Pam & Tommy Violates Pamela Anderson All Over Again

Pam & Tommy causes far more harm than good to the one person whose perspective on the subject actually matters: the real Pamela Anderson. The Hulu limited series reexposes old wounds from a harrowing time in Anderson’s life by depicting the (somewhat) true events surrounding the infamous and illegal distribution of an intimate home video made by Baywatch star Pamela Anderson and her husband, Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee. Dubbed a “sex tape,” the private video made by the young married couple on their honeymoon was stolen by an aggrieved porn star-turned-carpenter, Rand Gauthier, and then circulated far and wide with the help of the burgeoning internet.

Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee were powerless to stop the spread of the tape, which became a highly publicized phenomenon. Anderson’s career was substantially derailed as she was relentlessly mocked, harassed, and shamed by the media, while her husband transcended to a new level of rock god due to the much-lauded size of his penis. The double standards and misogyny implicit in the tape’s media coverage are not lost on Pam & Tommy, becoming an unmistakable focal point of the series in its second half. However, the show’s largely sympathetic treatment of Pam (played by Lily James) does not excuse the fact that Pam & Tommy was made without Anderson’s consent and against her wishes.

Anderson has spoken many times about what a difficult period this was in her life, especially as people believed her to be complicit in the tape’s release. She maintains that she has not watched the tape to this day due to the trauma and turmoil it caused for her and her marriage, much of which she had to endure while pregnant with each of her and Lee’s two sons, Brandon and Dylan. The couple was also having other difficulties that were compounded by the tape, leading to Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s divorce in 1998 after Lee was sentenced to six months in jail for spousal battery. Between an abusive relationship, a humiliating scandal, and the dissolution of her marriage with two young children to care for, this was a time that Anderson has expressed the desire to leave in the past. More than 20 years later, however, Pam & Tommy has reignited public interest in the tape that caused Anderson so much pain, forcing her to relive her worst memories and wrenching control of her own narrative and body away from her once again. Though Pam & Tommy preaches the importance of consent and female empowerment, the existence of the show itself proves that it doesn’t actually respect those concepts much at all.

Pam & Tommy Violates Pamela The Same Way As The Tape Did

Just like the infamous tape in question, Pam & Tommy exploits Pamela Anderson’s body, privacy, and autonomy over her own image for commercial and “artistic” purposes without her consent. More than that, Pam & Tommy exploits Anderson’s trauma by rehashing and quite literally recreating some of the most upsetting moments of her life. Sources close to Anderson have said that the “Pam & Tommy Hulu series has been so painful for Pamela Anderson and for anyone that loves her,” and that the tape makes her feel “so violated to this day. It brings back a very painful time for her” (via ET Online).

Interestingly, there is a similar line said in the series when Pam expresses to a perplexed Tommy that she feels so “violated.” The creatives behind Pam & Tommy make it clear in moments like this throughout the series that they understand the devastating impact wrought by the invasion of privacy and toxic nature of celebrity culture, even while they are themselves nonconsensually invading privacy and blatantly subscribing to (and often encouraging) the cult of celebrity – just like the original tape. Unlike Pam & Tommy‘s Rand Gauthier, however, the people exploiting Anderson this time around are not ignoramuses who did not consider the consequences of their actions. They knew what they were doing in creating Pam & Tommy, and after seemingly weighing ethics against creative license and profit, the decision was made that their show was worth the pain it would cause Pamela Anderson.

Pam & Tommy Could Never Have Helped Pamela Anderson

By reopening this horrible chapter in Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s life, Pam & Tommy has exposed whole new generations to Anderson’s greatest regret, inviting upon her once again the same kind of public scrutiny and humiliation that she had to endure years ago. Countless people who never would have known anything about Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee are now aware of them because Pam & Tommy has resurrected a decades-old scandal that Anderson just wants to be forgotten. Though the show is trying to spin the events through a new, more modern and sympathetic lens, they are still peddling a narrative about Anderson that she has had no input in, making assumptions and projecting ideas onto her the same way people did in the nineties.

Additionally, Anderson fought very hard for many years to stop the distribution of the tape, the process of which Pam & Tommy greatly simplifies and condenses. Though it was, unfortunately, a losing battle, Anderson made it very clear that she was deeply upset by the fact that people were watching, selling, and talking about the tape. In recent years, her goal of putting the whole ordeal behind her finally looked to be within reach, as Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee’s tape faded far from the forefront of cultural consciousness. But now, with the success of Pam & Tommy, it’s fair to wonder how many more people have sought out and seen the video that never would have otherwise. Even though the intentions were surely not malicious, the attention the show calls to a moment Anderson has tried so hard to erase ensures that Pam & Tommy was always going to do more harm than good.

