In the film “The Last Showgirl” the former Playmate plays an erotic dancer who is facing ruin. As a sex symbol with a tragic past, Anderson knows what that feels like.
You have your worth even in old age, says Pamela Anderson: “We will soon have a 60-year-old American president.”
Norman Wong
Of course, it was always clear that Pamela Anderson was not as banal as many men imagined. Rubber in the bosom does not affect the mind. Anderson, who notoriously took off her clothes for “Playboy”, the lifeguard/bathing beauty from 77 episodes of “Baywatch”, is now proving herself as a character actress.
Cultural pessimists groan: Anderson, the epitome of the sex symbol, should be a serious actress? Yes, at the age of 57 the second career was launched. The woman with the curves shows depth. In the film “The Last Showgirl” she stupendously plays a washed-up vaudeville dancer in Las Vegas. Pamela Anderson is an Oscar contender.
Tom Kummer’s first victim
The Swiss author Tom Kummer became known in the 1990s with star interviews that later turned out to be fakes. The reason why newspapers and readers fell for him was because when he was in grief, the stars came across as amazingly reflective. Like Mike Tyson as a Hemingway expert: That was new.
Tellingly, Kummer began his counterfeiting career with Pamela Anderson. An intellectually stimulating sex bomb guaranteed attention, and the red bathing dress made flesh took on astonishing textures in Kummer’s imagination: he wrote about Anderson as a beach diva who eloquently compared herself to Isabella Rossellini and mentioned in passing the avant-garde cyberpunk cycle “Neuromancer” by William Having read Gibson.
It wasn’t that far-fetched. At the audience discussion at the Zurich Film Festival currently taking place, Pamela Anderson also occasionally shows her educated middle-class side. “I like a lot of directors,” she once says. “Fellini and Godard and Herzog and Cassavetes.” (By the way, the way Werner pronounces it “Örtsog” is adorable.)
Anderson has class. However, by tampering with her intellectually on his own initiative, Tom Kummer was serving a poor male fantasy: the submissive thinker is sexier than the obsequious fool.
For a long time she was underestimated. Then, because of Kummer’s nonsense, it suddenly became part of the Pamela Anderson phenomenon that legends grew up around her intellect. Pamela Anderson was hyped up to be a feminist genius. A kind of Simone de Beauvoir with a double D cup.
She is an open book
Pamela Anderson is neither stupid nor cerebral. There is something else fascinating about her, and her visit to Zurich illustrated that: she is almost overwhelmingly natural. Now it’s pretty trite to describe a celebrity as natural. Newspaper articles about stars who are oh-so-down-to-earth and authentic are some of the dullest things film and social journalism has to offer.
With Anderson, however, things are more complicated. Because it has become an icon precisely because of its artificiality. She has never hidden any cosmetic surgery. She, who is so decidedly “made,” never fooled anyone. As a pin-up girl, Pamela Anderson was both a projection screen and an open book. Its effect came from this contradiction. Note: If the breasts aren’t real, that doesn’t mean the woman is fake.
As it happens, Pamela Anderson becomes less suitable as a sex symbol as she gets older. She now spends a lot of time in the garden and in Zurich she talks about her pickled cucumbers. According to her own statement, she also stopped wearing makeup. The experience is reflected in her face. Inevitably, personality shines through. There is logic to the fact that she is now making a comeback in the character department.
The showgirl is a thing of the past
In the touching indie drama by Gia Coppola, niece of Sofia Coppola, which Anderson presented at the film festival (the cinema release is expected in early 2025), Anderson plays an aging showgirl, Shelley. Shelley’s era in Las Vegas is over. The show in which she dances is being canceled after 37 years. Viewers rarely get lost in the variety show called “Le Razzle Dazzle”. It is intended to be reminiscent of the legendary “Lido cabaret” in Paris. The old-fashioned, revealing show is now simply passé.
Pamela Anderson is stunning in the role of the show girl on the verge of ruin. Performances like hers don’t come along too often. It is one of those rare cases in which an actress suddenly finds themselves in a material that enters into a fascinating dialogue with their own biography. It was similar with Mickey Rourke and the film “The Wrestler”. The story about the worn-out show fighter reflected the star and his struggle with the entertainment industry, which had made him big but also thrown him hard onto the mat.
