Netflix’s new documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, is the second popular culture providing about Pamela Anderson to emerge in our present second of revisiting the tales of well-known ladies of the ’90s and 2000s who we now imagine ourselves to have wronged. It’s additionally, in not less than one vital method, probably the most fascinating. Along with Anderson’s memoir, Love, Pamela, additionally out in February, the brand new documentary is what we get in Anderson’s voice.
Wronged-woman revisitations have been trendy for a couple of years now. After simmering underneath the radar with the success of the favored podcast You’re Wrong About since 2018, it got here to a rolling boil in 2021 with Hulu and the New York Times’s documentary Framing Britney Spears. Pop tradition populated itself with tales of the ladies we beloved and despised and raked over the coals, and with eloquent mea culpas on their behalf.
The nice achievement of Pamela, a Love Story is that not like its predecessor Pam and Tommy, it manages to advance the evaluation that each one these wronged-woman revisitations are theoretically doing within the first place. It makes a convincing case that Pam and Tommy exists inside the similar style of callous exploitation as all these Jay Leno jokes in regards to the couple’s intercourse tape did in 1996.
About that intercourse tape: the tape Anderson made with then-husband Tommy Lee was meant to be non-public. In 1995, Rand Gauthier, a development employee who mentioned Lee stiffed him on the invoice for home renovation, stole the tape from their house and shortly started to promote entry to it over the web. Anderson and Lee sued Gauthier and everybody else who appeared to be concerned in its distribution.
The couple finally dropped the swimsuit, apparently exhausted by the authorized wrangling. Pamela, a Love Story shines a light-weight on the authorized argument that exhausted them so. In courtroom, Gauthier’s legal professionals argued that Anderson had no proper to privateness as a result of she was a Playboy star; she had uncovered her bare physique to the world earlier than, of her personal free will, and so she should not have any drawback with it being uncovered now, in opposition to her will.
“It made me feel like I was such a horrible woman,” Anderson remembers in Pamela. “I’m just a piece of meat. That this should mean nothing to me because I’m such a whore, basically.”
The authorized argument right here was that by having ever been bare in public on her personal phrases, Anderson had revoked her proper to consent. She had develop into that type of lady: the type of lady who didn’t deserve privateness.
Anderson says in Pamela that she felt the identical method when she came upon that Hulu was going to make a TV present in regards to the occasions. “They should have had to have my permission,” she says.
Last February, Hulu launched Pam and Tommy, which aimed to do for Anderson what American Crime Story: Impeachment did for Monica Lewinsky. It was presupposed to reveal the extent to which Anderson had been mistreated after her intercourse tape turned public in opposition to her will, and late-night hosts all over the place discovered themselves with a brand new alternative to mock Anderson as an notorious “dumb blonde.” That Anderson loudly disavowed the present and mentioned that it was made with out her consent — not like Lewinsky, who was a producer on Impeachment — didn’t appear to matter. Shouldn’t Anderson get a mea culpa now, no matter whether or not she wished one or not?
Pam and Tommy premiered a yr after Framing Britney Spears to gentle curiosity, but in addition to what gave the impression to be a little bit of revisitation fatigue. At this level, the story of one other blonde intercourse image who turned out to have been mistreated appeared to really feel like an outdated, outdated story, and the present didn’t add something notably new to what was by now changing into a system. Reviews have been anemic, and whereas it was nominated for a number of Emmys, it solely gained one, for make-up.
In Pamela, a Love Story, Pamela’s son tells her he watched the primary three episodes. In response we see her anxiously munching on a vegan croissant, quipping for the cameras about emotional consuming. “I blocked that out of my life,” she says. “I had to, in order to survive, really. It was a survival mechanism. And now that it’s all coming up again, I feel sick, in my whole stomach, from the middle of my chest, all the way down, just, my stomach feels like it’s been punched. I don’t feel good right now.”
In an interview with EW in 2022, Pam and Tommy director Craig Gillespie says the members of the inventive group “absolutely respect the privacy” of Anderson, regardless of making the present with out her blessing. He went on, “I felt, for us, what we’re trying to do is really change the narrative and your perspective of what happened. And this felt like such an opportunity to do that and to be able to look at the story through today’s lens and the outrageousness and just the atrocities that happened. I felt that hopefully, it would change people’s point of view on that.”
The argument right here is that Anderson was a wronged lady of the sort that was presently trendy. If she didn’t conform to her story being retold, it didn’t matter. It’s the identical logic that animated the discharge of the intercourse tape within the ’90s, the dehumanization at its core disguised with a faux-progressive veneer. The story might go on with out her, as a result of she had made herself that type of lady.
There are at all times issues with a documentary made by way of shut cooperation with its topic. Pamela, a Love Story is designed to be as sympathetic as attainable to Anderson. To that finish, it glosses calmly over her alliances with figures like Vladimir Putin (for anti-fur marketing campaign functions, she says right here) and Julian Assange (on this doc she says merely that she’s very pro-transparency, however up to now she’s mentioned he’s been falsely accused due to “the Clinton monopoly on the media”). Her skeptical feedback in regards to the Me Too motion (Weinstein’s victims “should have known what they were getting into,” she mentioned in 2017), go undiscussed completely.
Still, Pamela, a Love Story is an enormous enchancment on its predecessor. Pam and Tommy contributed little, if something, to the general public dialog that was not already there. It by no means fairly justified its personal existence.
Pamela, a Love Story does transfer the dialog ahead. It suggests, brutally, that exhibits like Pam and Tommy exist extra to allow us to indulge our titillated fascination with outdated scandals than to make any type of principled stand in opposition to misogyny.
