbers, preferably fast, cheaply, accurately and with the lowest possible number of faults...yields an attractive return...can have undesirable and often even harmful side-effects...

M1: [simultaneously, facing wall image]: birth, 1/26; entered orphanage 9/13/35, left orphanage 6/26/37; first screen test, 7/19/46; divorce, 9/13/46; posed nude, 5/27/49; first life cover,4/7/52; footprints in cement, 6/26/53; 3/31/55, rode atop a pink elephant at Madison Square Garden...[freeze]

[pause slides]

M3: [quick piece of bio., statistical]

M2: "My travels have always been of the same kind. No matter where I've gone or why I've gone there it ends up that I never see anything....

[continue slides]

D: Gloves. [all change gloves. M1 spins back into action]

M1: "...the same picture layouts of yourself...?"

M1 [studying images]: A search for the "real" MM...always mediated, always versions, through others' words, her "own" words—representations, reproductions, re-visions, signs without diacritical marks...

 25. Inspector Starkey: "Tell me Mrs. Loomis, is there any chance he could have come here today?" Rose: "Here?" Starkey: "Yes, here."

M2: "I used to get the feeling, and sometimes I still get it, that I was fooling somebody—I don't know who or what..."

[text slide:

Loomis follows Rose to the Scenic Tunnels, Cave of Winds...she eludes him. He takes the elevator down to the tunnels; Rose's young, virile lover follows...Walking away, she hears their song, as planned...but the improbable has happened...]

D: Models fulfil in simulation the function of giving us a grip...

M2 [pointing to M3]: The box set—domestic MM, behind the scenes MM, dark mysterious MM, unspoiled Norma Jean; MM the wife, the star, the versions we create—2nd, 3rd hand....we never touch her—can she be touched? [M1 is preoccupied with the projected images]

M1: "The real lover is the man who can thrill you just by touching your head or smiling into your eyes or by just staring into space."...

[slides: Niagara brochures

w/ aerial views;

pictographic tour maps]

M1 [remembering the discourse, but not the job]: Boxes in boxes.... The reel versions. The Niagara MM that escapes formulation—why we hover briefly over the film Falls in our hermeneutical helicopter...

 26. Rose: "What are we doing here?" Inspector Starkey: "Wasting your time, I hope."

D: "credit cards—thermoplastic money"

M2: Let us imagine MM posing for us, in her various costumes...

M1 [Self-involved, M1 begins to cross-dress, with M2's help; removes the black stretch cape and black fur vest, puts on a blue kimono and the blonde wig (all three covered heads are now identically identitiless); M2 gives M1 a red dot, and takes a blue one for herself. Throughout this scene, until "Modern Housekeeping Cabins," M1 experiments with various movements inside the body-image MM]: white sharkskin with an orange yoke, white suede shoes; sheer black negligee, blue polka-dotted cotton, tight white shorts, choker of pearls, baseball cap, low-cut blouse with tight plaid pedal pushers; a strategically placed decorative rose, gold lame, army pants and combat boots, [toys with/stretches a black stocking] black wool jersey with a black wool coat, white gloves, mink coat, no makeup, a Chinese Kimono, dark glasses, a white scarf, black net with a translucent bosom [facing M2]...

D [simultaneous; waits for M1 to begin, above]: How does the product smell, taste. sound?...Let us imagine her in her various roles....

M2 [simultaneous. Props her leg on a chair—or the table—strips off one of her dark blue stockings (alternatively, she may draw one suggestively from her brief case), and, w/ M1's help, stretches it over her head and face; M1 considers, gives her a blue dot]: Norma Jeane Mortenson—a sexy neighbor/model/ actress; Norma Jean Baker—a vulnerable divorcee, an aspiring actress; Norma Jean Dougherty—a chorus girl, a secretary; Marilyn DiMaggio—Dick Powell's girlfriend; Marilyn Monroe—a hardened nightclub singer, mistress; Marilyn Miller—an alcoholic singer/ukulele player of an all-girl band...[M1 nets M2's head in black stocking]

[hold slide]

D: They won't buy it. There has to be coherence, alignment—signified with referent—phase parity...a sign wave...

