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PAMELA ANDERSON, AMBER HEARD AND THEIR FEMINIST

REDEMPTION ARC
To look the part of Pamela Anderson in “Pam & Tommy,” the Hulu series, the
actress Lily James sat through four hours of makeup each day and reportedly
went through 50 pairs of 34DD prosthetic breasts, which had to be switched out
repeatedly during filming and were at times so sweaty, they almost fell off.
The series recounts the whirlwind marriage of Ms. Anderson and her ex, the
Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, and centres on the honeymoon sex tape that
was stolen from their home and distributed to the masses. But this retelling of
their story, created without their involvement, purports to be the empowering
version of events — an attempt to depict Ms. Anderson’s struggle in the
aftermath and “provoke a conversation about how we treat women,” as Ms.
James has put it.
So if the camera seems a little too interested in lingering on those prosthetic
breasts? Don’t worry — this is feminist art.
And it’s the kind of art that seems to be everywhere in Hollywood these days,
part of a slate of projects that aim to “reclaim,” “redeem,” “reframe” and
“reconsider” famous, beautiful, usually white and always misunderstood women
from our semirecent pasts, who were at one point vilified, usually over
something sexual in nature. As the logic (and marketing language) tends to go,
by retelling (and consuming!) these women’s hardships through the more
enlightened lens of today, we are helping women reclaim their power.
“Pam & Tommy” is not the most recent example of this genre, though it is
perhaps the most controversial — in part because Ms. Anderson wanted nothing
to do with it. But by the time it was announced, in 2018, there was a whole host
of other successful projects like it: a biopic and documentary about Anita Hill,
recounting her treatment in her sexual harassment claim against Clarence
Thomas; “I, Tonya,” about the figure skater Tonya Harding, now treated as
more complex than just a low-class villain; and “Lorena,” about Lorena Bobbitt,
who today goes by Lorena Gallo and who we now see was not merely the
woman who chopped off her husband’s penis but also a victim of domestic
abuse.
“They always just focused on it. …” Ms. Gallo said in 2019, in an interview
published by The New York Times. “And it’s like they all missed or didn’t care
why I did what I did.”
These stories played out before #MeToo, before social media, before we began
reassessing everything from the art we consume to the monuments we’ve put up
to the very date of our nation’s founding. And so, many of these recent attempts
to look backward have been genuinely revealing: “Framing Britney Spears,” for
instance, the Times-produced documentary from last year, and “Britney v.
Spears,” the Netflix one, delved into the exploitative details of the pop star’s
conservatorship, as well as the tabloid coverage of her, igniting a national
conversation about conservatorship abuse. Documentaries on Janet Jackson,
including one she produced, reignited conversations about her treatment in the
aftermath of that infamous “wardrobe malfunction” at the 2004 Super Bowl,
when her breast was exposed and she was blacklisted but the man who exposed
it, Justin Timberlake, was not.
We owe some of this redemption framework to Monica Lewinsky, of course,
whose affair with the president was the backdrop to everyone’s teen years and
whose return to the public eye ,the wire, arguably helped facilitate. The
interview happened in 2015, shortly before she delivered a TED Talk on public
humiliation, and then again last year, when she became the subject of the FX
series “Impeachment.” (The show, which counted Ms. Lewinsky among its
producers, tells the story of the affair through the lens of the women involved.)
Since then, I’ve applied a similar approach to the lives of other vilified
women: Katie Hill, a former representative who resigned in a revenge porn
scandal; Paula Broadwell, the onetime mistress (a word that has no male
equivalent) of Gen. David Petraeus; Amanda Knox, who a decade ago was
cleared of the sensational murder of her roommate but has struggled to find her
footing since. These women were at times sympathetic characters and other
times not, but plenty of nuance was left out of all their stories.
So I am not immune to the appeal of this redemption arc. And yet …
There is a term I learned recently: “scopophilia.” It means “the love of looking.”

