Moviemaking was an agony for her and became so for everybody she worked with. And yet the directness and naturalness she achieved during these harrowing sessions consistently astonished everyone who'd been on the set. On-screen she looks startled, as though she's so entirely present in the moment and in her glowing skin that she has lost track of the plot. She hugs herself, wiggles her shoulders with the pleasure of inhabiting her body. There's nothing supernatural in it, of course, unless you consider the immense sway that movie images and technology hold over all our imaginations.
Description approaches hallucination.
The action is told by numerous voices, some singular and famous, some anonymous and plural. Volatile, delusional, chain-smoking and sometimes setting the sheets on fire, she delivers endless apocalyptic rants based on serendipitous reading and a thousand movies. Or, more ominously, he's there all the time, in the movie reality at the back of her mind that always threatens to overwhelm her grip on everyday events. Hyperreal and overwrought, the book stuns by its relentless energy. Less successful, I think, is a hokey, probably manufactured central episode having to do with Monroe's obscure affair with a sad, sexy, druggy Charles Chaplin Jr.