Death
The fatal motor accident that killed Mansfield and spread the rumors of her decapitation had been the subject of many plots and scenes. In the film To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar, Miss Vida Boheme (Patrick Swayze) remarked while trying out a vintage yellow convertible, "I feel like Miss Jayne Mansfield in this car!" Noxeema Jackson (Wesley Snipes) replied "Uh oh, Jayne Mansfield, not a good auto reference." In Severance: Stories, the 2006 story book containing 62 postmortem monologues, each 240-words long, by Robert Olen Butler, a Pulitzer Award winning writer, Mansfield's death is included along with James Dean, John the Baptist, Maximilien Robespierre, Marie Antoinette, Cicero and others. The underride guard, a strong bar made of steel tubing fitted underneath the rear portion of a semi-trailer, is also known a Mansfield bar, commemorating her accident that occurred before the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act required underride guards on semi-trailers.
In the 1994 film Leprechaun 2, directed by Rodman Flender, a character degrades the leprechaun by saying, "If hearing the actual sound of Jayne Mansfield's head being severed from her body is too intense for you, well then, you know, more power to ya." The accident is also referred to in the 1998 film One of Them. In Money, Love: A Novel by Brad Barkley, the character Roman organizes a show of Celebrity Death Cars, including that of Dean and Mansfield, to win back his love interest Gladys. In the song Movie Star by the rock band Cracker sang, "Well the movie star, well she crashed her car, but everyone said she was beautiful even without her head, everyone said she was dangerous", making an allusion to the accident. In the 2003 single, "Overdrive," Katy Rose sang, "I'm sitting in Jayne Mansfield's car." The Hollywood Forever Cemetery, where here cenotaph is located, is described as one of the sights to see in California by the regional tourist guide by Lonely Planet. In the episode In Escrow of Dead Like Me, George orders a "Jayne Mansfield" for breakfast. When Kiffany the waitress gives George her order it is a pastry in the shape of breasts with blueberries as nipples. Daisy refers to the breakfast as "...blueberry muffins with their tops cut off," making reference to the urban legend of how Mansfield died.
In David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash (based on J. G. Ballard's 1973 novel of the same name), a male stunt driver dressed as Mansfield recreates her fatal accident, killing himself in the process. His partner, a fellow celebrity-crash aficionado, comes across the scene of the wreck and says, "You did the Jayne Mansfield crash without me?" Differing from the book, the storyline of the film revolves around these two partners recreating fatal celebrity disasters, in the name of a project they call retrospectives, including those of James Dean, Grace Kelly, Albert Camus and John F. Kennedy. The film was nominated for the Golden Palm at the Cannes Film Festival, it instead won the Special Jury Prize for daring, audacity, and originality.
Read more about this topic: Jayne Mansfield In Popular Culture
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“I knew the poor,
I knew the hideous death they die,
when famine lays its bleak hand on the door;
I knew the rich,
sated with merriment,
who yet are sad.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“The sole work and deed of universal freedom is therefore death, a death too which has no inner significance or filling, for what is negated is the empty point of the absolutely free self. It is thus the coldest and meanest of all deaths, with no more significance than cutting off a head of cabbage or swallowing a mouthful of water.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)