#marilyn monroe x choi san meta

[storkmuffin]

The Magic of San (6/n)

Marilyn Monroe Sidebar #4/4 ( Sidebar 1, Sidebar 2, Sidebar 3)

No but seriously, you guys, there are so many similarities between Marilyn Monroe and Choi San. Please agree with me.

On and off.

Marilyn Monroe was fabulous at being a movie star. She could turn it on or off at whim, according to at least one friend (Lee Strasberg's daughter). She was invisible just walking along the street in normal clothes in New York City, dressed simply, and nobody noticed her, beyond maybe, Oh that's a pretty lady. Then she asked her friend, Do you want me to become her? and the person who witnessed it happen couldn't actually articulate what it is she did, only that she did something and suddenly Norma Jean was gone and Marilyn Monroe was there, in the same clothes and get up but nevertheless suddenly present, and people swarmed.

Marilyn was also apparently absolutely delightful to fans. Anyone who ever saw her at a movie premier had a wonderful time, because she loved the red carpet, loved her fans, and really 'performed' being a movie star for them.

In his TokToq Live on 2025.1.19, San said that he sometimes has this feeling that he is 'not himself' when he's performing on stage. (TBF, I have heard Beyonce say this too, actually, and she names her stage persona entirely different from her actual name). Furthermore, he is often told that he "looks like San of Ateez" but nobody ever actually clocks him. This has led him, in his characteristic way, to wonder "Is my flesh and blood self not very exciting?" (내가 실물이 별로인가?) but I think possibly, he has this "on" persona and an "off" persona. "On" San is immediately recognizable, "off" San just looks like a boy who looks a lot like San of Ateez. There's a great post that makes the distinction between San and "Sanimal." I wonder if all great stars have this??

San shows a lot of deliberation about what it means to be an idol. There are expectations for how he is supposed to behave. San has learned what the rules are, and wants very much to adhere to them. He's paired with Wooyoung a lot, who also is very aware of what the rules are, and gets off on deliberately flouting them. San will calmly lecture Wooyoung about his failure to behave like an Idol, insisting "remember you're an Idol" when Wooyoung purposefully acts against the role of model citizen that S. Korean society demands of Idols.

On a different live, (2025.1.27) San has addressed when the fans in attendance who were apparently cursing at him to get his attention. He laid out his boundaries: He can tolerate 미친 but beyond that is a bit difficult to stomach. He said note that since many foreigners are all intentinoally learning Korean swear words, he tries to accept the strong language when it is used as adjectives - as in 'fucking' is fine if it's in the context of "I fucking loved the show" perhaps, but a straight up, aggressively intended "fuck you" would not be ok. Then he said, as a statement, 여러분은 평생 내가 욕하는 거 들을 리 없겠지만. (You would never hear me swear your whole lives.) I thought this was an extraordinary statement for a guy who's 25 and planning to stay in the public eye decades to say. How would that be sustainable? But he intends to see it through - of that I have no doubt.

Studious

Both San and Marilyn are hardworking people, sure, but I actually think most people are hardworking if you give them something with even a modicum of meaning. What San and Marilyn are, actually, are studious, almost bookish.

Marilyn had a major intellectual hunger that was never actually fulfilled, mostly because given the combination sexism and resentment that her great beauty inspired, she was so relentlessly mocked for her intellectual curiosity. But she read, challenging herself to difficult texts, wrote, had considered and rather brave political opinions. Towards the end of her life, Marilyn was trying to figure herself out by making recordings of her thoughts, going to therapy, taking difficult acting classes, and for a while, very reliant on a strict acting coach. Marilyn and Natasha Lytesse are still speculated on as being lovers, which I don't really care about, but Marilyn did insist on having Natasha present on her sets and listened only to her. This too was mocked, but I assume Marilyn's reliance on this coach wasn't just the usefulness of whatever coaching she got - Lytesse was possibly the only person on set who took Marilyn seriously as an artist. Marilyn kept wanting to get better, and be serious, and make art.

As a bookish person who also loves the idea of expanding my inner world by taking in external stimulus, it always hurts me that Marilyn never had anybody take her intellectual yearnings seriously - not Joe DiMaggio, not Arthur Miller, very few of her male costars, even fewer directors. She was just born at the wrong time, in so many ways. I feel like her equivalent may actually be Nicole Kidman - a superlatively beautiful actress who wants to make dark material. Kidman of course was raised in a stable, intellectual home.

