Sydney Sweeney‘s appearance at the Vanity Fair Oscars party last night had a strange quality to it. Her last week’s wavy “lob” had been chopped into a soft, blown-out haircut; her cream-colored, plunging halter-neck dress, on the other hand, seemed more appropriate to be wafting over a subway grate than trailing along a red carpet. To put it succinctly, the 26-year-old actor looked a lot like Marilyn Monroe.
Naturally, Sweeney is not the first to attempt to summon the image of the most well-known starlet in the world; to name just a few, James Franco, Kim Kardashian, Madonna, Beyoncé, and Anna Nicole Smith have all deliberately mimicked Monroe’s red lips and platinum hairstyle. Even if it was inadvertent, the tribute given by the “Anyone But You” star on Sunday night felt more meaningful.
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With a series of jokes about her sexualized typecasting, allegations of affairs with co-stars, and her large chest, Sweeney made her hosting debut on “Saturday Night Live” last week.
An intense online controversy was sparked by the episode, which featured Sweeney as a waitress at Hooters in a spoof that has already received 3.7 million views on YouTube.
Were Sweeney’s breasts “double-D harbingers of the death of woke,” as one writer for Canada’s National Post described them? In other words, did SNL herald a return to sneering at and criticizing women’s bodies by using Sweeney’s body as a visual punchline? “We’ve been criticized for wanting or appreciating beauty for years,” Amy Hamm of the National Post said. “(But) when it comes to Sweeney, the truth is that sex sells.”
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Since then, jokes about Sydney Sweeney’s boob have been freely shared, particularly in the comments section of the actor’s Instagram photos. In reaction, a deluge of reactive opinion pieces have appeared. The Cut wrote, “Leave Sydney Sweeney’s boobs out of this.” A Vanity Fair thought piece titled “Saturday Night Live did Sydney Sweeney dirty” compared watching Sweeney’s episode to “watching Barbie before her existential crisis.”
All of which adds to Sweeney’s after-party look’s poignant quality. Was Sweeney trying to send a message to the industry by taking on the role of another mistreated female actor? We are unable to be certain. But compared to Jolie’s winged liner and tattoos, Sweeney’s satin Marc Bouwer gown, which she wore to the 2004 Oscars, was done differently, with a romantic hairstyle and a golden smokey eye.
It’s hard to avoid reading something about Marilyn Monroe these days as depressing. In certain ways, Monroe’s dazzling achievements and shining acting career have been eclipsed by the image of a woman tormented and hunted for her body as more details about her horrific past come to light.
Monroe biopics have been accused of using “trauma porn” to continue the movie star’s posthumous exploitation even up to this day. Her wardrobe has been raided for museum displays, and later museum exhibits have been raided for red carpet events.
Others have more recently examined the pressure of being viewed as a “sex symbol.” Model and actress Emily Ratajkowski claimed in her first book, “My Body,” that she was “not just famous; I was famously sexy” (2021). “I have definitely benefited from capitalizing on my sexuality in numerous ways. However, I’ve also felt constrained and objectified by my status as a so-called sex symbol in the world in less obvious ways.
Few people can ever understand Sweeney’s true feelings toward the cultural discourse surrounding her image following her now-famous SNL appearance, but one can only hope that she was part of the joke from the beginning.