Pamela Anderson Reclaims Her Personhood In ‘Pamela, A Love Story’
In the Netflix documentary, Anderson claims space to define herself away from how she was objectified in the past.
In her Netflix documentary, Pamela Anderson speaks up about her new Broadway star era, her painful childhood, animal rights activism, and feeling re-traumatised by Disney’s “comedic” Pam and Tommy series.
Pamela, A Love Story premiered in late January. A Netflix exclusive, the documentary gives Anderson the long overdue space to take control of her image and tell her version of her much-ogled life.
Now in her 50s and living on the small Canadian island she grew up on, Anderson spends much of the documentary speaking to camera directly from the couch or the cobbled beachfront by her house. It’s a starkly intimate contrast to the sexy shoots many viewers would be accustomed to and cleverly draws a subtle line between baring it all and baring the soul.
Archival footage of Anderson’s work in everything — from Playboy, to Baywatch, and beyond – accompanies Anderson’s candid recount of her early years in the public eye. At every turn, director Ryan White prioritises Anderson’s own words. Only narration of her diary entries are read by an actress.
“It’s tough to go through it again ’cause you’re going through it again like you’re going through it for the first time. It’s painful,” she explains. “You have my permission.”
Re-traumatisation through a lack of consent slowly emerges as a dominant theme in the documentary and indeed, Anderson’s life. Having experienced assault throughout her childhood, Anderson herself explains that she saw her work in Playboy as reclaiming control over her sexuality.
“I tried to forget [the assault], but I felt like it was tattooed on my forehead,” explains Anderson. “What it made me was very very shy and self-conscious. When I got to my first Playboy shoot I just said, ‘Why am I so freaking paralysed by this shyness? I’m so sick of all this past that’s created this insecurity in me,’” she recalls. “[The shoot] was the first time I felt like I’d broken free of something.”
But the freedom and autonomy Anderson found in her work and image deteriorated with the infamous thievery of Anderson and Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee’s private tapes.
“Not to bring up something heavy from my childhood,” Anderson recalls, “but when I was attacked by this guy [as a child], I thought everybody would know. When the tape was stolen, it felt like that,” she explains, referring to when the couple’s private home videos were stolen from their property in the ’90s.
Eventually, Anderson and her husband pursued litigation against Internet Entertainment Group, who were distributing their stolen tape footage online. After two years of depositions, Anderson and Lee signed over rights to the tape, fearing the stress of the ongoing trial would cause them a second miscarriage.
“We never made a dime off of it,” Anderson explains. “You can’t put a monetary number on the amount of pain and suffering that it caused.” From here, Anderson delves into how the stolen tape contributed to the breakdown of her marriage to Tommy Lee.
“I have romanticised the past,” she admits. “Now that we’re talking about it, I could remember some things that were really big red flags.” Among these red flags, Anderson details instances of Lee’s possessive jealousy – including one that drove him to trash her Baywatch trailer after discovering she had kissed a co-star for a scene.
Eventually, the police were called to the couple’s home in 1998 and Lee was arrested and imprisoned for spousal and child abuse. This is the tumultuous period of Pamela Anderson’s life that Disney decided to exploit in the limited biopic series, Pam and Tommy.
“It really gives me nightmares,” Anderson confesses on the subject of learning about the series. “They should’ve had to have my permission.”
As Dylan Anderson, Pamela’s youngest son, rightly points out; “Why bring up something from 20 years ago that you know fucked someone up? The worst part of her life, and making a semi-comedy out of it, [it] didn’t make sense.”
“It really gives me nightmares,” Anderson confesses on the subject of learning about the series. “They should’ve had to have my permission.”
Pamela, A Love Story also includes the moment that Anderson learns from Brandon Lee, her eldest son, that Pam and Tommy fabricates a subplot where the thievery of the tape is justified by making the thief a disgruntled employee of the couple’s.
“I’m shaking,” she says. “I blocked that out of my life. I had to in order to survive really. It was a survival mechanism, and now that it’s all coming up again, I feel sick. This feels like when the tape was stolen. Basically, you’re just a thing owned by the world, like you belong to the world,” says Anderson, tearfully.
Fortunately, the documentary ends on a high note, showcasing Anderson’s critically acclaimed debut on broadway in 2022. Anderson was offered the lead role of Roxie in Chicago shortly before the announcement of the Pam and Tommy series, and the film concludes with her rendition of the musical’s bittersweet ballad, ’Nowadays’, over a montage of footage from her life.
“I feel like I’m doing this with this person. This is me on Broadway,” says Anderson, holding up a photo of herself as a child before she’d been abused. All I can say is that we stan a queen healing her inner child.
In sharing her story, Pamela, A Love Story also questions the inherent abuse of Hollywood’s biopic-industrial complex, which profits from recreations of injustices the industry itself is responsible for. Regardless, it is incredibly moving – vindicating, even – to see a woman so objectified by popular culture reclaim autonomy over her personhood.
Pamela, A Love Story is streaming on Netflix.
This is an opinion piece, written by Merryana Salem (they/them), a proud Wonnarua and Lebanese–Australian writer, critic, teacher and podcaster. They are on most social media as @akajustmerry.