Anne Nicole Smith belongs to that lineage of women referred to by augmentations: big man, blonde, sellers, A quarter of a meter eighty tall, a D cup bra, we remember her in Italy mainly for her wedding photo with the eighty-nine-year-old billionaire James Howard Marshall II, in her twenty-three-year-old one. The wedding dress is as swollen as whipped egg whites, she is in a wheelchair. If you were a teenage boy in the ’90s, though, you’ll remember him from the cover Maximum: arms folded over breasts, Marilyn Monroe posture and hair. The documentary was released on Netflix in late May Anne Nicole Smith: The True StoryAnother non-fiction portrait of a faded star pulled out of a hat by streaming platforms in the wake of other successful documentaries like Pamela Anderson and Britney Spears.
The documentary on Anne Nicole Smith is not particularly successful, perhaps a bit rushed; We understand the attempt to make her another very fair and very sad, “victim of herself and others”. But Anne Nicole Smith’s charisma is such that it’s able to compensate for the documentary’s slowness: She’s a bad girl with a rock’n’roll attitude, whose redemption and curse lie in beauty. She is the embodiment of Lana Del Rey’s entire discography. Hers is a typically American story: the young girl who wants to escape the province and the white underclass, known as “white trash”, to become rich and famous. «She practiced playing Majorette in the garden, since she was a child, she was already beautiful. He attracted the attention of the whole neighborhood and he liked the attention», as the Texan uncle describes him at the beginning of the documentary, which makes us understand that we are talking about someone who knows that How things work in parts.
The first years are characterized only by a desire to escape: running away from school, running away from an unhappy childhood, running away from her first husband when she was very young. Becoming a mother gives her the awareness: all she will do is for her son, Daniel, to give him the life and everything she never had. To support herself, she works at a strip club, with the money she saves, invests in herself and getting her breasts fixed. There she meets the second love of her life, the much older billionaire James Howard Marshall: it cannot be said that it was not love, she embraces him and stays close to him, he showers her with money and promises her It is a manor. They are both aware of the transaction, but she doesn’t want to pass off as a social climber; Before marrying him, she decides that she will pursue a career.
When we talk about “typically American” history, it is not true that here in Italy we are able to understand what it means, although we are now certain that we know everything about America. Got it. Watching all those movies and all the episodes isn’t enough the simpsonsEven if we too have started celebrating Thanksgiving and watching the Super Bowl. It hinges on the fact that Hollywood propaganda works (and God forbid), what escapes us is that it is addressed more to Americans themselves than to us. However, Anne Nicole Smith understood everything about the society in which she lived; Redemption through money and the promise of saving redemption, the cult of fame. She knows what sacrifices are required: to become rich and famous she kills Vicki Lynn Hogan (i.e., her old, poor Texan girl self) and impersonates Marilyn Monroe: she puts on makeup like her, Cuts her hair like her, walks and talks like her. The pseudonym “Anne Nicole Smith” was found by Paul Marciano, the head of the Guess brand, of which she became a testimonial. turning point during an audition for Slacker: «She was the most beautiful girl I have ever seen without makeup. Immediately after that was Sharon Stone», says the photo editor. That cover catapults her straight to the Olympus of Hollywood celebrities; Films and television appearances, many other covers would follow: the public loved him, felt close to him (and still loves very much); The media exploits her because she exploits them.
in 1994 new york magazine It is featured on the cover with the title “White Trash Nation”. She’s sitting on the floor eating chips, white Texan shoes, pink top: She’s going to sue the newspaper that didn’t reveal the reason for the shooting. A year after her marriage to the billionaire, she remains a widow and is sued by her son. The “Marshall vs. Marshall” trial, over who would win the billionaire’s money, invaded the newspapers for months and months; A “Depp vs. Heard” trial of sorts, and the latter is the woman on the losing side. Her career takes off in later years, but she is still constantly followed by the paparazzi and appears in gossip magazines with photos in which she appears fat (redemption if you come from so low). symbol of the impossibility of); The favorite target of the “Mud Machine” is the road accident that everyone morbidly wants to see and keep up to date on. Its relaunch takes place in the 2000s with a reality show. And!Riding high on Osbourne’s success, she loses weight and moves to 2007, the fateful year in which she is found dead at the Hard Rock Hotel in Hollywood after a drug overdose. The same death of her son Daniel five months earlier, lying next to her hospital bed in which she had just given birth to her second child.
The story of Anne Nicole Smith is a clear representation of what you have to sacrifice if you are a woman to achieve fame and success in a capitalist society founded on collective hallucination. The Life of Anne Nicole Smith The Complete Bibliography of Richard Yeats. Of all the details, his falling in love with Marilyn Monroe gives the story an esoteric edge. She was such a fan that she collected Marilyn memorabilia as well as lived in one of her homes, where she said she came into contact with his spirit. But she’s not the only celebrity to have been influenced by Marilyn, in fact it could be said that every woman who has reached Hollywood stardom at a certain point in her career like her should pay homage to the diva of divas. Who is not Greta Garbo, or Jayne Mansfield or Liz Taylor, but Marilyn Monroe, the one with the saddest story, characterized by childhood abuse, persecuted and narcissized by gossips, with a mysterious and tragic death.
Just google the name of any celebrity plus Marilyn Monroe and photo shoots, or red carpet looks inspired by her, inevitably come up. Think Kim Kardashian at the Met Gala; Christina Aguilera and Gwen Stefani in their pin-up phase, to Lady Gaga who at the start of her career would have practically reproduced all her iconic outfits, to Madonna. There isn’t a female celebrity who doesn’t survive a “Marilyn moment,” for who knows why (there’s an old internet conspiracy theory that explains it: Marilyn would be the prototype of the entertainment industry’s ideal slave). The pattern that keeps repeating itself: There’s a content creator on TikTok named Jasmine Chiswell who impersonated Marilyn Monroe, copying her features, hair, makeup and tone of voice to amass 16.5 million followers. A whole section of her videos is devoted to the purchase of a house where the actress lives: she says she feels his presence, talks about paranormal activities, makes frequent videos on memorabilia related to Marilyn and Joe Dimaggio. Is. Until someone on Reddit realizes that he didn’t buy a house and that the originality of the memento is highly questionable, let alone paranormal activity.
What is most troubling is that at a certain point the TikToker published a video in which she cries, explaining that she had a miscarriage, which however only heals in a few videos: The pregnancy is going well Is. Did TikToker perhaps want to give itself a sad Marilyn Monroe tone? It may be, and in any case, that Anne Nicole Smith did so intentionally: she invented slang in her childhood that was not her own, but that of a friend; She appeared drunk on stage showing “mental distress”, once she got off, she went back to being “normal”. At the end of the documentary, Anne Nicole’s mother recalls a conversation she had with him: «Mom, I make more money telling sad stories than happy ones. I make money whenever my name comes up, that’s the purpose of my life: to make money. But if I tell a bad story, something terrible, I make fifty times the money I could make with a good story.” Once a paparazzi yelled at Anne Nicole that she was better than Marilyn and took her Nods back: “Better never than Merlin”.