“Hello. Come on, Vogue. I’m just going to make sure that bad energy does not enter [en esta casa]”. Thus greeted Pamela Anderson to the editorial team of the American fashion magazine in full report while preparing to attend the premiere of her documentary, ‘Pamela Anderson: A Love Story’, produced by her son Brandon Thomas Lee and which deals with her personal and professional life before the public gaze.
That image, rosewood in hand, could perfectly be one of the snapshots of the Netflix documentary that are shot on the beach of Ladysmith, the native island of Canada where Anderson currently lives, and that completely break the schemes of the preconceived image. of the spectator on which it was C.J. Parker in ‘The Baywatch‘.
The sadness of a forgotten star
Throughout the documentary by Pamela Anderson, who began working in front of the cameras as a model after going with some friends to a BC Lions football game in 1989 and being “discovered” by the camera, which earned her a first contract for the Labatt beer company, one thing is clear: the reality of a woman who moves with the intelligence of who has been created an ironic shell to make jokes, before anyone else, of their inherited sexualization.
But, above all, let the dregs of sadness of someone who has seen their own aspirations frustrated by the exploitation of a doll at the hands of the industry, only to later be forgotten because it has become the scandal of a hypocritical society.
In fact, it is very revealing to see how constant Pamela Anderson talks about herself distancing her spirit from her physique and what it means, in theory, a classic pattern of behavior of the former icon of Playboy magazine. Thus, she says in that Vogue video, when the stylist refers to her classic curly updo from the 90s, that that I’m going to do “my thing” is going to happen for the last timeto finally take your own reins, be “really me” and do what you want.
The ‘Pamela Anderson: A Love Story’ documentary quickly takes shape as a farewell letter to that archetype of sexual icon that her personal image adopted socially off camera. she does it since a painful perspective that accounts for the emotional consequences of the actress after experiencing the leaking of an intimate video without consent, her broken career and society’s continuous reductionist look at her tits.
At the beginning of the Netflix documentary, Anderson talks about the environment in which he grew up —with an alcoholic father— of the abuse of a babysitter and the rape she suffered at the age of 12 at the hands of a man twice her age and, therefore, already an adult.
In that autobiographical path, he begins to defoliate how society comes to mold women to make them responsible for what happens to them. For example, she says that when she was little, she hated her body and saw the Playboy magazines that her father had, hidden, thinking about how beautiful those women were and why she didn’t look like those models.
Some time later, shortly after starting to work as the Blue Zone girl for the beer made by Labatt, a call from Playboy burst into her life to sign her as a model, a job that began, as she tells in the documentary, feeling for the first time “released from her insecurities”. For Anderson, in addition, being the image of one of the magazine’s reports was playing a character, since all the time he had wanted to “leave her body and escape.”
The dissociation of a myth
From that point, Pamela Anderson conveys how she has moved away from that parallel reality by being trapped by it. In footage throughout the documentary, the model and actress is seen over and over again as more a product to consume that as a woman free of labels and with the power to make, without burdens, the decisions that she deems appropriate.
In fact, his own son expresses his distrust towards a society that does not consider it “the owner of its own image” and that sees it as “the property of everyone” for the mere fact of having stripped in the Playboy header. Witness to that painful legacy are the diaries that Anderson delivers, without wanting to put the voiceover herself for those words from the past, and in which many thoughts and experiences from the past are revealed, including the jealousy of her ex-partners.
It is not uncommon to hear from him that he is not going to see the documentary, even if his son produced it, because, as he says, “the only thing I want to know about all this is nothing.” Pamela Anderson gives the feeling in this project that He has even come to doubt who he is and what his personality is for the humiliations at the cost of his physique and the theft of the famous tape.
And the most disheartening of all is to see, in front of a camera, how the dissociation with respect to who it is supposed to be, according to the gaze of others, is clearly shown. “I surprise myself living more that way than how I really am,” Anderson is heard saying in the footage when delving into the “caricature” image the entertainment industry has created of herliterally attached, as he also expresses, to some breasts that had a career.
Decades later, society continues inoculating an unrealistic beauty statute, making people believe that in order to feel good about one’s own body, standards that fit with the search for perfection must be met. Added to this harassment and demolition is the fact of coming together with an entertainment industry still very accustomed to taking advantage of the female image from the male gaze and, at the same time, to blame her for that frivolous image created.
In the documentary, for example, images of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee going out at night are included, a recording in which he sneaks the press’s question to her about where her baby isa question that is also latent today on social networks, as for example happened to the actress Shay Mitchell, who was Emily in ‘Little Liars‘, at the end of 2019 when she went to a party after giving birth to her first daughter.
Who is Pamela Anderson?
The Playboy of today, as far as establishing a chair is concerned around the archetypal and ideal image that is liked in society, could well resemble the hegemonic parade of always being ready to consume before a stranger who started the ‘Mujeres y hombres y viceversa’ program in 2008, who has lived her legacy with ‘the island of temptations‘, Overturned already in this 2023 in its sixth season.
Living at the service of the social construct of beauty means constantly being in the eye of the hurricane and being exposed to the edge of the precipice by those who believe, furthermore, that they have the right to judge you for the fact that you have always played with the available norms. The same happens with chaining relationships in this type of environment, always pursuing the great love story sold by society. As with the Anderson marriages, there are also a hypocritical look when judging the effusiveness of a way of relating that has also been driven, socially, towards the ephemeral.
Despite everything, the return of Pamela Anderson to television also leaves room for the rebirth, with the actress making it clear that this means the closure of a past life to “transit to the next stage”. Already with the practice of knowing how to escape and build a parallel reality for a long time.
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