****This thought isn't fully fleshed out. Just a warning. This post may end up being a boatload of dribble, I don't know. Remains to be seen.
Um, it's hard to talk about Anna Nicole seriously, because she became such a caricature in the years, months leading up to yesterday, when she died. For some reason, I have a tremendous amount of feeling about her death, and it's not really sadness, or sympathy, or anything like that, though she did leave a 5 month-old daughter behind, which is tragic. And I don't mean to defend her, though I think that someone somewhere can make a case for her as a tragically mis-used woman. I don't know how to make that case, because I don't know enough about her.
Even so, that is sort of the direction my feelings come from, from this sense of her as a caricature of "blonde ditzy woman" and the idea that she somehow took in certain messages society sends to women and became those messages. Does that make sense? She is a tragedy because she did all the things we heap scorn on women for doing--using sex to sell things, marrying for money (turning the joke into reality), becoming a fat rich whore (I don't mean to insult here, but just that this is how people saw her), and then becoming a skinny, drug-addled joke. I can't pretend to know the motivations behind her decisions, and rest assured, I'm not letting her off the hook for them. She made some horrible decisions; anyone can see that with little effort.
But I'm also going to bat here for the idea that none of Anna Nicole Smith's decisions were made in a vacuum, and sometimes I think this culture has such power over women in the public eye. We're very exacting about what we expect from these famous ladies, and sometimes it's crotch shots in limos, and sometimes is rehab at 21 and sometimes it's dating the wrong men and sometimes it's becoming a stereotype based on a stereotype. We gloried in what happened to Anna Nicole, because it made her what we wanted it to make her. It'd be hard, I think, not to bring up Norma Jean Baker in this conversation (Marilyn Monroe, fwiw) about Vicky Lynn Hogan, and her short life and her untimely, early death. I don't think that what happened to Marilyn is so different from what happened to Anna Nicole, and it's a shit position to take, to call them both victims, and to blame someone else for their deaths. To blame us for their deaths.
Yet it's very hard, almost impossible for me to not think these things, to not see things in such an ugly way. Because ultimately, I do believe that both of these women were used. By men, by women, by society, by the media. By just about everyone who could use them. Does that mean that they themselves didn't use people? Of course not. And they used themselves, in every sense that they could. Anna Nicole became a spokesperson for a diet drug that probably does very little good for anyone, and possibly a lot of bad. There's nothing noble about that. Marilyn, though from a different time, used her body no differently, in some ways. She sold movies by standing over grates and feeding the notion that everyone (read: men) should be able to look up her skirt and snatch a view of her, well...snatch. Again, neither action is noble. Neither thing is something to be praised for, something to remember fondly. They're ugly acts, and they reduce women down to what I can't stand them to be reduced to: sex objects.
But they were sex objects, those two women, whether they chose that role or not. Whether they felt they had any choice in that. Whether we gave them any choice in that. I don't have the answers. I just know that something feels somehow wrong about the way Norma Jean died, and has for years. There are reasons we are still fascinated by her. She wasn't who we saw her as. And I think that there are nuances to the Anna Nicole/Vicky Lynn story that feel the same. Something feels wrong about her death, and our fascination with her sordid life. She wasn't who we saw her as. In each case, it's impossible to know who that woman really was. We can only ever see them as we want to. And in this case, this latest, recent tragedy, I fear that our vision isn't so charitable. I fear that many people will express the thought that S did yesterday: "Maybe the baby is better off without Anna Nicole for a mother."
And that might just be the most tragic thing about this whole thing. That might be the ultimate act of using Anna Nicole Smith.
Comments