 27. Scenic Tunnel Custodian: "Hello Mr. Starkey." Inspector Starkey: "Hello. Did you check again?" Custodian: "Yes sir I did, and there's still one missing."

M2: Let us imagine the body, as it appeared at 10:30 am on August 5, 1962: "a 36 yr. old well developed, well-nourished Caucasian female weighing 117 pounds and measuring 65 1/2 inches...The eyes are blue."

[continue slides]

M1: Let us imagine the opening of the corpse, as it took place on table #1 in the Hall of Justice, the slitting of thoracic and abdominal cavities with the "usual Y-shaped incision..." Yes, a question? ...

 28. Custodian: "and over here..." Starkey: "Le"me see...[to Rose] ever seen these before?"

M2: "The heart weighs 300 grams, contains no excess fluid, the epicardium and pericardium are smooth and glistening...both the lungs are moderately congested...the surface is dark and red with mottling...."

M1: Hard to draw breath, to catch breath, to pass through unnoticed on an exhalation...

D: "The thyroid glands are of normal size, color, and consistency...the external genitalia shows no gross abnormality....the stomach is almost completely empty...the convolutions of the brian are not flattened, the contour of the brain is not distorted....The brain weighs 1440 grams."

M2: Lips moist even in death: "Marilyn has make-up tricks that nobody else has and nobody knows...she puts on a special kind of lipstick. It's a secret blend of three different shades. I get that moist look to her lips for when she's going to do a sexy scene..."

M1: Who knows you more intimately then your mortician...

M2: "by first putting on the lipstick and then putting on a gloss..."

M1: Fall mouth, 202, 000 cfs wet lips, sucking down into, depths of the organic, internal darkness of the creature... out again, in again...the floor at the tip top of the bell tower, death orgasm, frozen come-drop bells—still shots in moving montage; locked in the girdered erection, a last night with the dead lover...

 29. Starkey: "Have ya got anyone to take care of ya, any friends or close relatives?"

D: 11/54, gynecological surgery; 8/57, miscarriage; 12/58, miscarriage; 6/59, 5/61—gynecological surgery; 7/62, alleged abortion...

M1 [directly behind one MM head]: The inability to reproduce, to let her body (any longer) be the subject of a reproduction.

M2: "Her body voluptuous and ridiculous, her face a blank negative on which male fantasies of rape and impotency were printed..."

[audio B: fade in MM singing "Kiss,"

from the soundtrack of Niagara]

D: Modern Housekeeping Cabins

[pause slides]

[As Monroe sings "Kiss," M2 and M1 sheath themselves in hooded yellow rain ponchos; M2's head is still sheathed in the black stocking. Something begins to protrude from underneath...a backscratcher, from M1, and from M2 a big pencil! They mechanically caress each other—eroticism twice removed—moan, swoon...music stops abruptly; M1 & M2 throw off coverups; M2 removes the black stocking from her head with the poncho. M1 & M2 quickly disappear behind MM]

[text slide:

Polly, Ray, and the Ketterings tour the Scenic Tunnels, Cave of Winds, dressed in black and yellow raincoats. Slick catwalks. Polly falls behind; glimpses Loomis, in black raincoat, following. She runs, slips, falls against the railing, it breaks, she grabs the splintered post, Loomis pulls her back...

D: The simulation model should be a homomorphism of the original

[continue slides]

 30. Rose: "No, no one." [Ray, in the background]: "no one...?"

M2 [as if commenting on previous interaction]: "I feel as though it's all happening to someone right next to me. I'm close, I can feel it, I can hear it, but it isn't me."

M1 [pops up, with a heart-shaped paperweight; points it toward the audience, suggesting protruding breasts]: Hey! honeymoon MM bust paper weight—shake it up and watch the image fragments drift down in hermetic lucidity...

D: Good accessorizing. Send it to Industrial Design.

M2: Newspaper story of the death, police photos, pointing fingers—the evidence, the window (shattered glass—through which she saw...) fragments ...