San has exhibited a similar lack of pride and hunger for artistic achievement. It can't have been easy, necessarily, to be a stiff, slightly awkward dancer with mostly a martial arts background asking for coaching and attention from very near peers. It speaks to a lackof unnecessary pride, which I think is rare to find in very young people. San's dance performances are to my eye the most 'ballet' to me, in terms of his having absorbed whatever classes he got in formal dance training and insisting on keeping those in his body. San is, along with Hong Joong, the only singer in this singing group that seems to just constantly burst into song. (I have not seen a long of Jongho footage, tbf). Whenever he's bored, waiting for other people to get ready for him, or his mood improves, he just starts singing. Other members have said that he's a bit of a practice nut, constantly working on improving himself in a way they found transformative and inspirational.

And one more thing -

Throughout the European concert tour, San has discussed his continuing to study English. He devotes 30 minutes per day every day to studying, and he does it using a very standard textbook. I found this so moving, that he would tell people about it (creating external accountability) and be so sweetly proud of the progress he was making in his book.

San is gifted at languages by the way. I too am gifted at languages, so I am the authority on this. This Atiny on Tumblr has noticed it too, that he has an ear and a knack for correct pronunciation ( in this case, German). His English pronunciation seem like real accomplishments to me. I assume that his being a gifted singer has something to do with this - he can hear with great attention to detail, so it helps him replicate the sounds better. During their Japanese TV special, San made a concerted effort to try to speak Japanese with the people that he met as well as the crew, even if it's imperfect, because this is how you improve. (Yunho seems the most fluent in Japanese, but that's just ... Yunho, to be good at all the idol things lol, which in Kpop includes speaking Japanese).

The encouragement and admiration that San's fans express for him when he talks about studying English or Japanese is something I'm so happy he has, and I wish Marilyn had had something like that too. **

**Though I don't know -would she? If say, another (I think) very smart, sexy little blonde (say, Sabrina Carpenter) went on social media and talked about how she was teaching herself German so she could read Goethe, would her fans support her?

[storkmuffin]

The Magic of San (5/n)

Marilyn Monroe Sidebar 3/4

My longform essay series on the many similarities between Marilyn Monroe and Choi San of Ateez, the 4th Gen Kpop Boyband. You can find part 1 of the Marilyn Sidebar here, and part 2 is here.

Performance Intelligence I have a weird prejudice, perhaps, in favor of the native intelligence of performing artists. I just don't see how someone who is stupid could actually craft a performance in something as complicated as film acting or a song-and-dance show together.

Consider the above images and the skills involved. Marilyn's expressions, the use of her eyes, where she chooses to look, the hands, the shoulders, and knowing where to stand in the light and in relation to the camera - and on cue! SO HARD. San had to do the same thing - find the camera at the right time, stop moving, know where to stand in relation to his camera, what angle to turn his neck so that it shows his face best and casts the least amount of shadow from the lensed glasses he's wearing!

The actresses who worked with Marilyn Monroe, especially young Marilyn, have been very consistent in talking about how good she was at her job. She always knew exactly where 'her light' was, she also knew exactly how she would come off on camera (rather than how it looked in the moment on set, I suppose), knew the choreography and always knew exactly what she was going to do. She was moreover so effortless in all this that it made these female coworkers actually wonder, Does she know how this is coming off? This has to be deliberate, right? But why does it look so natural? Men (Lawrence Olivier, for one) reacted with rage at her competence, by the way. That she was effervescent and exciting in the final film in a way that 'superior' actors could not match.

San is spectacular at combining facial expressions with his physical dance movements. The concentration that it must take to make the perfect expression - whether one of punch drunk excitement, sneery sexiness, stern disapproval, I'm dangerous and might bite - in between very athletic dance movement? Spectacular. He makes the most of every costume he's given, too, and he's especially good at working with head-prosp: hats, glasses, bruises.

