The new and thoroughly adult-oriented miniseries Pam & Tommy tells the tale of the relationship between the musician Tommy Lee and the actress Pamela Anderson. It is interspersed with the narrative of the notorious theft and subsequent internet leak of their Nineties sex tape that has occupied a near-iconic place in popular culture ever since it occurred twenty-five years ago.
Pam & Tommy was initially announced as a James Franco project in 2018, for him to both direct and star as Lee, but Franco’s current status as persona non grata saw him replaced by Sebastian Stan. In the near-impossible role of Anderson, meanwhile, Lily James bravely dons prosthetic breasts, blonde hair and an American accent in a considerable volte-face from the upper-class English roles with which she is associated.
There is surrealism (Lee’s penis talks) and smirking innuendo. The first episode is entitled “Drilling and Pounding,” and both the meanings of the terms are on display, as Seth Rogen’s beleaguered carpenter is first bothered by the endless sexual antics of the couple, and then by Lee’s refusal to pay his bill, leading to Rogen stealing the soon-to-be-notorious tape as revenge.
The show begins as a light-hearted romp, only to morph halfway into a more serious examination of the myth of Pamela Anderson, and the way in which, long before her sexual antics could be observed with the click of a mouse, she had become famous for being, essentially, an objectified pair of pneumatic breasts, often barely contained within a red swimsuit. By the mid-Nineties, she was famous for her appearance in Baywatch and for her Playboy centerfolds, which led one wag to joke that she had been in the center of the magazine so many times that it was a wonder she didn’t have staples in her.
But this cheap, jokey attitude towards Anderson — sexism and misogyny only barely concealed by her apparent complicity in sexualizing herself — is held in sharp relief throughout Pam & Tommy, as it shows the soul-sapping cost of becoming an international commodity. If the release of the tape and her Playboy and Baywatch appearances represent the high, or low, watermark of her “dumb blonde” era — Marilyn Monroe for the MTV generation — then Anderson has subsequently reinvented herself as simultaneously ironically self-aware and a walking symbol of consumerism.
Her social media feeds are inevitably full of black and white pictures of her in various forms of undress, but the captions are by the likes of Nin, Jung and Plath. She is a campaigner for everything from PETA to veganism, a novelist and memoirist (albeit in ghostwritten form) who is also a long-standing defender and supporter of Julian Assange, whom she has called “a hero.” Rumors of a romantic connection between the two, even as Assange hid in the Ecuadorean embassy in London, were not displaced by her statement that “He is a good man, he is an incredible person. I love him, I can’t imagine what he has been going through.”
The lives of those sex symbols who have tried to subvert the “dumb blonde” stereotype that they have been landed with have not always been happy ones. From Jayne Mansfield and Diana Dors to (most notoriously) Marilyn Monroe and Sharon Stone, their post-heyday careers are often a morass of disappointment and objectification, shot through with an image-obsessed industry’s overt irritation that famous women’s bodies age and develop, just as the rest of ours do. (The word “ageless” is used less as a compliment and more in hopeful expectation.)
But Anderson has been sufficiently savvy to confound expectations and challenge stereotypes, taking control of her own story in the process. If Pam & Tommy is the success that the hype should merit, she may be that rare thing: a self-aware icon fully in control of both her sexuality and her image, who is bound for the long haul. Hopefully, she will continue to challenge and subvert for a considerable time to come.