D: "computer housing—thermoplastic injection molding" [directs M3 to begin, as she/he continues computer manipulation of Monroe images]

M3 [bio., daydreams. M1, about to make a point, freezes before live video camera]

M1 [to live camera, though he has trouble staying within the frame; may overlap M3]: And Joseph Cotton, too—fails to master the forms of successful middle-class life, is sucked into the maelstrom of culture-destroying forces, transmogrified by his proximity to the transmitter MM, comet converted, burstar, his arms fly out from his body, miniature plastic replicas of the "good ole days" of western culture dashed to pieces against the walls that restrain him...spoked wheels, tiny instrument panels...what does he think the walls can save him from? these last rafterings of mid-american modular model honeymoon success stagings of domestic bliss drifting over the shattered imagery, dis-integrating documents of a "life"—a veneer hypostisized by the culture, a room with a view on the brink...

D [simultaneous]: She drove or was driven in a Model-T, a blue 1940 coupe, a 1935 Ford spots car, a 1948 Ford convertible, a black Cadillac convertible, a black Thunderbird, a jaguar, a white Cadillac, a chauffeur-driven limo...

M2: "They've said I want to direct pictures. I couldn't direct traffic."

D: A "man model" is a representation or imitation of ergonomically relevant features of a population...

M1 [delayed response to joke—giddy laugh]: "Georgie" (JC) and Rose (MM)—both brief presences, the odd honeymoon couple, masks of deterritorialization; she an (auto)biography of absence; he, a shadow of "social man"—both epiphytes living on images...so JC and MM are only superficially opposed in abstract Hollywood thematic machine meant to rechannel, categorize, contain, cordon disruptive mind trick; modular composition, suburban track homes, motel units...

D: Computer simulation is only possible if the behavior of the original can be represented in a mathematical model...

[hold slide]

M1: Polly, and the naively resistent "Ray" (opaque illumination)...the perfect hosts, like the motel room/representum of suburban life they function within (what is it like in their room? what do they do? what do they talk about? what "happens"? the "story" is not there, simply because the narrative is too seamlessly in place: we always already know their room, their story); so they become the perfect subjects upon which to test the virus, the resilience capacity of society, the strength of the ideological coding resisting infection, infestation, infiltration...

M2: What?

D: Keep on track.

[continue slides]

M1 [live camera: briefly tries to recontain himself within the frame]: The Modern Housekeeping Cabins, the familial couple [fanning out a deck of girlie cards, cu in video eye], the moralized body of the woman; model cars and natural phenomena packaged as tourist attractions. MM the lower rapids; turbulent swell in the planescape of Duluth...whatever of the human her path crosses, by chance or direction, swept into the black hole, particulate cosmic humanicide...

wherrrroooorrrrr...[flings deck of cards, freezes; M2 silently reorients...]

[hold slides]

D: A moment of catatonia for the product designers...[M2 puts wig on M1]

 31. Rose [bells, echoy: "Kiss"]: "I'd rather walk." [bells continue, sound of footsteps]

[continue slides]

[text slide:

Who will go over? Rose tries to escape, cross the border..."Georgie" is already there, on the deserted walkway, waiting...cigarette pressed between his lips, right hip thrown out in bitter mockery...

M2 [to live video camera. As M2 speaks, a slow, distant smile passes through M1's features, gradually distorting into a kind of grimace; the jaws continue to stretch to the point of discomfort as M1 draws the mirror/script closer and closer to his face]: The film, spiralling out from its empty core, images hurled down a beam of light, dashed against the metallic screen, flushing back over the tiered faces—pick one, anyone, how much does the light weigh as it passes through the cornea?—then (re)absorbed by 50's Lowe's State sham opulence. The screen is Falls, as the Falls is screen, porous screen absorbing while reflecting...the denser fabric of the movie screen—a particle weave... the screen of water rushing at such speed, force, and volume, it seems motionless—a matter of gravity...the apparently stable movie screen undergoing photon bombardment—it wails... "kiss me..." the light particles rebounding into the eyes/faces of the viewers—"kiss"—douse with illusion...Cave of Winds, repercussion of tons of falling water, air forced violently back over us, bumbling forward in the cheap futile raincoats provided for our comfort, soaked to the bone by the play of images, enraptured...