And without being very loud about it, San seems to consistently want to branch out into a 'creator.' I recently learned that he has contributed choreography to Work. Ice On My Teeth behind the scenes showed that one of the majorly distinctive vocal parts of that song, where each singer appears with a low, 'uhh' that sets the mood, was a San idea. I like these snippets but I find this level of contribution much more believable from a young person who was mostly trained to be a performer, than the whole "so and so wrote the whole song" or they are "entirely self produced" types of ad lines they have been pushing since the 3rd or so generation of kpop, when the credit list for each song in kpop usually has like nine people, most of them Swedes. Nobody yelled at Whitney Houston or Pavarotti for not writing the songs they performed, so I think Kpop having to insist on 'they are authors' is a reaction to the racism that originally caused kpop to be so summarily dismissed. In short - he's a growth stock, and I have high hoptes.

[rant begins] By the way!! If you actually watch Marilyn's movies, her characters are actually never stupid. They just aren't. They're often very clever and strategic - they just aren't invested in looking smart which is a very different thing. Marilyn getting increasingly frustrated, and then, in her final years, enraged about the 'dumb'ness continually attributed to her and her characters is very understandable. What Marilyn's characters actually are is good. They're ethical. They don't imagine that other people constantly want to sexually molest them, or don't see them as fully people and actively hope they are assaultable without consequence just because of how pretty their face and body are. And her characters are often surrounded by men who do and think exactly this, and get annoyed, then aggressive, when she refuses their advances. But Marilyn's characters are NOT STUPID. [end of rant]

Blunt, Direct Humor.

While Marilyn and San both share the image of being guileless, as I've said, and even potentially a little bit lacking in the sophistication department in the initial years of their career and such, they're both given to being very funny in a really blunt, almost rude, way.

The key quote here from Marilyn Monroe is when Playboy magazine (and Hugh Hefner, that motherfucker) made his debut as a pornographer by publishing Monroe's nude photo (without her consent NOR paying her) Marilyn was subjected to what sounds like a series of infuriating interviews where she had to explain herself in order to save her own career.

The tightrope that the young Marilyn Monroe had to walk sounds exactly the same as the one that members of the Kpop star system try to stay perched on. She was supposed to be fascinating, sexy, beautiful, give off the air of being sexually available and down for a good time, but being shown to be an actually sexual person or performing 'too much' sexuality in the 'wrong way' could end everything. Being of the 'wrong' sexuality also would have had the same effect.*

*In recent years, there's been speculation that Marilyn was asexual (either innately or as a reaction to all the sexual aggression she endured) or potentially bisexual (in her relationship with her acting coach).

Creating a playbook that Madonna Ciccone would use decades later, Marilyn Monroe chose to go with a bold, Yeah I did It, So What? approach. One lady interviewer (I'm using the word lady very intentionally) in particular had the gall to ask her, about nude photos made famous by a porno mag, "Do you mean you had nothing on!?" To this, Marilyn answered, "Oh! I had the radio on!" Perfect fucking answer, and SO FUNNY.

When Marilyn was trying to go for a role in a serious movie (The Brother Karamazov), she went on a sort of PR campaign to lobby for the role, including reading the book in public. It's a bloody thick book, that one (and kind of tedious to read because the women in it are so awful, like OK Fyodor, you don't like us, I get it), so she had it out for a press conference held at her (and I think Arthur Miller's?) house. A male reporter asked her, nastily, "Have you actually read that book?" Marilyn's answer was to take a breath, blink, smile, and say, sweetly, "Have you?" (He couldn't answer in the affirmative).

San exhibits similar humor that I think doesn't always translate because it's so culturally Korean, even when he's saying it in English. And obviously, the examples I'm citing are nowhere During a recent (Feb 2025?) Live, a fan asked him, "What's the secret to your beauty?" (He read it out in Korean, 잘생김의 비결요?") His answer, seriously-faced, was "My dermatologist." (피부과요!) I had to snort at that one. Terrific answer.

Regardless of what's actually happening in his personal life, San has exhibited some distress at both the BL shipping and drawing erotic attention from men while in public interactions with fans or for content But he does it in a way that's actually very funny - cuttingly so. When a European Atiny told him that San was her boyfriend's ult/ bias, he looked taken aback, and then said, in English, "Sorry, Bro!" that got the whole sing-song nuance of that particular Amercanism down pat. A second European Atiny told him the same, some weeks later, and he varied his answer, giving a very solemn, "Thank you, Sir." See? FUNNY.

