23. You do know her

Anna Nicole Smith and the exhaustion of celebrity reckonings

Housekeeping first: my own book of celebrity reckonings is available to preorder! I’m wildly excited slash terrified about Toxic being a real book people can read. If you preorder the hardback, you can fill out this form to request a signed bookplate as a thank you for your support — these will be pretty cool, so please do.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me (Netflix)

There’s an implicit bargain in the modern celebrity documentary. It isn’t just going to tell you something new, it’s going to tell you something that upends your perception of this particular star. That moves them from being alien and outrageous to being human and relatable. That rewrites a sensationalist story as a sympathetic one. 

The most skilled practitioner of this is, of course, Paris Hilton — This is Paris, on YouTube, hinges on the revelation of the abuse she suffered at the Provo Canyon reform school. (Provo Canyon has denied the allegations.) At one point, the director asks Paris why she hasn’t spoken about this before, and Paris says, “I wanted to do something. But I was like, this is going to hurt my brand.” It’s a perfectly Paris disclosure: self-promotion as survival strategy. 

There’s more. Dance With the Devil (YouTube) lays out Demi Lovato’s history of sexual trauma, How I’m Feeling Now (Netflix) opens up on Lewis Capaldi’s anxiety and Tourette’s syndrome. My Mind and Me (Apple TV) explores Selena Gomez’s mental health (or “spans her six-year journey into a new light”, according to Apple’s grammatically demented publicity materials).

Those examples were all made with the extensive participation of the subject, who are actively shaping their image. (That doesn’t mean what they’re saying is in any way untrue, only that, as with Paris, there’s an advantage for them in sharing it.) 

But the style applies too when the celebrity in question is very much not involved: think of the multiple documentaries about Britney, of which the most successful is the New York Times-produced Framing Britney Spears. (Despite Britney’s hatred of it, it was certainly pivotal in pushing her conservatorship to wider attention and helping her legal case.) 

It’s not enough to offer audiences an interesting story about someone they’ve heard of, told well. The public appetite is for reckonings. Hence, the title of Netflix’s Anna Nicole Smith documentary: You Don’t Know Me. Except, what happens if you do, in fact, know her? 

If I had to guess at your preconceived ideas about Anna Nicole Smith, I’d go with something like this: white trash, gold digger, drug addict, unfit mother, promiscuous. No spoilers, but this documentary about her life and death does nothing to undercut any of that. She grew up poor in Texas, became a Playmate, married a billionaire (and fought his family for his estate), and died of a drug overdose in 2007 following the death of her son in similar circumstances, and leaving behind a baby girl of highly contested paternity.

There are some fabulously salacious details in the film — an interview with a lesbian lover, carefully libel-safe suggestions of conspiracy around her death, the heady oedipal overtones of her relationship with her son Daniel (the line in the documentary is that she had a baby so she’d always have someone who loved her and the two had a smothering closeness; Daniel’s death came three days after the birth of his sister Dannielynn, whose name seems like a very specific redundancy notice).

What there isn’t, though, is anything to suggest Anna Nicole might have been unfairly treated. She experienced press intrusion and body shaming, but she courted the attention (one of her money spinners was repping a diet supplement). She was, it’s true, very beautiful: often while watching it, I stopped to marvel at how she could get so wrecked and still look so good. But there seems to have been nothing to her beyond a furious drive for fame. 

She was not a gifted actress like Marilyn, who she imitated relentlessly. She got roles in films because she had an enormously wealthy sugar daddy to fund her career, and when she’d achieved celebrity, she never had the Paris-esque nous to extract the full profit from her brand. 

It’s impossible to learn what made Anna Nicole into Anna Nicole

The interesting question about her — to me — is why she wanted so badly to be famous. The problem is, she was an incredibly unreliable narrator: she claimed to have been abused, but her ex-girlfriend says these were actually stories she originally disclosed to Anna Nicole. (Her father definitely was abusive, but he wasn’t in the picture other than a brief meeting when she was an adult — at which he reportedly made a pass at her.) 

So it’s impossible to learn from Anna Nicole what made Anna Nicole into Anna Nicole. You could I think produce a version of her life that explained why American popular culture of the nineties and noughties needed Anna Nicole to be Anna Nicole: the archetypes her blow-up doll loveliness tapped into, the metastasising gossip culture she kept fed, the opiates crisis she was subsumed by. But those are background notes to the revisionist project implied by the title. 

Not every celebrity casualty is a victim of media savagery and misunderstanding. Anna Nicole is where the reckoning style of celebrity coverage runs out of road: if anything, she seems a considerably more disturbing figure than a superficial read suggests. (Seriously, what the heck did she do to her son?) Don’t get me wrong: I ate up You Don’t Know Me. I’m just not sure what makes it different to reading the National Enquirer.

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Gimme, gimme more

• I reviewed Paris’s memoir for the Sunday Times. “‘Here’s what I believe: Your reality is totally up for grabs; if you don’t create your own life, someone else will.’ It’s a philosophy that has proved as successful as it is mercenary. For Hilton, almost everything is potential material for ‘the brand’. She criticises her parents for their tendency towards old-school emotional repression. ‘That’s bullshit,’ she writes, ‘and what makes it even crazier: It’s not good business.’”

• I’ve also written about Elliot Page’s memoir for UnHerd. Fair to say I’m not really convinced that this is, per the flyleaf, “an ode to stepping into who we truly are with defiance, strength and joy.”

• A conversation this week reminded me of this great Slate Star Codex post about the huge flourishing and extraordinary collapse of New Atheism (thank you Stuart Ritchie). “The defining feature of this period wasn’t just that there were a lot of atheism-focused things. It was how the religious-vs-atheist conflict subtly bled into everything… At the time, this seemed perfectly normal.” (One thing not noted in this is that New Atheism was an absolute dead zone for feminism. Redefining women’s rights as “whatever fundies don’t like” was, in retrospect, not genius politics.)

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