 32. Chief Inspector Starkey [at the morgue]: "Mrs. Loomis, can you identify this body as that of your husband, George Loomis?" [dramatic music, sound of a body collapsing]

D: We've got a product to get out here! [M1 & M2 switch heads, in an excessively orderly, almost military fashion. The next several lines are played out behind the heads, letting the language rhythms carry the action]

[slides blank, hold]

M3: [struggles with his bio.: an intimate confessional babble]

 33. Inspector Starkey [visiting the recently hospitalized Rose]: "What's all this?...I wanna talk to "er." Doctor: "Come around in the evening, she'll be out till then." 34. Manager, Rainbow cabins: "The key's in the door." 35. [door opening, closing, latch turning; blinds being drawn]

[continue slides]

M1 [semi-trance]: Her lips illuminate behind the screen of water; the falls itself a prop, MM a prop...

M2: "committed under restraint"!

[slides: hypercolorized Falls & MM]

D: 200 Bengal lanterns behind a scrim of water...

M1: both driven—propelled— by the same force...

D: Is the product exciting? Attractive? what images come to mind when viewing it?

M2: ("cascade of diamonds"?)

M1: Lip falls, pudenda lubrication, hip action, streaming libido; techni-flush of the Falls (night-lit color spectacle mimicking diurnal rainbow) rims moist lips of the lover—a clandestine kiss at the foot of the Falls, kiss of death—color coordinated excessiveness, the plunge, loss of self...

D: company policy...Team mission!

M1 [may emerge from behind MM here]: She is movement of passion, form of force slowed down enough (just enough), through makeup costume set direction constantly frustrated by her volatility—"too hot" to handle—and the relatively slower speed of light projecting through celluloid, to briefly irradiate a human, molar, thematically codeable aggregate.

M2 [simultaneously with M1]: at age six, by a friend of the family; at age seven, a Mr. Litman, with his finger; at age eight, at age eight, age eight, a Mr. Ka...Ka....Ka Ka K...at age 12, by an artist...

M1: Glacial drift grazing a '50s suburban patio party, drawing destruction in its wake. Joseph Cotton smashes the plastic disk, the codified melody of love electronically reproduced for the temporary residents of Modern Housekeeping Cabins...

D [simultaneous with M1]: geometric integration and precision, function sharing, localization of change, accommodation of variety, enabling standardization, portability of interfaces...[continuing after M1 stops] go with the flow, use visual stimuli and props, suppress preconceived hypotheses about the product technology, have the customer demo. the prod. and/or typical tasks related to the prod., be alert for surprises and the expression of latent needs, watch for nonverbal behavior...[M1's gloved hand rises from behind MM, or, if M1 is standing, comes down with great malicious comic force to grab his crotch, as he makes his way back behind MM to work out his desires]

M2: "A photographer once told me that my two best points are between my waist and neck."

M1 [giddy laughter, begins to "masturbate"]: But the refrain, abstracted from the lyrics, repeated over and over in MM's sing/talk—"kisssss me"—escapes semantic surveillance, the stability of definition....

M2: "It isn't necessary to use your voice in any special way...if you think of something sexy, the voice just naturally goes along."

M1: as does MM as a form of material culture...Georgie...

M2: "My looks are against me. They're too specific."

M1 [laughing neurotically, masturbating fiercely; M2, not paying too much attention to M1, takes over for him—his discourse, that is...]

D: Design methodology—how one may or must act in a certain situation...

M2 [standing]: The form of a cultural content and the content of that form...a flush in the cheek, Falls spray filtered through technicolor rainbow, micropolitical subversions of the radiant, erratic, nomadic body at large...

M1: "I always sleep with my mouth open. I know because it's open when I wake up." [Everyone has begun to laugh, except M2]

 36. Rose screams and George strangles her. [eerie echoy music]

[M2 observes M1's activity and screams, dovetailing Rose's prerecorded scream. At that moment, an explosion as M1 ejaculates a champagne popper; if he has been standing, M1 now collapses into his chair]

[audio B 2, from a Niagara promotional trailer:

"It's Marilyn Monroe skyrocketing

to new dramatic heights

in the destructive whirlpool

of another's deceit"]

[slides: the last few slides repeat]

D [setting up a red flashing beacon—like a small lighthouse—in front of the head of the MM stand-up behind which M1...]: "It was because of this violation that she began to stammer..." Gloves!...[all change gloves; M1 and M2 also change heads—i.e., the heads from behind which they sometimes speak] "Team Spirit": Product development teams are often highly motivated, cooperative groups. The team members may be co-located so they can focus their collective energy on creating the product. This situation can result in lasting camaraderie among team members [M1's doctor hands, above the head, in his sterile new gloves].

