Editor’s Note: Sara Stewart is a film and culture writer who lives in western Pennsylvania. The views expressed here are solely the author’s own. View more opinion articles on CNN.
CNN —
Pamela Anderson is finally telling her own story her own way. No makeup, no ghostwriters. And it turns out that while the world was writing her off as a sex-object cartoon, she was cultivating a life full of art, family and radical activism.
Is the public ready to see her that way, the way she sees herself? I’m not so sure. It’s heartening to watch the Netflix documentary, “Pamela, a love story,” get a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes as well as an outpouring of love of social media. “I actually feel rooted for,” she told Ronan Farrow in an interview. But the media’s focus on the film and her recent memoir, “Love, Pamela,” has largely focused on a few “bombshell” details: abuse; hijinks at the Playboy mansion; bad romance.
There’s a much more interesting narrative to be explored here. For starters, Anderson is one of the most effective animal rights crusaders ever. She expertly weaponized her own sex symbol status to achieve real progress; she was way ahead of her time in calling attention to the abuse of marine animals and extolling the benefits of a vegetarian diet.
And while much of the world was wrongly and offensively depicting her as a dumb blonde, Anderson has spent her life as a seeker, immersed in literature and poetry and art. (In one amusing moment in the documentary, she barely looks up from her book as her then-fiancé, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, excitedly talks about their upcoming beach wedding.) She seems to have always taken the high road in a world that consistently treated her in the basest of ways: “Love, Pamela” leaves out any mention of the Hulu show “Pam & Tommy,” which never asked her permission to tell the story of a stolen sex tape and its ruinous effects on her career.
She was also openly talking about cosmetic surgery in an era where it mostly went unsaid. The documentary features a 1990s-era clip of her telling Larry King she’d had breast implants, only to have him ask her later in the interview if her breasts are real. No, she explains patiently, albeit incredulously. They’re implants. The honesty with which she discussed the construction of her own image should have clued people in that it was, at some level, a performance. But that didn’t spare her from being dismissed as an object.
She sent up that image in her performance as Roxie Hart in “Chicago” on Broadway last spring with “an excellent grasp on winking camp,” as the Guardian wrote. “Anderson appeared to be both playing the floozy and poking fun at her own image at the same time. Lines such as ‘I’m older than I ever intended to be’ drew laughs, while ‘I can still have my own act’ elicited cheers. The enormous wink she gave while singing ‘What if the world slandered my name?’ could probably be seen from Times Square.”
Anderson seems to have always understood the value of a light touch. Despite enduring nonstop misogynist leering in the public eye, she radiates an unquenchable optimism and reverence for the healing power of love. “Hold our heads high/Let it go/And move on with/Grace and Dignity,” she writes in her memoir. “[Tommy Lee and I] called it ‘G and D’ for short, something we said to each other every time things felt out of control.”
And yet she very determinedly turned that lightness into a tool for good. In the documentary, she says she agreed to let Comedy Central do a roast of her — one of their most obnoxious, and that’s saying something — if the network would donate $250,000 to PETA. She publicly endured hours of crass jokes at her expense for a good cause.
Her relationship with that muckraking animal rights organization goes back decades. In one billboard, Anderson poked fun at the kind of objectification she’d experienced, posing as a diagram of marked-up animal parts. In a video, she plays a scantily-clad TSA agent who doles out punishment for wearing animal products. She channeled her sultry notoriety into being an activist, or maybe, as she mused to Farrow, a performance artist (she also does balloon animals). She even successfully prevailed on Vladimir Putin to ban the import of Canadian seal hunt products to Russia.
So why has Anderson never been renowned as an influencer — not on Instagram, but of actual world leaders? Maybe it’s because of who we think of as worthy of such accolades. Famous women who’ve been labeled sex symbols are rarely allowed to be also seen as serious. In “Love, Pamela,” Jane Fonda offers Anderson some advice: “Don’t let them do to you what they did to me.”
In between gigs and crusading, Anderson seems to have understood the value of unplugging long before there was a self-help genre built around it. She relocates to the south of France at one point, and revels in the freedom to wander around, walk to the cafe, read a book (alongside neighbors like Karl Lagerfeld). Her return to her tiny Canadian hometown of Ladysmith, where she lives now, involves a lot of gardening and beachcombing and, always, literature.
To be sure, Anderson openly embraces her own contradictions: She extols independence and the importance of recognizing your own self-worth, all the while documenting her own sinkhole-sized blind spots regarding love interests. She minimizes what seems to have been a longstanding pattern of violent jealousy from Lee (from whom she is long divorced) and names Playboy founder Hugh Hefner as the one man who gave her complete respect.
The through line in Anderson’s story is her dedication to her sons Brandon and Dylan, who apparently were the ones who urged her to tell her story, and who are clearly incredibly devoted to her. “She’s a protector of the beaten down and the underdogs,” Brandon told Interview a couple of years ago. “If you are facing adversity, my mom is going to stand up for you no matter what.”
Movingly, they are now standing up for her. Brandon’s been making the red-carpet rounds alongside his mom, talking openly about his outrage over her finances. Anderson, apparently, only makes $4,000 a year on “Baywatch” residuals, and was asked in 2017 to cameo in the “Baywatch” movie for free. “I would love to see her get what’s right,” said Brandon, who’s also gone on the record saying his parents should have made money on the sex tape.
Though Anderson herself vows in the film she’d never take a dime from those proceeds, her son’s not wrong. Not that she’d say it, but in a just world, every single person who watched it would now buy a copy of her book. In hardcover. G and D, baby.