THE DARK SIDE OF PARIS
A new biopic on YouTube casts the famous ’heir-head’ as a savvy, sad survivor of abuse, writes
There is something painfully anachronistic about Paris Hilton, pictured. It makes sense: she was, after all, the poster girl for the early 2000s — white, emaciated, bleach-blonde and California-fry vapid. Since her erstwhile assistant Kim Kardashian usurped her place in the pantheon of celebrity, Hilton — and her bedazzled, butterfly-saccharine aesthetic — has aged out of the spotlight, no doubt partly because her signature style and persona have not evolved much since the height of her renown.
Historically, Hilton has exemplified celebrity for the sake of celebrity: we know her as the beautiful Hilton heiress who begat the fanatical paparazzi culture we take for granted today, some two decades later. Indeed, Kardashian hails Hilton as the original reality-TV maven, and it was her ridiculous (and ridiculously popular) run on The Simple Life with Nicole Richie that rocketed them both into notoriety.
Hilton is an unequivocally savvy businesswoman who found a way to merchandise her appeal early on, spawning clothing lines, perfumes, and pet-wear collections years before this kind of marketing strategy was “a thing”. That said, to most of us, Paris Hilton is first and foremost a punchline. Pacified with a silver spoon from birth and self-obsessed to the point of pathology, it’s hard to concede that Hilton is more than the mannequin she has made herself out to be.
Now, however, the release of a biographical film on YouTube has not only introduced her to the world afresh, but has also shattered a great many of our misconceptions about the heiress’s upbringing, detailing a highly disturbing saga of abuse followed by years of silence and trauma. This is Paris sees director Alexandra Dean trail and engage with the heiress for about a year, documenting one tumultuous romantic entanglement and Hilton’s relentless schedule as a DJ and promoter. (Hilton is the highest-paid female DJ in the world, reportedly racking up $1m per appearance.) At a critical juncture in the film, however, once Hilton and Dean have established an intimate rapport, it emerges that, as a wild and uncontrollable teenager in New York City, she was sent to a range of brutal reform schools, the last and worst of which becomes a central feature of the documentary’s narrative.
According to Hilton and a host of the school’s survivors, Provo Canyon School in Utah literally “kidnapped” its pupils during the night (with their despairing parents’ consent, of course.) The school forcibly administered psychiatric medication to its students, used torturous physical and psychological disciplinary techniques, and enforced a regime of physical labour and terror that premised suffering as the remedy for rebelliousness.
This is Paris chronicles Hilton’s decision to make her experiences at the school public, as, along with her ex-schoolmates, she participates in a campaign to bring awareness to the issue of the reform-school industry (#BreakingCodeSilence). It also reveals that Hilton’s ineptitude at mastering average-Joe jobs on The Simple Life was a deliberate façade, given that her tenure at Provo saw her washing floors and chopping wood.
Having access to this undisclosed period of Hilton’s personal history does go some way towards understanding the peculiar figure we gradually get to know over the course of the film. For all her wealth and success, Hilton is unshakably something of a tragic figure. She’s patently lonely; she’s addicted to her phone; and, by her own admission, she has a Peter Pan complex that inhibits her from coming to terms with age and the behaviour it merits.
For all that she suffered at the hands of a really foul school administration, she is still somehow ridiculous: entitled, prone to dramatic outbursts, and desperate at all times to be the centre of attention.
This is Paris; but it’s wonderful that she’s using her pink fluffy platform for good.