13. Paris owns the joke
An imperfect victim, like everyone else
The 2005 version of House of Wax isn’t very good, so it was a relief when I got what I wanted from it ten minutes in: the blow job joke. (Don’t worry, I’m a thorough researcher and made myself suffer through the rest.) Here’s Paris Hilton, filmed in night vision by another character holding a camcorder, looking as though she’s in the middle of sucking her boyfriend off. It looks — deliberately, of course — an awful lot like the 1 Night in Paris sex tape she made with her ex-boyfriend Rick Salomon that was leaked in 2003 (then commercially released the year after).
The release of that tape felt, said Paris in 2020, like being “electronically raped”. When it was initially rumoured, she denied its existence and was quoted calling Salomon “a complete liar and scumbag”. After efforts to sue Salomon failed, she had any profits due to her from the sale of the video donated to charity. I still haven’t unpicked exactly what happened to lead to the videos release — the law on digital copyright and privacy was evolving at the time — but I absolutely believe that she didn’t want the video to be public, that she suffered over its release and that she wishes it had never happened.
And yet. And yet. Here she is in 2005, turning her humiliation into a gag (sorry) for the sake of a role in a movie. It’s almost exactly the same joke that Pink would make a year later in the video for “Stupid Girls”, a song that tears down “porno paparazzi girls” for their man-pleasing and attention-seeking. It’s howlingly obvious at this remove that with the song and video, Pink was having her cake and eating it: mocking women who were famous for being hot, while showing how incredibly hot she was. (The cringiest scene is of Pink with her body marked up for plastic surgery. She looks perfect already — so who exactly is the joke on here? Every time I watch it, I feel bad about the way I look. The grimmest scene is the bulimia one.)
But it looks like Hilton was having her cake and eating it too. She was just better at it, and she got in there first.1
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago the fact that there was no vocabulary for talking about the invasion Paris suffered when it happened — the phrase “revenge porn” was five years away from entering the language. But even without a ready concept to fit it into, people could still that something cruel and unjust was happening to a young woman. Here, astonishingly, is Christopher Hitchens in 2007 banging the nail on the head (thanks to Helen Lewis for remembering this column and pointing me to it):
I don’t mind admitting that I, too, have watched Hilton undergoing the sexual act. I phrase it as crudely as that because it was one of the least erotic such sequences I have ever seen. She seemed to know what was expected of her and to manifest some hard-won expertise, but I could almost have believed that she was drugged. At no point did her facial expression match even the simulacrum of lovemaking. (Kingsley Amis, a genius in these matters and certainly no Puritan, once captured the combined experience of the sordid and the illicit by saying that, even as he wanted a certain spectacle to go on, he also wanted it to stop.)
So now, a young woman knows that, everywhere she goes, this is what people are visualizing, and giggling about.
But Hitchens was a rare beam of sympathy is a world where even ostensibly feminist analyses had nothing nice to say about Paris. This is Tracy Clark-Flory in Salon the year after, in an article about the then-new phenomenon of “upskirting”: “Of course, not all subjects are entirely unwilling participants. Paris Hilton’s and Britney Spears’ pantyless crusade in front of paparazzi seemed intentional — if not sober or clearheaded.” She continues: “In some ways, it appeared to be an aggressive acknowledgment of their utter lack of privacy as famous females.”2
It’s a difficult passage to understand. Clark-Flory seems to be saying that certain celebrity subjects of upskirting are flashing their labia deliberately. But then she lurches back to suggesting they’re being violated, even if this particular form of intrusion is one they’re invited. I’ve read this over a lot of times, and I still can’t work out whether Clark-Flory is positioning Paris as a victim of sexual harassment, or a reason other women suffer sexual harassment. I’m not sure Clark-Flory could have told you what she thought if you’d asked her at the time.
What were Paris’s options in the noughties? She could presented herself as a victim and been defiant. But it’s unlikely that this would have served her very well — later, when non-celebrity victims of revenge porn spoke out about the attacks on their privacy, they were simply attacked even harder as stupid, attention-seeking sluts. Paris’s entire brand was seeking and enjoying celebrity. It’s why Perez Hilton would take her name as his nom de blog. She presumably realised that the only workable response was to own this narrative.
This is from her 2004 book Confessions of an Heiress:
IF THE MEDIA PLAYS WITH YOU, WELL, PLAY WITH THEM. I went on Saturday Night Live soon after my name was in the headlines every day for something I wasn’t too proud of, and which had really upset my family. On “Weekend Update” with Jimmy Fallon, the script had him asking me, “Is it hard to get a room in the Paris Hilton? Is it roomy?” and he wanted to cut it. But I wouldn't let him. No way. That was the funniest line. And I got the upper hand with the media the moment he said it on national TV. That’s when it all clicked and things started to change. People knew I could laugh at myself, and that one bad incident was not going to make me lock myself in my room.
I don’t think Hilton could have chosen another approach without compromising her career, and you can certainly read this as a trauma response played out in the most public way: plenty of women who’ve been raped or abused will tell you they initially minimised it or laughed it off, before coming to terms later with what was done to them. (Notice how opaque that passage is: the passive tone of “my name was in the headlines”, the vagueness of the “something”. Obviously you’d avoid mentioning your blow job tape in a paperback destined for Target, but I still think this is a significantly distant way of describing events.)3
As the older version of Paris has leaned into the factually correct account of herself as victim, another, equally factually correct account of herself gets obscured from view: Paris the player, Paris the opportunist, Paris the businesswoman who knew instinctively how to wring profit from a busted situation. The Hitchens take on her was right, but it would not have been an advantageous one for her to make much of at the time. Part of the challenge of writing this book is how to show that women can be both — “half victims, half accomplices, like everyone else,” said de Beauvoir — without withdrawing compassion on a technicality.
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Gimme, gimme more…
Satisfying long read on Justin Timberlake’s noughties belatedly catching up with him. Points of interest: that his solo career did not get off to a roaring start and incorporating the Britney breakup into his image turned that around, and that he had his own confrontations with the paparazzi that did not lead to reports of him “melting down” or “being on the edge”. More on JT next week I think, and in the meantime I’ll be buying the book by the author of that article.
I like how this article sniping at Chrissy Teigen for hosting a Squid Games theme party is almost too bored by its own gussied-up outrage to get to the end. “But CHRISSY, you essentially are one of the ultra-rich people from the show. Maybe don't spend $$$$ to cosplay a situation where lower-middle-class people are forced to become the worst versions of themselves and/or brutally murdered for a slim chance of winning a cash prize. OK?” Does Buzzfeed think Squid Games itself was made for zero budget by a socialist co-operative?
Obviously I was always likely to go and see House of Gucci, but this review decided it. One star? A comparison to Showgirls? “Howlingly inept”? LET’S GO TO LONGWELL GREEN SHOWCASE IMMEDIATELY.
Could this have been something done to Hilton by the filmmakers without her consent? The scene would have been in the script, and she would have had to OK that before filming: I don’t see a plausible way that you can perform “head in a man’s lap” without knowing what that looks like. The colour treatment could have been added without her knowledge, though, and her contract may not have given her the power to object. I think it would be pretty insulting, though, to pretend she wouldn’t have understood that the sex tape was integral to her value to the movie.
Small piquant historical detail: in 2003, when rumours of the sex tape began to circulate, Paris was actually dating Joe Francis, the man behind the Girls Gone Wild franchise, whose entire business was based on exploiting the images of young women who were “not sober nor clearheaded”.
I’m assuming here too that Paris was an active collaborator with her ghostwriter, Merle Ginsberg, and so the text can be taken roughly as a statement of Paris’s own feelings.