When the information broke, in 2020, that Disney-owned Hulu was making a miniseries about Pamela Anderson, Tommy Lee and the purloined intercourse tape that shook the world, it got here as a little bit of a shock. The platform had all the time been the streaming house for the corporate’s R-rated fare, but it surely appeared uncertain that Disney could be daring sufficient to do justice to a triple-X premise. Properly, as a refrain of pre-release headlines trumpeting the fictionalized Lee’s animatronic speaking penis confirmed, that exact fear was misplaced. And it seems that the issues with Pam & Tommy go far past a scarcity (or surplus) of raunch.
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The perfect factor this irritating crime caper has going for it’s its forged. Sebastian “Winter Soldier” Stan captures the manic machismo of Mötley Crüe drummer Lee in full, chaotic flower. If Lily James, the British interval drama stalwart, leans into Anderson’s breathy ditziness to an extent that feels barely imply, at the very least she makes an astonishing bodily transformation into the Baywatch star. (The present’s hair and make-up deserve all of the awards.) Seth Rogen, who developed the undertaking with producing companion Evan Goldberg and author Robert Siegel, dons a mullet as Rand Gauthier, the down-and-out carpenter who steals the couple’s honeymoon video after Tommy pushes him too far. Nick Offerman, Taylor Schilling and The White Lotus breakout Fred Hechinger spherical out Rand’s smut-saturated L.A. milieu.
There’s actually extra to this story, which figured prominently within the rise of web pornography and presaged current authorized battles over revenge porn, than even many people who had been sentient on the time are conscious. A few of it’s even value telling. However the present is wildly inconsistent, swinging from fratty exploitation romp to revisionist buzzkill to dramatized Wikipedia entry with out bothering to clean out the transitions. The central couple can come off as moderately clever and reflective or deeply silly and shallow. In some scenes, Tommy is a young, loving, overgrown boy, blindsided by the rise of alt-rock and delicate about Crüe’s fall from the highest of the charts; in others, he’s a raging psychopath.
Based mostly on a 2014 Rolling Stone characteristic, Pam & Tommy additionally stretches a brief film’s value of fabric to eight episodes of as much as an hour apiece. The Lees’ 96-hour courtship is rendered in such minute element that it virtually appears to unfold in actual time. Considered one of three episodes directed by Craig Gillespie (I, Tonya) opens with a seemingly interminable sequence through which Rand and grownup leisure icon Uncle Miltie (Offerman) pitch the tape to studio after litigation-averse studio. I assume it’s apt that the present matches Umberto Eco’s well-known definition of porn: “If, to go from A to B, the characters take longer than you prefer to, then the movie you might be seeing is pornographic.”
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What pushes Pam & Tommy from inane, inconsistent however often enjoyable trifle right into a extra cynical realm is, satirically, its intermittent makes an attempt to view the saga by a feminist lens. Halfway by the collection, after Rand and Miltie begin promoting copies of the tape on-line, the largely male producing crew brings in a couple of credible feminine storytellers, together with author Sarah Gubbins (Higher Issues) and director Lake Bell, to weigh the scandal’s disproportionate affect on Pam. Out of the blue, a personality heretofore depicted as a simpering bimbo is issuing such searing third-wave critiques as: “sluts don’t get to determine what occurs to photos of their our bodies.”
The present’s creators could have been genuinely moved to provide Anderson, who reportedly finds its existence “very painful” and resisted invites to take part, her due. However even when that’s the case, their jumble of characterizations and tones—to not point out the laziness of churning out such a shoddy retelling of her public humiliation—does her a disservice. The identical goes for the selection to color the couple’s marriage as a whirlwind romance and relegate the six months Lee served in jail after pleading no contest to felony spousal battery costs to onscreen textual content.
Pam & Tommy is the type of story that’s virtually unimaginable to inform within the post-#MeToo period—one that mixes a budget pleasures of trash tradition with a sober accounting of systemic misogyny. Rogen and his collaborators wouldn’t have been fallacious to worry a backlash to a lighter, extra glib depiction of Anderson’s ordeal. However what they’ve made as a substitute is a cowardly compromise that, speaking phallus and all, appears sure to disappoint viewers of each stripe.
