I’ve now watched The Seven Year Itch perhaps three full times in the last two weeks. It stars Marilyn Monroe and won a Golden Globe as best actor for her co-star, Tom Ewell. Here’s the first paragraph of Wikipedia’s plot summary:
Richard Sherman is a middle-aged publishing executive in New York City, whose wife Helen and son Ricky are spending the summer in Ogunquit, Maine to escape the city's crippling heat. When he returns home from the train station with the kayak paddle Ricky accidentally left behind, he meets an unnamed woman, who is a commercial actress and former model. She has subleased the apartment upstairs while its owners are away for the summer. That evening, he resumes reading the manuscript of a book in which psychiatrist Dr. Brubaker claims that almost all men are driven to have extra-marital affairs in the seventh year of marriage. Sherman has an imaginary conversation with Helen, trying to convince her, in three fantasy sequences, that he is irresistible to women, including his secretary, a nurse, and Helen's bridesmaid, but she laughs it off. A potted tomato plant falls onto his lounge chair; the seemingly unclad attractive young woman upstairs apologizes for accidentally knocking it off her balcony, and Richard invites her down for a drink.
Notice the order of events. First Mr. Sherman sees The Girl (Marilyn Monroe, she has no name in the movie) arrive, and then he has this fantasy discussion with his wife, trying to convince her of his attractiveness to woman. (Note that in the third of these fantasies he reprises the famous “love on the beach” scene in From Here to Eternity.) Is far as I can tell, that’s the primary driving force behind his interest in The Girl. Yes, he sees that she’s beautiful, but that’s important, not because he appreciates beauty the way an artist does, or even because he takes it as an indicator of sexual pleasure; it's important because her interest in him reflects well on his manhood. If such a beautiful woman is attracted to me, then I must be a manly man indeed! I detect no interest in or awareness of sexual pleasure.
This is a very Girardian world. Total mediation.
Later on Sherman fantasizes himself seated at the piano, wearing a red smoking jacket straight out of the Playboy fashion advisor[1], and playing Rachmaninoff’s 2nd Piano Concerto while nattering on in a thick nondescript continental accent. When The Girl convinces him to sit down at the piano, the best he can manage is chopsticks. She happily joins him and takes it up a notch, having a lot of fun in the process while he bumbles along wondering what’s going on. The whole scene is an elaborate parody of a sexual encounter. To be sure, yes there's a bit where they work together to pop the cork on a bottle of champagne resulting in the expulsion of liquid all over the place, an obvious parody on ejaculation. But that's what it is, a parody, a simulacrum of sex that pointedly elides and mystifies the substance. The movie avoids sexuality in this most elaborate way.
There’s much more to the movie that those two scenes, other actors, subplots, complications, the famous scene of The Girl standing above the subway grate, but really, that’s it. In this movie, the beautiful blonde bombshell exists to convince the anodyne bread-earner that he’s a good man because he’s kind and sensitive. Important virtues to be sure, but also functionally asexual. They’re both effectively neutered.
Is that middle America in the 1950s? If so, what are we to think about the state of marriage in the 1950s if a story about a typical husband's desire for an extramarital affair is grounded, not in a desire for sexual pleasure with a woman other than his wife, but for a need to feel attractive to other women? What does that imply about his relationship with his wife?
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Note: You might want to look at this older post, where I compare this movie with Sex and the City and Madmen.
[1] Playboy premiered two years earlier, with Marilyn Monroe as the centerfold. The movie plays on this, with one motif being a photo of The Girl in a bikini lying on the beach.
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