Arthur Miller’s The Misfits is a confused attempt to grapple with some of the Big Questions. It started as a spare short story for Esquire, then Miller decided to give it to his wife (Marilyn Monroe, in case you’re a late-comer) as a screen-play; and then he sat around on location beefing up Marilyn’s part (she hadn’t even existed in Esquire) at the expense of the story’s definition.’
Besides Gay, there is Guide, a displaced war veteran who pilots an ancient airplane, and goes out with Gay on their mechanized mustang hunts. And there is Roslyn, a low-slung golden girl who used to dance in nightclubs before she found out all those old men with white faces and blasted eyes weren’t interested in art at all. Roslyn is supposed to represent a sort of Goddess of Life-Energy, an earth-mother image who worries about rabbits. Freedom for her is really meaningless: emotional contact between people is what really matters. Because it is this contact she
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