It could refer to pornography or even a car crash, but it is often used in film to
describe the way we look at women who are portrayed onscreen. It is no secret
that humans love consuming spectacle — and we doubly love a spectacle when
it involves women and sex. But at what point does the fictional depiction of that
spectacle, and our viewing of it, become just as bad as watching it in the first
place?
Ursula Macfarlane, the director of an upcoming Netflix documentary
about Anna Nicole Smith, the troubled actress and model who died of an
accidental drug overdose at 39, said when the project was announced, “Now
feels like the right time to re-examine the life of yet another beautiful young
woman whose life has been picked over and ultimately destroyed by our
culture.”
Perhaps — but at what point do such re-examinations merely perpetuate the
tropes that made them worthy of applying hindsight in the first place? Who gets
to tell such stories, who should profit from them, and when does all that talk
about reframing and about upending the male gaze become more about the
performance of redemption than about the woman at the center?
The writer Kathryn VanArendonk has called this recent genre “empathy
tourism”: an attempt to take viewers on a voyage to a past that’s recent enough
to be recognizable but distant enough to feel bizarre. As a result, some efforts
— and, perhaps even more so, the way that people talk about them — can tip
into a kind of smugness.
We can still consume these stories, but through the lens of enlightenment. We
get to feel good about where Ms. Lewinsky is today (she’s a producer!) but we
still get to gawk at her flashing her thong to the president of the United States
— a scene that, she reluctantly signed on to.
We can nod along to heavy-handed dialogue — for example, “Sluts,” Ms.

Anderson’s character declares after a disappointing court ruling, “don’t get to
decide what happens to pictures of their body.” But we also get to do so while
looking at her.
There’s nothing quite like rewatching a woman’s life collapse over a sex tape in
the name of righting history.
For what it is worth, the real Ms. Anderson — who is having something of a
renaissance at the moment — hasn’t seen the show about her. I’m told that she
won’t. According to those close to her, she has few regrets in her life (not
even Kid Rock), but that tape is the one thing she wishes she could undo. She is
now at work on her own version of her story, a documentary with Netflix, co-
produced by one of her sons, as well as a memoir.
Ms. Spears, now free from her conservatorship — the result, arguably, of the
newfound attention stirred up by the films about her — has said she was
“embarrassed” by “Framing Britney Spears” and is also working on a tell-all
memoir.
Ms. Lewinsky has perhaps handled her rehabilitation the most delicately — by
insisting on being a part of it. But even she has said she would have preferred
that the show about her didn’t exist at all.
“I hope it’s the last time,” she said.
There are enough tales of wronged women in history that we could keep telling
these stories forever. But are we really any better off today for having heard so
many of them?
It doesn’t take much effort to uncover examples of imperfect women whose

lives are currently being picked over by our culture, in real time. Those whose
credentials are questioned. Whose fashion choices are picked apart. Whose
personal lives are violated by the tabloids. Whose downfalls, be they for good
reasons or bad, are just a little too salivated over.
RLast week the actress Amber Heard took the stand in a defamation trial against
her. She is being sued by her ex-husband, Johnny Depp, over a 2018 opinion
essay she wrote, in which she called herself a victim of domestic abuse. (Mr.
Depp has denied abusing Ms. Heard and has accused her of abusing him.)
The outcome of the trial is still weeks away, and there are plenty of reasons to
express skepticism about either side’s narrative. And yet it is Mr. Depp’s fans
who flank the courthouse daily, waving from the galley, while social media —
and the trial’s livestream — is inundated with anti-Heard memes and insults,
calling her a “gold digger,” “fake,” “bipolar” and “manipulative,” to the extent
that she has reportedly had to hire security.
Redemption plots are, in theory, supposed to teach us about empathy, about the
inherent humanity of even messy, imperfect women. But what good are they if
they can’t help shape the way we treat one another now?
Until the next redemption plot, I guess.

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PAMELA ANDERSON, AMBER HEARD AND THEIR FEMINIST

So I am not immune to the appeal of this redemption arc. And yet …

There is a term I learned recently: “scopophilia.” It means “the love of looking.”

We can nod along to heavy-handed dialogue — for example, “Sluts,” Ms.

“I hope it’s the last time,” she said.

It doesn’t take much effort to uncover examples of imperfect women whose

Until the next redemption plot, I guess.

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