Pamela, a Love Story is a documentary about model/actor Pamela Anderson. Living in her hometown in Canada Anderson reflects on her career, relationships and personal life. Told through archival footage, home footage, narrated journal entries, and talking head interviews(mostly with Anderson herself) she, more or less, tells her story.
Hers is a fascinating, at times brutal, story and she's a compelling figure. Talented, beautiful, commodified to a agree by herself but then even more so by others, fame on an ugly titanic scale. But Anderson doesn't seem to have gained much perspective, doesn't seemed to have changed, doesn't offer much in the way of insights simply relays events. It does not appear as if much growth or healing has occurred. When she relays traumatic events its almost as if we are watching her be re-traumatized, have PTSD episodes on camera. Her personality seems virtually the same as it was when she rocketed to stardom as a 20 year old in the 90's, perhaps this is a result of extended disassociation, a persona that she created and inhabited in order to survive. Which is all understandable, given her past there is no judgement about her experience or how she has coped with it but what we see here is really Anderson still struggling and even if she is a willing participant in the project it feels exploitive. It is not her "reclaiming" her story because it seems as if she hasn't really unpacked and understood it herself.
She clearly has a complicated relationship with the media, sex, motherhood, and romance as well as a history of involvement with abusive men and addicts. What all that says about her or them or how she actually views these things is not delved into. Things are relayed in a factual manner, breezed over, or ignored completely(her relationship with Kid Rock is summed up by a still photograph of them with a comment from Anderson that basically amounts to "that happened"). Which is all fine, she doesn't owe the public anything, but why even do this? One of her sons says at one point about putting herself into the media spotlight "why are you doing this, this is exactly the kind of attention we don't want" to which she doesn't have an answer, I think we are left to assume she can't help herself and has never really interrogated that motivation.
I wish all the best for Anderson- peace, happiness, companionship- and have a lot of respect and admiration for her, she's a survivor, but what Pamela, a Love Story shows us is a sad, lost, middle-aged woman pinning for a prince charming that never was frantically and continually compartmentalizing the past in order to rationalize it. Is that accurate? Is that true? I don't know but its certainly not a full picture.
Currently streaming on Netflix.
Don't See It.
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