After Hulu series, Anderson speaks her truth in Netflix doc
For Pamela Anderson, fame came in increments. First as a model for the Canadian beer brand Labatt Blue. Then in the pages of Playboy magazine. “Baywatch” was the project that brought her to life in three dimensions, even if the show’s producers treated her character as yet more scenery — there to be looked at — and that’s how audiences responded in turn. The consumption of her image turned gleefully cruel when a sexually intimate home video of her and then-husband Tommy Lee was stolen from their home. The tape transformed their private moments into a public bootleg cash machine — and without their consent. Anderson looks back on all of it in the documentary “Pamela, a love story,” functioning as a corrective to last year’s Hulu limited series “Pam & Tommy.”
Many people not named Anderson and Lee made several millions from that tape. Thirty years after the fact, the Hulu project ensured a new group of people not named Anderson and Lee would again profit from this saga. The Netflix documentary is an opportunity for Anderson to sort through these feelings.
The interviews take place at her home in Vancouver Island. She’s returned to the small town of her childhood “which is triggering and crazy,” she says. Her memories are complicated. Her mom worked as a server at a pancake house. Her father was a “poker player, con man, chimney sweep” and also a “notorious bad boy.” Her parents would fight and reconcile in a never-ending cycle.
Her childhood was disrupted by sexual abuse, first at the hands of a babysitter and later by an older man. She doesn’t talk about what kind of life or career she envisioned in her future. Maybe she didn’t know herself. “I just thought: I have to get off the island.” When Playboy came along, it was her ticket out. But also, “now I was going to take the power of my own sexuality and take my power back.”
Too often celebrity documentaries are an exercise in image management, or artless compilations of archival footage spliced with interviews. Anderson’s documentary, from director Ryan White, avoids these pitfalls. I was surprised by how much I liked it, largely because White creates an intimacy with Anderson that gives the illusion of stripping back the artifice.
So much comes through with clarity. She’s funny and a bit lonely. Selfaware and self-deprecating. Smart and bright. It’s worth asking if the fame machine couldn’t, or wouldn’t, make room for a career where these qualities could be put to sly use.
The videotape would alter her life forever. The law should have been on
her side, but a persistent misogyny clouded those efforts. She remembers looking at an assemblage of male lawyers and wondering, “Why do these grown men hate me so much?”
It’s an astute observation, about the entitlement
— the rage — that fuels exploitation.
Almost 30 years later, her anxiety about the tape becomes a present-day reality once again thanks to the Hulu series. She declines to watch, but her son tells her about the first few episodes and you can see her panic rising. “And now that it’s all coming back up again, I feel sick
… I feel like I’ve been punched. I don’t feel good right now.”
The documentary humanizes her experience — and the vapor trails that never seem to fully burn off — in ways a scripted prestige project never could.
So much of “Pamela, a love story” is about a woman searching for love from men who saw her as a person to be obtained — and then controlled. The best love story might just be the one she develops with herself.
Rating: Running time: How to watch:
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