I preached this month on the poetic (you can listen to it here) particularly in the wisdom literature of the Old Testament. I explored how true poetry paradoxically brings clarity in articulating the inexpressible aspects of human experience whilst maintaining a sense of transcendent mystery. Great poetry, I said, should both reveal and veil the truth, allowing us to encounter the ineffable without confining it to rigid concepts. This same artful balance between disclosure and concealment struck me while watching My Week With Marilyn, a film set during a brief week in 1956 when Marilyn Monroe, struggling with fame and personal insecurities, forms an unexpected bond with Colin Clark, a young production assistant.
The film dances between exposing Monroe’s fragility and reinforcing the myth of the ‘tortured artist’, a trope that culture has long glorified. As I watched, I found myself asking whether Monroe’s art was, in essence, poetic: what truths were being uncovered in her performances and what mystery was being hidden?
In My Week With Marilyn, Monroe’s genius is portrayed as inextricably linked to the public knowledge of her suffering. Her brilliance seems to emerge through the cracks of her fragile ‘self’, reinforcing a narrative that talent is fuelled by the revelation of an image of personal pain. But this narrative left me uneasy. While the ‘tortured artist’ is a seductive concept, it reduces creativity to suffering and risks limiting the person behind the art. Does this myth truly capture the nature of artistic expression, or does it lock it into a narrow, harmful vision?
As an artist, I have wrestled with this myth. For a long time, I was trapped feeling that the disclosure of suffering was the key to accessing a depth in my poetry, particularly when I was publicly grieving the loss of my wife, Sarah. During that time, I became prolific in my writing, effortlessly tapping into deep wells of emotion. I was lauded for this and revelled in the encouragements. Yet, over time, I found this approach to be spiritually and emotionally draining. It left me clinging to pain as if it were essential to my identity as a poet. Watching Monroe’s portrayal in the film stirred these familiar questions in me: Is it possible to create from a place of healing rather than from our wounds? Can art come from scars rather than pain?
Our culture increasingly places value on victimhood, particularly in the arts. Suffering is often seen as a marker of authenticity, elevating those who endure hardship in to the realms of ‘great’. But it’s important to distinguish between acknowledging pain as part of the human experience and glorifying it as the sole requirement for the poetic/creative art. This is evident in My Week With Marilyn, where Monroe’s performances in the film, particularly in her famous scene from The Prince and the Showgirl, reveals a vulnerability that made her beloved by audiences, but we are left wondering: was this vulnerability merely a product of her personal pain, or a conscious artistic choice by Monroe herself or those around her? The film leaves little room for imagining how her creativity might have evolved to also express a path to healing and hope.
Vincent van Gogh is also remembered as a ‘tortured artist,’ with his mental anguish frequently tied to the interpretation of his art. However, to reduce his work to a mere expression of suffering overlooks the deep sense of hope, beauty, and reverence for life that pervades much of his art. Despite his personal struggles, van Gogh’s paintings are consistently filled with vibrant colours and an emotional intensity that conveys awe and wonder at the world around him. His works reflect not just pain, but a profound yearning for connection, and spiritual solace. In this sense, van Gogh’s art is a testament to the possibility of creating from a place that acknowledges suffering but ultimately strives toward hope and transcendence.
This is where the balance between revealing and veiling, so important in poetry, is lost in the My Week With Marilyn. By revealing and overly-relying on Monroe’s private pain, we cut off the opportunity keep the essential mystery that evokes real beauty. Her story, like many others in popular culture, is framed within the ‘tortured artist’ myth, which insists that true beauty comes solely from brokenness. Although I do not deny the truth of this, I question the notion that beauty must remain rooted in suffering. True beauty may emerge from wounds but what truly inspires is the journey through them. What if, rather than fixating on Monroe’s pain, we asked a different question: What would healing have looked like for Monroe?
This led me to a broader reflection on how our culture glorifies suffering. It’s as if we believe pain is a prerequisite for greatness, that only through brokenness can we create something meaningful. But this is a distorted view of both creativity and the human experience. In my opinion, we are not called to remain in our brokenness, but to move through it, to heal, and to create from a place of wholeness.
My faith in Christ has profoundly shaped my understanding of art and life. In the Christian narrative, suffering is not the final word. While pain is a part of life, it is not where we are meant to dwell. The cross, with all its agony, leads to resurrection—a powerful symbol of healing and renewal. Jesus bears the scars of His crucifixion, but those scars are signs of victory, not defeat. They represent a suffering overcome, not a suffering glorified.
This distinction between wounds and scars is crucial. Wounds are raw, unresolved, and ongoing sources of pain, while scars are healed wounds; marks of what we’ve endured, but should not define us. In Christ, we are invited to move beyond our wounds and embrace healing. Our scars tell a story, not of victimhood, but of redemption. This overturns the ‘tortured artist’s’ power by reversing what is revealed: wounds glory in the exposing of pain, scars promote the healing whilst hinting but, ultimately, obscuring the pain.
In my own journey, I’ve come to realise that my creativity doesn’t need to be fuelled by pain. When I stopped creating out of my wounds and began to create from my scars, I found a deeper, more authentic voice. Creating from scars, rather than wounds, means drawing from a place of resilience rather than raw pain. It’s art that acknowledges the past but doesn’t dwell in it. This kind of art not only reflects suffering but also points to the possibility of renewal, offering hope to both the artist and the audience.
Our culture, especially in the arts, needs to move beyond its fixation on victimhood. We don’t need more tortured artists; we need more healed ones. Maya Angelou, for example, whose early life was marked by trauma and hardship, also found creative strength not by remaining in her pain, but by moving through it. Her poetry and memoirs often reflect a journey of healing, culminating in a powerful message of resilience and hope. Angelou’s art, like the scars she carried, does not dwell in victimhood, but instead points towards transformation. The world is crying out for this kind of art that taps into the healing that only Christ can offer; healing that turns wounds into scars, pain into redemption, and suffering into hope. In this healing, we are not diminished but set free. Our creativity flourishes, not because we are broken, but because we have been made whole.
In the end, My Week With Marilyn is a an incomplete reflection of the truth. It reveals much about the pressures of fame and the cost of genius, but there seemed to be little behind the veil that inspires the imagination towards the possibility of healing and transformation. As artists and as people, we are not called to live in our wounds. For something to be truly poetic and beautiful it must reflect not just the pain of the human experience, but, more importantly, the profound hope that lies beyond it.
Ultimately, the myth of the ‘tortured artist’ oversimplifies the complexity of true creativity by presenting a narrow narrative that equates suffering with authenticity. This perspective neglects the profound potential for redemption and healing that lies beneath the surface of all great artistic expression. In doing so, it fails to acknowledge the rich, veiled dimensions of the human experience—those depths that can inspire awe and beauty. True artistry emerges not from the confines of pain but from the journey of transformation, where the scars of our past become symbols of resilience and hope. It is in this delicate balance between the revealed and the veiled that we find the most profound expressions of beauty, inviting us to recognise that healing and redemption are integral to the creative process, not merely the backdrop against which it unfolds.