The author sees a link between the posture of Charcot’s female hysterics and the figure of Marilyn Monroe in her movies, Niagara and The Misfits. The fetish in these films presents the “has she or hasn’t she?” “will she or won’t she?” of the phallic woman. Seeing Marilyn Monroe as a fetish proposing a foreground to mask a background, Kaplan reads the background text in the films of Monroe as the repression of female traumas about sexual violence, loss, and female difference. The foreground is the utopian fantasy of a return to the preoedipal mother and rebirth in nature through the hyperidealization of the woman’s body. Nonetheless, Kaplan insists upon not privileging the message of the background over the message of the foreground, but rather seeing the discordance or discrepancy between the two and their dynamic relation. The rock star, Madonna, is considered as the return of the repressed Marilyn Monroe, in Madonna’s female macho vengeance for the fetishistic exploitations suffered by Monroe.