Marilyn Monroe
Actually, she is never referenced by both names, but is always just simply “Marilyn.” That is part of the symbolic status, of course. Marilyn Monroe is the Hollywood dream of starlet-to-star come true beyond even the wildest hopes. In 1950 she was just another sexy blonde getting small parts requiring little more than looking at least as pretty as the other 500 beautiful blondes who might have landed the role if just one little thing had gone differently. A decade later she was the biggest star in Hollywood, divorced from the most famous living baseball player and married to America’s most famous playwright while allegedly sleeping with both the President of the United States and his brother, the Attorney General. Marilyn Monroe remains more than half a century after her death the embodiment of the Hollywood dream. She represents everything that Weetzie’s former-starlet mom does not.
Three Wishes
Amazingly, Weetzie is given a magic lamp holding a genie inside with the ability to grant three wishes provided they fall under certain conditions. (Infinite wishes is one of those prohibited conditions.) The time between the moment the genie appears and the moment when he grants her wishes is indeterminate, but a rough estimate would be about two minutes. Weetzie makes her wishes without reserving any time for thoughtful consideration; she just blurts all three out in one extraordinarily imprecise sentence. This process serves to symbolize the many various ways in which people pursue their dreams, ambitions, and goals without applying logic and forethought. That the dreams are granted is irrefutable, but the consequences of those fulfilled wishes remain just as much as mystery as everybody else’s life.
My Secret Agent Lover Man
This is literally the name by which Weetzie’s boyfriend resulting from one of the wishes goes by. (In a future sequel his real name will ultimately be revealed and, needless to say, it is nowhere near as interesting.) When Weetzie makes her wish for a perfect Duck the only information she has to give the genie is a pop culture allusion. This may at first make her seem a bit flighty, but the fact that his name has nothing to do with his job an is based on an ambiguous conceptual figure symbolically represents the idea that everybody carries of their perfect romantic partner. It is probably almost never a fully fashioned individual they fantasize about, but a vague culturally-inspired archetype.
Witch Baby
One day our confederacy of protagonists find an abandoned baby left on their doorstop. The baby is the offspring of ill-conceived but successful conception resulting from a tryst between My Secret Agent Lover Man and a Lanka or, as they are more commonly known, a dark-haired femme fatale. This illegitimate offspring from the past is exactly the sort of thing that can cause even a very happy couple in the present to undergo trauma in the future. But that’s not the case here. Witch Baby is a representative archetype like her father: the dark romantic secret of a lover capable of blowing everything to bits. She is declared a witch baby, but nevertheless is welcomed as part of the unusual family dynamic, symbolizing that love conquers jealousy.
Native Americans
One of the more controversial elements of the book is its ambiguous treatment of Native American culture. Well, ambiguous to some and downright offensive others. What both camps seem to miss, somehow, is that the seemingly problematic aspect of the characters simultaneously bemoaning the horrific treatment of Native Americans by the U.S. government and culturally appropriating their tribal symbols is intended to be ironic. There is no paradox here at all which is what stimulates the controversy. Native Americas are quite directly implicated as a symbol of the powerless and disenfranchised in America. It is certainly not by accident that every sympathetic character in the book can also effectively be described using those terms.