M2 [walking to live camera]: Reel real and real reel—the full dynamic assemblage designated MM—the MM complex, an image complex/phenomenon of material culture that subsumes other artist formations, past and future—Mae West, Madonna; these but two coordinates of an abstract event that can't be defined by limits—by lines limning—an actuation that is, by definition, indefinable, existing as a multi-dimensional space/time web the extensions, resonances, and molecules of which are in continuous dialogic tension...

D: a reciprocating screw injection molding machine...

M2: and exchange... subsuming, subsumed by...

D: "takes solid granules of thermoplastic resin, melts and pressurizes them in the extruder section, forces the melt at high velocity and pressure through carefully designed channels into a cooled mold, then ejects the finished part(s) and automatically recycles."

M1 [stirring behind his new head]: Better to move in the direction of less complexity...better better...they'll like...

M2: indifferent to dialectic closure. We follow the contours of MM's expanded/exploded body, cruise the margins of cultural coherence, register those points where she slips away...

D & M1 [D ironically, emphasizing "now"; M1 sing-song]: "yea, now, slip away ..."

 37. [eerie echoy music, creepy base. Peering through a window, the camera picks up an uncanny silhouette in the bushes out back of cabin 2. Inside, in bed, Polly has displaced Rose. George, returned from the "dead" is unaware...Polly screams]

[pause slides]

D: Common dysfunctions exhibited by development teams during concept generation include: failure to consider carefully the usefulness of the concepts employed, ineffective integration, failure to consider entire categories...

 38. Ray: "Sport clothes...[snicker] all we needed here was a couple "o shrouds."

M3 [tries to come back with a "new" bio. entity—the Monroe "ME." He ends on his own, looking for approval; D stares, then cues to M2]

 39. George [forcing Polly into a narrow hollow, Cave of Winds catwalk]: "on the floor of the tunnel I found his claim check...th...then I could put on his shoes and walk out of there officially dead."

[continue slides]

[slide: Cave of Winds]

[text slide:

Rose flees, George follows—up the bell tower that plays tunes on request (that played "Kiss" when her lover, instead of Loomis, went over—for her, with her, without her). No more flights of stairs to run up: "Georgie"...a stifled scream...]

M2 [to live video; M1 reenters, out of it]: Cave of the Winds. The husband and the lover, saturated in a becoming woman, the annihilating downpour of thigh, the thrusting out and beating down—MM's sexuality in the film always thrusting outward (even as she walks away), rather than being thrust into; she is not penetrated but engulfing—the morning after, waking late in Rainbow Cabin, it is apparent that she has taken JC for a ride in the machine of her desire...

 40. Ray: "Now get organized baby... what's wrong?"

M1: The bell tower, the morning after, erect and silent. Rigor mortis. Inside, in the dry core of the tower with its seven flights of locked doors, a ray of light falling on the jeweled lipstick case, beaming back like a near star.

Ray fishing, cast...

[slides: collages]

D: State of the world at time 1 (S1) + action = action + effect (S2).

M1: Ray's lighted world, a clean wide plane with a bowl of shredded wheat—molded into airy bricks—and the luminous pitcher of milk...[as if reshaping on of MM's heads]

M3 [small piece of bio. Or—nothing, waiting, beaming, looking out over the audience. M1 walks toward audience, so that the live camera frames him from behind: the monitored image recalls MM's long walk, away from the camera, in Niagara]

 41. George: "get a job, get organized!"

M2 [making her way back behind MM]: Walk/stalk: following what?

[text slide:

Locked in. He finds the purse, its spilled contents, the jeweled lipstick case...]

M1: Walk away, lead astray.