Shelley’s era in Las Vegas is over: Pamela Anderson in “The Last Showgirl”.
ZFF
Such performances are not about the performer playing himself. But he understands better than anyone was he plays. When she read the script, says Pamela Anderson in Zurich, she knew that she had to make this film for all the world. For her it was “a question of life and death”. That sounds dramatic, but it was also dramatic.
Because Pamela Anderson was down. For many years now. She had experienced strokes of fate, a miscarriage, and later domestic violence. She was also a tragic case professionally. There was no longer any talk of a career. Because the scandal surrounding the sex video had destroyed everything: in 1995, her husband Tommy Lee and she filmed a private pornographic video while on vacation. The cassette was probably stolen by a craftsman, along with the 200 kilogram safe in which it was located.
Fight against the sex tape
These were the early years of the Internet. The video spread in ways previously unimaginable. While the story was unbearable for Pamela Anderson and made a halfway decent film career impossible, it affected Tommy Lee less. A scandalous rocker like him is fine with any excitement.
Anderson fought, but the humiliation only increased. Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee are public figures, a judge ruled. They would have to live with the distribution of the video.
What many people probably thought: Anyone who has made a career thanks to nude pictures in “Playboy” doesn’t need to get upset because of a sex video. But one was not comparable to the other. Publishing the video against Anderson’s wishes was sexual assault. However, she chose her career in the adult industry on her own initiative. Being a Playmate was an act of self-empowerment for her, she says in interviews.
Because as a child she experienced terrible things. First the girl was sexually molested by a babysitter. At the age of 12, she was raped by a 25-year-old. Later she is said to have been raped again by several young men. The girl isolated herself and became increasingly shy. Working for Playboy gave her self-confidence back.
Pamela Anderson has no regrets
In “The Last Showgirl,” Pamela Anderson embodies a woman who is proud of what she does. It doesn’t matter what others say. Shelley loves the “Razzle Dazzle”, this better peep show, she doesn’t see anything dirty in it. And so it is for Pamela Anderson, who likes to emphasize that she is not ashamed to look back on her days as a sex symbol. She doesn’t regret anything.
When “Playboy” called, she didn’t think twice. As she reveals in Zurich, she only briefly asked her mother what she thought about it. “I would,” replied the woman, who worked as a waitress at a place called Smitty’s Pancake House. The mother told her daughter: “Go out into the world, child. Live your life.”
Pamela Anderson comes from Ladysmith, a community of 8,500 people on Vancouver Island. The mother was 17 years old and the father was 19 when the daughter was born. He, Barry, is a hothead and a warrior. Barry plays poker and loves fast cars. Pamela Anderson describes him as the “notorious ‘bad boy of Ladysmith’” in the Netflix documentary “Pamela, a Love Story”.
Sparks flew in the passionate marriage. The mother and the children flee from the hot-tempered man several times. They live in their cars and on welfare. “I still remember the taste of powdered milk,” says Pamela Anderson.
She is discovered at an American football game. The camera scans the audience and stays on the blonde All-American girl. The call from “Playboy” doesn’t take long to arrive.
Wedding in bikini
In Pamela Anderson’s life, events often happen quickly. Tommy Lee meets her in a nightclub and after the brief encounter he is completely infatuated with her. Uninvited, he follows her to a photo shoot in Cancún. Four days later the wedding. At the beach. She in a white bikini, he wears Bermuda shorts. She doesn’t even know his last name. At first she thinks his name is Tommy Lee Jones (she confuses the name with that of the Hollywood actor).
This is how Pamela Anderson races through her life. The divorce is immediately followed by another wedding, then another divorce, then another wedding, etc. Nothing lasts, it finds no stability. She doesn’t want one either. She says herself. She wants to live in the moment.
Pamela Anderson inspires in her fearlessness. When she presented the film at the ZFF, she explained that “The Last Showgirl” was “a rallying cry”: You have your worth even in old age. “We will soon have a 60-year-old American president,” she adds. That is to say, one should take Kamala Harris as a role model. Or to Pamela Anderson.