San exhibits a lot of the traits of a traditionally raised Confucian boy, and one of them is to be very conscious of his own age. He is now, 25 (turns 26 in July). He seems to attribute a lot of meaning to this particular age. When San feels like the fans on Lives are babying him or infantilizing him too much, he immediately brings up the fact that he's 25 going on 26 as a rebuttal. But he does it in this down-energy monotone way, using a reedy Seoul voice, almost seeming sleepily bored as he issues his comebacks. And at one of those post-concert meet and greets, a fan handed him the little plushie animal mascot that each of the Ateez members has, and asked, "Is this you?" His answer was, "This is not me. I'm his father." A really blunt sort of conversation ender, but in the moment it was funny because it was unexpected, and delivered with a star's charm.

[storkmuffin]

The Magic of San (3/N)

The Marilyn Monroe Sidebar Part 1/4

Basically I just want to talk about Marilyn Monroe and San at the same time for no very good reason.

I found myself saying a while ago that I feel like Choi San lives the life that Marilyn Monroe would have wanted for herself, because though their biographies diverge so sharply, they bring about the same sort of feelings in me whenever I encounter their work.

OK but no, but hear me out!

Disclaimer: My understanding of Norma Jean Baker/ Marilyn Monroe is as fictional as my understanding of Choi San the person/ the idol, but I do come by my fantasies with a sense of rigor insofar as I try to not have an agenda about what I want these people to be like.

GIF by summersinger

The superficial similarities: Marilyn and San are both obviously gorgeous people.

Very photogenic bone structures, very symmetrical features. They're very lucky, physically, because they have a combination of features and then got styling and in the case of Marilyn, definitely, plastic surgery, that achieves the platonic ideal of what their specific 'type of person' is supposed to look like: San the handsome Korean man, Marilyn the pretty blonde (fake) blue eyed white woman. Marilyn is said by almost all eye witness accounts of her to have had the most astonishing skin - poreless, porcelaine, glowing. Even though my standards are admittedly bizarre because I've lived in a culture always obsessed with skincare (S. Korean), San exceeds the highest expectations for skin tone, clarity, evenness. Even his rosacea, which seems to bother him, has a' blusher' effect and only adds to his beauty.

All the Ateez boys are beautiful (otherwise they wouldn't have been selected) but I have to say that San's looks in particular being acknowledged as beauty represents, to me, a triumphant return to form for Korean self-worth that was so maliciously and intentionally harmed by the Japanese and then further destroyed by the trauma of the Korean War and subsequent years of poverty-and-political-disaster-stricken misery. He has almond, not round, eyes. He looks unmistakably Korean, with the cheekbones and the shape of the jaw. Koreans have recovered our sense of liking ourselves and how our typical features look again after a century's worth of painful detour. Every time I see San, I feel an extra level of pleasure just because of this additional meaning I read into his face.

Sidebar: We deny it now, I think, because of the racist attacks by white people who always figure out some new way to be racist, like it's a really important hobby to them, but there was a brief period where the "handsome" men often looked like they could have a white parent. If they actually had a white parents, of course, they couldn't really have a show business career because that was too painful and unacceptable for our own ethnocentric reasons.

Golden Age of Hollywood = Kpop: There's actually a lot about the system that created Marilyn Monroe out of Norma Jean Baker that is actually very similar to the system that created San the Idol. The Hollywood studio system took young people, gave them lessons in acting, singing, modeling, taught them how to behave, gave them media training before it was called that, made them change their bodies and faces and haircolor, assigned them personas, and often gave them whole new names. They invented fictional backgrounds for the young aspirant to 'sell' if reality was insufficiently exciting or was too dark. Movie 'fan' magazines were put out by the studios, sometimes directly and sometimes under cover of being journalism.

There's more of this type of content due to advances of technology for Kpop, but the creation of this sort of parasocial relationship with a fictional version of a person's performance persona (I am not saying that twice - I'm saying that there's the actual performance persona and then a fictional version of that person that is sold separately) has always been in existence.

The reason there's so much more content for Kpop is due to the fact that humans can have movie making equipment with them, complete with sound recording and editing capacity, in their pocket is something nobody in Hollywood ever imagined even though they could and did dream about Martians invading earth. But the creation of the 'persona' is a very old tradition, at this point.