Netflix’s new documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, is the second popular culture providing about Pamela Anderson to emerge in our present second of revisiting the tales of well-known girls of the ’90s and 2000s who we now imagine ourselves to have wronged. It’s additionally, in a minimum of one essential approach, essentially the most attention-grabbing. Together with Anderson’s memoir, Love, Pamela, additionally out in February, the brand new documentary is what we get in Anderson’s voice.

Wronged-woman revisitations have been modern for a number of years now. After simmering below the radar with the success of the favored podcast You’re Mistaken About since 2018, it got here to a rolling boil in 2021 with Hulu and the New York Instances’s documentary Framing Britney Spears. Popular culture populated itself with tales of the ladies we beloved and despised and raked over the coals, and with eloquent mea culpas on their behalf.

The good achievement of Pamela, a Love Story is that in contrast to its predecessor Pam and Tommy, it manages to advance the evaluation that every one these wronged-woman revisitations are theoretically doing within the first place. It makes a convincing case that Pam and Tommy exists inside the similar style of callous exploitation as all these Jay Leno jokes in regards to the couple’s intercourse tape did in 1996.

About that intercourse tape: the tape Anderson made with then-husband Tommy Lee was meant to be non-public. In 1995, Rand Gauthier, a development employee who mentioned Lee stiffed him on the invoice for home renovation, stole the tape from their residence and shortly started to promote entry to it over the web. Anderson and Lee sued Gauthier and everybody else who appeared to be concerned in its distribution.

The couple ultimately dropped the swimsuit, apparently exhausted by the authorized wrangling. Pamela, a Love Story shines a lightweight on the authorized argument that exhausted them so. In court docket, Gauthier’s legal professionals argued that Anderson had no proper to privateness as a result of she was a Playboy star; she had uncovered her bare physique to the world earlier than, of her personal free will, and so she should not have any downside with it being uncovered now, in opposition to her will.

“It made me really feel like I used to be such a horrible lady,” Anderson recollects in Pamela. “I’m only a piece of meat. That this could imply nothing to me as a result of I’m such a whore, mainly.”

The authorized argument right here was that by having ever been bare in public on her personal phrases, Anderson had revoked her proper to consent. She had grow to be that type of lady: the type of lady who didn’t deserve privateness.

Anderson says in Pamela that she felt the identical approach when she discovered that Hulu was going to make a TV present in regards to the occasions. “They need to have needed to have my permission,” she says.

Final February, Hulu launched Pam and Tommy, which aimed to do for Anderson what American Crime Story: Impeachment did for Monica Lewinsky. It was alleged to reveal the extent to which Anderson had been mistreated after her intercourse tape grew to become public in opposition to her will, and late-night hosts in every single place discovered themselves with a brand new alternative to mock Anderson as an notorious “dumb blonde.” That Anderson loudly disavowed the present and mentioned that it was made with out her consent — in contrast to Lewinsky, who was a producer on Impeachment — didn’t appear to matter. Shouldn’t Anderson get a mea culpa now, no matter whether or not she needed one or not?

Pam and Tommy premiered a 12 months after Framing Britney Spears to gentle curiosity, but in addition to what seemed to be a little bit of revisitation fatigue. At this level, the story of one other blonde intercourse image who turned out to have been mistreated appeared to really feel like an outdated, outdated story, and the present didn’t add something notably new to what was by now changing into a components. Opinions had been anemic, and whereas it was nominated for a number of Emmys, it solely gained one, for make-up.

In Pamela, a Love Story, Pamela’s son tells her he watched the primary three episodes. In response we see her anxiously munching on a vegan croissant, quipping for the cameras about emotional consuming. “I blocked that out of my life,” she says. “I needed to, with a view to survive, actually. It was a survival mechanism. And now that it’s all arising once more, I really feel sick, in my entire abdomen, from the center of my chest, all the way in which down, simply, my abdomen feels prefer it’s been punched. I don’t really feel good proper now.”

In an interview with EW in 2022, Pam and Tommy director Craig Gillespie says the members of the artistic group “completely respect the privateness” of Anderson, regardless of making the present with out her blessing. He went on, “I felt, for us, what we’re attempting to do is actually change the narrative and your perspective of what occurred. And this felt like such a chance to try this and to have the ability to take a look at the story by way of in the present day’s lens and the outrageousness and simply the atrocities that occurred. I felt that hopefully, it will change folks’s standpoint on that.”

The argument right here is that Anderson was a wronged lady of the kind that was presently modern. If she didn’t comply with her story being retold, it didn’t matter. It’s the identical logic that animated the discharge of the intercourse tape within the ’90s, the dehumanization at its core disguised with a faux-progressive veneer. The story might go on with out her, as a result of she had made herself that type of lady.

There are all the time issues with a documentary made by way of shut cooperation with its topic. Pamela, a Love Story is designed to be as sympathetic as doable to Anderson. To that finish, it glosses evenly over her alliances with figures like Vladimir Putin (for anti-fur marketing campaign functions, she says right here) and Julian Assange (on this doc she says merely that she’s very pro-transparency, however previously she’s mentioned he’s been falsely accused due to “the Clinton monopoly on the media”). Her skeptical feedback in regards to the Me Too motion (Weinstein’s victims “ought to have identified what they had been moving into,” she mentioned in 2017), go undiscussed totally.

Nonetheless, Pamela, a Love Story is a large enchancment on its predecessor. Pam and Tommy contributed little, if something, to the general public dialog that was not already there. It by no means fairly justified its personal existence.

Pamela, a Love Story does transfer the dialog ahead. It suggests, brutally, that reveals like Pam and Tommy exist extra to allow us to indulge our titillated fascination with outdated scandals than to make any type of principled stand in opposition to misogyny.