Pam & Tommy’s Marketing & Messaging Were Hypocritical

Numerous interviews with the writers, directors, producers, actors, and actresses of Pam & Tommy all seem to emphasize one apparently fundamental intention of the show: justice for Pamela Anderson. So much of Pam & Tommy‘s press and marketing has been about setting the story of the infamous tape straight on Anderson’s behalf; however, that simply cannot be done without her consent. Though Lily James and the TV show’s producers apparently reached out to Anderson many times, she stayed adamantly silent, while friends such as Courtney Love and others have made it abundantly clear that Anderson does not want to see this part of her life revisited.

No doubt in response to this, Pam & Tommy‘s marketing has largely been preemptively defensive and self-congratulatory for reframing the past with a more modern, female-driven perspective. Though director Craig Gillespie’s name is most prominently attached to the project, most of the series was actually directed by women – something that Pam & Tommy‘s Twitter and Instagram accounts were very keen to point out on a frequent basis. However, only one episode out of eight was written by a woman, and male producers on the show significantly outnumbered female ones by a nearly 3:1 ratio. The marketing also largely suggested that the show would be Pam-centric, but she is conspicuously and frustratingly absent from the Rand-focused pilot, in which she hardly even makes an appearance. Pilots are usually considered to be a show’s mission statement, in which case, Pam & Tommy‘s is certainly not prioritizing Pam, contrary to what the title and the press interviews advertise.

Pam & Tommy’s Finale Was A Cop Out

Throughout the series, Pam & Tommy consistently glamorizes what was really a very intense and tumultuous relationship. Certainly, there was glamour in the deep and extravagant Hollywood love story shared by Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, but it is disingenuous and harmful to romanticize the positive aspects of the couples’ relationship while largely ignoring its very real and devastating fallout, resulting in Anderson and Lee’s divorce. Though the chyron that inevitably follows any dramatic adaptation of a true story briefly mentions Lee’s uncontested charges of spousal battery at the end of Pam & Tommy, the abusive aspects of Anderson and Lee’s relationship remain largely untouched upon and overlooked by the series. Sebastian Stan, who plays Tommy Lee, clarified that he was glad the show didn’t go into the couple’s messy break-up because it’s not about them – “it’s about what did [the tape and its aftermath] say about America and about the internet and the media and how we are very much driven in many ways for profit and consumerism – we don’t stop at the repercussions of how it might impact anybody on a human level, because they’re celebrities, maybe you can get away with it. But no.” (via EW). Ironically, MCU star Sebastian Stan’s words could be just as easily applied to Pam & Tommy as they could to the furor surrounding the infamous tape – and it has become woefully clear that people can still get away with it.

Instead of acknowledging the real issues of abuse and the show’s own complicity in the continued exploitation of Pamela Anderson, Pam & Tommy opts for providing closure that never really existed. Seth Rogen’s Rand Gauthier is shown to be repentant for the suffering he caused Pam by releasing the tape, though the real Gauthier was only remorseful in the sense that he regrets that his actions ruined his own life. The article that Pam & Tommy is based on makes it plain that Gauthier “likes the fact that he contributed this small token to the world, and he’s always enjoyed watching the tape himself” (via Rolling Stone). This Pam & Tommy fact check proves there were no lessons learned for Rand Gauthier, despite the show’s partial redemption of him. Similarly, Anderson and Lee’s legal and marital problems were not “over” when they signed over their rights to the tape, as Pam & Tommy‘s somewhat abrupt ending seems to suggest. She and Lee continued to present a united front in the fight for their own privacy even after their divorce, pursuing a lawsuit for copyright infringement by the Internet Entertainment Group that they eventually won in 2002.

Pam & Tommy Is Good Television, But That Doesn’t Make It Okay

One of the most frustrating things about Pam & Tommy is that it is actually good. As a television show, it’s wildly entertaining, thematically coherent, well-acted, and well-written, which makes it impossible to dismiss as salacious trash. It is decidedly more than that, and that makes its impact on the real Pamela Anderson even worse; Pam & Tommy is widely-seen and well-reviewed in spite of Anderson’s explicit lack of consent. It may even be nominated for Emmys, keeping Anderson’s trauma a steady presence in the news cycle for months to come. If Pam & Tommy were objectively bad, these things would not be in consideration, and the show would be far easier to write off and ignore – but unfortunately, it isn’t that simple.

Made by a host of talented filmmakers and actors, Pam & Tommy is both high-quality and highly unethical. Though it claims to stand for Anderson and challenge the double standards of the modern media, Pam & Tommy actually reinforces them by sending the message that entertainment is more valuable than a real woman’s say in her own life and healing. However, Anderson is now ensuring that she gets to speak for herself with an upcoming Pamela Anderson Netflix documentary that has been announced in the wake of the renewed media attention brought by Pam & Tommy. Hopefully, this means that Anderson will be able to tell her side of the story once and for all, finally free from the interference of media misconceptions, presumptuous interviewers, narratively-driven writers, or dramatic exaggeration.

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