A new Netflix documentary only seems to further obscure the enigmatic star.
Hollywood has never not been eager to explore the lives of sad, glamorous women. But the past few years in television and film especially have seen a boom in charitable retellings—what Vulture writer Kathyrn VanArendonk calls “empathy tourism”—aiming to humanize mistreated starlets and re-contextualize their sexist portrayals by the media. It was only a matter of time before one of pop culture’s biggest cautionary tales was given an opportunity for reappraisal—again.
A new Netflix documentary titled Anna Nicole Smith: You Don’t Know Me, out this week, attempts to shed new light on Smith’s iconic downfall from one of the most desired women in the world to a depressed, financially needy drug addict. The film is less an indictment of ’90s and early 2000s tabloid culture and more of a clichéd character study of a Marilyn Monroe-esque figure. After years of documentaries, news specials, and even an opera anatomizing her larger-than-life persona since she died of an accidental drug overdose in 2007, this film can’t help but feel extremely redundant.
However, You Don’t Know Me manages to expose two shocking revelations about the former Playboy Playmate, both involving Smith’s now-deceased parents. The debunking of a claim about her mother, specifically, is a confusing effort to offer Smith more complexity. But its placement in the film only calls into question the intent of the film’s director, Ursula...
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