M2 [as M2 speaks, M1 "draws" on a MM collage projected on the wall: using a fat red phallic pen as a pointer, he connects various parts—an eye to a leg to a magazine cover, etc.—a kind of rebus message—and then invisibly writes equations or words]: Loomis: "He came after me with a wrench; after that it was a case of who killed who." Use of a pronoun that conflates, rather than distinguishes...who is who? encased in identity-neutering rubber coats, the "I" can no longer secure itself by what it "sees," the physical no longer an adequate sign of power; in the shadow play of forces without names, faciality ceases to operate, the stops are pulled—what is what and who is who...?

M1: A problem of costumer interface...

[slides: Cave, superimpositions]

D: [trying it out] : (cus...con...tomsum....?)

M2: Stairways over the Falls, catwalks of the improbable—that which cannot not happen, "happens"; desire to void the self...Cave of Winds—voice obliterating, sign obscuring blast of wind and spray through a resonant absence, black hole, vagina/cavity hidden moist risky behind the eruption, the spewing out (and "over") of all significance...

D: Still good accessorizing.

M2: battering down under its own weight onto rockfall into deep plunge pool

M1 [simultaneously]: Canadian curve of hip, the horseshoe that kicks, clangs; she is the foreign falling...[slipping down wall/image] MM fucks them all, carries them all away.

D: (We thought it best to let the designers themselves describe the case studies, and did not force them to use our terminology.)

M1: "It seems to me it's time they stopped knocking their assets around."

M2 [M1 wanders]: MM—the face of cinema freed from its justification in "representation"—she is pure image, all act.

 42. George: "Let me stay dead." Polly: "Take your hands off me."

M1: "My work is the only ground I've had to stand on. To put it bluntly, I seem to have a whole superstructure with no foundation."

M2 [M1 imitates MM straddling the Falls in the '53 poster]: So what do we follow, chart, annotate? to note the whereabouts, the when, the with whom, is to drift on a circulation of signs for their own sake, to be taken for a ride, caught in a game of tracings like a riddle of catwalks over whirlpools of deterritorialization.

 43. [dream-echoy bells and distorted lyrics""Kiss""MM's drugged semi-sleep in hospital bed]

From Polly to Ray to the Shredded Wheat King (Mr. Kettering), the characters move further into the realms of middle class dissimulation...

M1: Customer's usually right...

M2: further from contact with the white hole/white Falls; and the further "in" they get, the more packed with articulation the culture space becomes—black hole/defined Falls—the harder to escape...

[text slide:

Loomis in flight, attempts to steal Mr. Kettering's boat. Bad luck, Polly shows up. "Get off this boat." They struggle, she falls...It's red with blue and white trim...mid river, the boat runs out of gas, gets caught in the main current....The police boat turns back (deep blue?)... "scuttle it scuttle it"...she takes water, slows, draws toward a rock; George pushes Polly off to safety... watches, then...]

M1 [positioning himself before live camera for a profile shot]: Imagery stretched over a syntactical framework... that side of the black hole is white annihilation...

M2: The portly Mr. Kettering sketched across a verbal wall of banal signifieds. Only when he sees his little red white and blue cruiser adrift in the main current is he stunned into silence. Polly without a Ray. Georgie aft working a nylon stocking, remembering Rose...What does Polly want...?

M1 [simultaneously]: "Pip pip, tootaloo...those fish are dyin' to get our bait...just tryin' to get things organized... Olive oil as the French say..." [facing audience, with his back toward live camera]: "Nearly every step forward in her acting seemed to require a step backward, a rehearsing of previous mistakes, a compulsion to repeat..."

D: Polly Want...?

M2: So what are we following? MM effect; image, emanation, illusion of our own deconstruction. A pair of legs—whose legs? A shadow, like all shadows; a surreptitious profile, an energy without a face, pure virility...

 44. Rose [on the run]: "Say what I want to know is can you get me to the bus station on the American side?" Taxi Driver: "If you"re not in too much of a hurry...they've got some kind of a road block up there at the bridge."

M1 [back behind MM]: That's not marketable.

