August 22 2026, 16:35

Insignificance

Director: Nicolas Roeg

Release year: 1985

Four iconic figures meet in a New York hotel room in 1954. They are not named, instead called The Actress, The Professor, The Senator and The Baseball Player, but it’s clear who they are meant to be: Marilyn Monroe, Albert Einstein, Senator Joe McCarthy and Joe DiMaggio.

Einstein is tormented with visions of the dead in Japan after the atomic bombs dropped in 1945. When Monroe knocks on his door in the middle of the night, he doesn’t take much convincing to let her in, even if he doesn’t know who she is. She’s lonely, unhappy in her marriage to DiMaggio, and wants to take the chance to get to know Einstein as a person. One of her strategies is to show her understanding of his theory of relativity with a joyful demonstration using children’s toys she bought en route. Another strategy is the offer of sex. But then DiMaggio shows up.

The relationship between Monroe and DiMaggio is doomed for many reasons. Her desire for children is thwarted by abortions organised by the studios because she’s under contract that have left her permanently damaged. DiMaggio is a man who knows what he wants and gets it – but he can’t give her children, and the attention she gets is making him miserable. In buying her attention he has bitten off more than he can chew.

Senator McCarthy tries to intimidate Einstein into appearing at one of his infamous hearings, and if he doesn’t, threatens to confiscate his life's work. He is power hungry, manipulative and brutal. Einstein’s mathematical proofs lie in chaotic loose piles around the hotel room and Einstein seems to be happiest when lost in theory and abstractions. He wants to describe the universe completely with mathematics. By the end it becomes clear that this is one of the ways that he avoids feeling the guilt of his connection with the creation of the atomic bomb.

The wonder of the film is that it’s played as a black comedy bordering at times on farce, but it still manages to address all the themes alluded to above – the deaths of civilians by atomic bombs, abortion and miscarriage, the allure of fame, the psychology of needing attention, Hollywood misogyny, political power, infidelity, and more. The actors lean in to the mythic qualities of the icons they are playing, but the script puts all of their human insecurities on display. Even the biggest names in Western culture are insignificant in relation to the stars in the sky — looking up at the stars is a motif that comes up multiple times. Fame (and infamy) is relative.

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