M2 [rising, wandering before camera. M1 experiments with various props—mirrors, shoes, writing instruments]: —who is JC when he returns from the Falls, the Cave? His hips thrown in static unconscious imitation of hers as he stands waiting for her at the border to her full-fleshed America. By a turn of events he is now the threshold, in her name (enacting the signature icon), through which she must pass, not into cultural, ideological or political sanctuary

 45. Falls Tour Guide: "Now right over there on June 30 1859 Blondine a French tightrope walker made his famous walk right over the Falls...if you follow me I'll show you a little better where it happened" [tense creeping background music; a stuck horn]

(for she was never a woman with a country), but out of her "self," her ineffectually (or futilely) politicized body (made in the image of 1950s American plentitude): out of her "Rose" subjectification (a partial identity) and eruptive body that was never completely probable, that was always movement toward disignification, a passing through/veering away from the delimitable...out of, to...rite du passage from partial construction on a plane of stratification to greater realization as pure MM effect [M1 shoots a pair of white-gloved "fives" over MM], replicated as pure cinema, a rhythmic coalescing and dispersing of elements in a mixed semiotic field, a deterritorialized (ing) milieu within which he is as much her as the red/white/blue boat adrift as the running red stripes of emblematic nationhood...

 46. [foreground: tense stringy music, metallic sound of small objects falling onto a hard surface, frantic knocks on a door, footsteps running up stairs, other footsteps in pursuit, more frantic knocks on doors, music becoming more dramatic]

M1: Running off, away, a flag torn holy battle beautified—as the red lips carrying (them) all over...lips sink ships...

D: Surgeons' gloves—vulcanized latex rubber.

[text slide:

Polly is rescued by helicopter...]

M2: And a piece of blue terror-struck Polly, wet blue-black hair, stranded on a spray-drenched Hollywood rock... pursued by...

M1 [popping up]: "True or falsie..."

 47. [sound of a body falling to the floor]

M2: protruding ruggedly from the torrent, lifted on what looks like a lawn chair dangling at the end of a cable into the technicolor sky—a highwire act worthy of Blondine...

D: MM's voice in a minute. But first, we should not forget to mention simulations based on stochastic models. If we take as an example somebody who is leaning completely drunk against a lamp-post. He tries to make some steps, but he sways over the street, forward, backward, to the sides—he cannot walk straight. Would it still be possible to say something about the distance the drunkard has walked (probably) after a few steps? Yes, for that purpose the Monte Carlo technique can be applied.

 48. Marina watchman ["stuck" car horn"a decoy] Hey!...What's wrong over there!...Hey!

M1 [simultaneously, piecing it out]: "Please don't make me a joke."

[slide: cu MM]

M2 [considering the video monitors; sometime previously, perhaps only recently, the video machines have automatically stopped "playing," the images dispersed into "snow"]: Video tape is tangible, like a book, but dark and wound in on itself; the laser disk goes a bit further, toward transparency and extreme sharpness of image repro.; then, silently, after a preset quantity of time, the image flash-dissolves into snow—a video snow whose (no) temperature is constant, comforting, anywhere on or off earth...welcome to Niagara Falls...

D: Can we project images onto video snow?

M1: "I worked with her hair till it was perfectly white— 'pillow case white' she called it"

M2 [looking at MM]: Polly wears blue for the skies...

M1: MM's eyes...all that blue...

M2: (thoughts freed also from objects, as objects are cast into the whirlwinds of thought...)

 49. George: "Get off this boat!"

D: Profitability is often difficult to asses quickly and directly.

[slides: blank, pause]

M1: "It might be kind of a relief to be finished."

 50. [sound of a boat motor idling, revving up, throttling out] "Hey!...Hey you!"

D: The mock-up. [M2 unveils first head of MM, the stand-up, revealing a standard pose; smiles, imitating the cardboard expression, and gestures for "client" (audience) response]: She's satisfied, she has what she wants, she let's us know...

M2: This doesn't follow...[unveils middle head] she looks away—at what?—just a pose...[elicits customer response. Unveils the final head, revealing a blacked-out face, turns the pillow case inside out, and places it over M1's head. Customer response]

M1 [from within pillow case]: she laughs, laughs, the teeth a cold crescent, the mouth is dark...she has begun to become...

M2 [lighting a sparkler and mounting it in one of MM's heads]: And so we go...

M1 [still "body"-bagged]: star fishing!

[slides black]

 51. Ray [riding in police car, tracking the stolen cruiser; sirens]: Well...where's he trying to go?" 52. [sirens]

M3 [searching his books]: ummmm...

[audio B 3, from Niagara trailer: "She could

never be his, nor any man's

completely"]

 53. [Falls roar, crashing water; scuttling]

[M2 helps M1 out of his kimono, then puts it on him backwards, securing it like a strait-jacket; she then turns M1 around, so that his "back" faces the audience, revealing, printed on the pillow case, a CU of MM, head thrown back and mouth wide and dark in laughter...]

D [with a sense of fashion, as M2 backs M1 into a front row seat among the clients]: "Marilyn's body was partially exposed in a solid bronze casket that was lined with champagne-colored satin. She was dressed in her green Pucci dress and a green chiffon scarf. Her hair was done in a pageboy.

 54. George [eerie Niagara theme music fading to background as Loomis, slipping quietly into bed after his dawn walk to the base of the Falls, whispers to the dissembling sleeper]: "Rose? [slightly louder]...Rose?"

[All offstage. D is the last to leave, distributing xerox reproductions of one of the "final products" to the clients, along with a blank sheet of paper]

D [amplified, from rear of performance space; pausing between each question, allowing audience time to respond, on paper or verbally]: Postmortem project evaluation:

 55. [Rose laughing, slyly]

Did the team achieve the mission articulated in the mission statement?

Which aspects of project performance were most positive? most negative?

Which tools, methodologies, and practices contributed to the positive aspects of performance?

Which tools, methodologies, and practices detracted form the project success?

What problems did the team encounter?

 56. The Shredded Wheat King: "Well, tootaloo for now [laughter] pip pip, c"mon mamma" [more laughter]

What specific actions can the organization take to improve project performance?

 57. Ray [noticing a bouquet of roses on the coffee table of their cabin]: "What's this thing?"

What specific technical lessons were learned? how can they be shared?

 58. [door slamming?] 59. Chief Inspector Starkey: "I know you've seen enough of the Falls for one trip, but...don't cross us off your list." 60. [tense music, Rose's breathless scream] 61. The Shredded Wheat King [laughter]: "Just tryin' to get things organized" [laughter] 62. [group laughter] 63. The Shredded Wheat King: "c"mon, c"mon kids we haven't got all day...those fish are dyin' to get our bait." ["our bait" repeated] 64. George [erie Niagara theme, fading to background, as 53.] "Rose? [quietly]...Rose...?" 65. [white noise, the Falls]

Works Cited

Special thanks to Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guittari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, Minneapolis: UNM Press, 1987.

Theory = Motion.

Baty, S. Paige. American Monroe: the Making of a Body Politic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Belofsky, Harold. Plastics: Product Design and Process Engineering. Munich: Hanser Publishers, 1995.

Boothroyd, Geoffrey, Peter Dewhurst, and Winston Knight. Product Design for Manufacture and Assembly. New York: M. Dekker, 1994.

Conway, Michael, and Mark Ricci. The Films of Marilyn Monroe. New York: The Citadel Press, 1964.

de Dienes, Andre. Marilyn Mon Amour: The Private Album of Andre de Dienes, Her Preferred Photographer. New York: St. Martins Press, 1985.

DePaoli, Geri, ed. Elvis + Marilyn: 2 X Immortal. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1994.

Lembourn, Hans Jorgen. Diary of a Lover of Marilyn Monroe. Trans. Hallberg Hallmundsson. New York: Arbor House, ND.

Mailer, Norman. Marilyn, a Biography. New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1973.

Pepitone, Lena, and William Stadiem. Marilyn Monroe Confidential. New York: Simon and Schuster, ND.

Riese, Randall, and Neal Hitchens. The Unabridged Marilyn: Her Life from A to Z. New York: Congdon & Weed, 1987.

Rollyson, Carl E. Jr. Marlyn Monroe: A Life of the Actress. Ann Arbor: U.M.I. Research Press, 1986.

Roozenburg, J. Eekels. Product Design: Fundamentals and Methods. Chichester, England: Wiley, 1995.

Sexton, Richard. American Style: Classic Product Design from Airstream to Zippo. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1987.

Shevey, Sandra. The Marilyn Scandal. London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1987.