Too soon? Too late?

I was disturbed when slutmachine (link NSFW, btw...but you knew that) told me that E! aired a special last weekend called Life & Death of Anna Nicole. "An epic, 3-hour special on the life of Anna Nicole that includes new interviews with her family? Why didn't I know about this? Why have I been kept in the dark about this E! News special?!?" Of course, the question answers itself -- I was probably too busy being gayyyyy to notice that it was on.

What didn't disturb me about the special was the content. I know that now that it's four months after her death, and the resulting media frenzy has most people all Anna Nicoled out, but not me. I ate this kind of shit up when she was alive, and I'm just as voracious about it now that she's dead. To me, a presentation of Anna Nicole's pinto beans-to-Playboy-to-Percocet existence is the apex of trash culture. Her somewhat toothless family (loooooove me some Shelly), her somewhat coherent friends (one labels her lesbian dabbling as "experimentin' around," another friend is...O.J. Simpson), her somewhat painful acting, her totally ridiculous modeling, her dedicated commitment to nonsense all come together like points of light to form this amazing prism of garbage.

"You could just stare at her for hours on end," says one of her friends during Life & Death and it's true. I have and often while doing so, have noticed a Pavlovian response within myself: when Anna Nicole opens her mouth, I laugh. That's always the way it was and it's the way it still is. I wonder, though, if I should now feel bad about this. Is laughing at her stoned high jinks morbid now, after an overdose led to her death? Should the following clips serve as bite-size cautionary tales instead of punch lines? Are they now something to tsk at and shake our heads over out of contempt for a waste of a life? Does the difference between comedy and tragedy come down to a few sleeping pills too many?

I don't think so. I'm sure there are plenty who never saw the humor in her antics in the first place, who always found them sad, but clearly, I'm not one of them. Maybe laughing at her ditzy slurring is the way to honor her legacy (after all, ditzy slurring was her main contribution to pop culture). After all, it seems to me that she lived her life not so much like a candle in the wind, but three sheets to it. You know?

Comments

[deeyou]

Anna Nicole's crazy will always be fun to watch, it's what she was known for and I don't think she had a problem with that.

If you're looking for bite-size cautionary tales, YouTube 'Britney Spears'.

[Audrey]

I think the E! True Hollywood Story is pretty decent. Maybe a little more tasteful than this one? The special on E! showed that she was less a gold digger and more a naive blonde stripper who was chased by a rich, gross old man who loved strippers. And adultery. And money. And strippers.

[kdub]

I totally agree with your penultimate line. She lived her life the way she wanted to, and most of the time that was "in an altered state."

[valerie]

Rich, I continue to love you after all these years. Anna Nicole was herself and I have alway adored her.

[Diva Delux]

I caught the tail end of the special last night by accident... and what a happy accident!

Anna Nicole never failed to bring the crazy, and even now that she's dead it doesn't really feel like she's gone. It’s like Anna Nicole's greatest hits (of the medicated sort) have been on repeat for the past 4 months.

[Miss Lisa]

Do you have to be stupid to be that high, or that high to be that stupid? That quandry is her legacy. R.I.P. Anna Nicole--the world is a little less crazy without you. And that says a lot about her brand of crazy. Meow! Meow!

[aj]

I've had mixed feelings about Anna Nicole, probably because she was funny, but we know so much about her upbringing, and we all know how she got to be that ditzy. In the 50s there were a lot of blonde actresses that played dumb all the way to the bank, but they knew that they were playing a character. Anna liked to vamp it up to, but she didn't seem to know what she was doing; she just knew she liked the response she got. To a neglected child, any attention was good attention, and if the people around her told her that her Southern sex appeal was the only thing that gave her value, it's no wonder she didn't work on educating herself.

I see it all the time at my job, where I work with high-school age girls that never learned how to add two-digit numbers because they're too busy being decorative. This ignorance has been heretofore reinforced by (middle-class!) parents who only now are starting to panic that their daughters will "end up on the corner." For most uneducated women who only value themselves through sexuality--especiaIly those that aren't white--life is a very difficult series of interactions with controlling, abusive men, worsened by prostitution and drug abuse. A lot of these girls don't make it to 20, much less 37.

Anna Nicole reminds me of these girls--if it weren't for her accidental connections to Playboy, she wouldn't have been a C-level celebrity that married a billionaire. She'd have had it much worse, and her life would have been even shorter and more clearly tragic.

[Amelia]

I like how Sherry's teeth whistle, yet there is no teeth. What makes the whistling?!

[sean]

"pinto beans-to-Playboy-to-Percocet"....honey, you need to get paid for this.

[Tanith]

I love how she'd snorgle that crypt keeper of a first ho-band, but wouldn't let Howard Stern touch her, even at her most schnocked. Clearly she had will and judgment in there somewhere, behind the Clairol and Oxycontin fumes.

[Boobie]

Does anyone think she looks like Pink in the top picture?

[Armandresdin]

I love her, she was so beautiful.

[misha]

i see no problem in laughing the same way you would have when you were alive. she was on tv because she knew she was humorous.

on the other hand, my friend recently asked me if it was still ok to masturbate to her and i seriously had no answer..where do we draw the line?

[Tremayne]

FOURTEENTH!

[Leslie4reals]

I love ANS always have, the ANS Show was like crack to me ala Flavor of Love nowdays, I especially loved that one episode when she was House Hunting and was wearing that super tight pink prairie like top and her boobs/stomach were bulging out and her skin was sooo shiny from being stretched out and got in the tub and couldn't get out, it's forever embeded in my mind, sadly but true.

[Leslie4reals]

I still believe it was the Trimspa, she shoulda stayed in the chunk, much hotter!

[Audrey]

I think she looks a tad like Alicia Silverstone... they have the same mouth, sort of the same smile, and similar eyes... like if Alicia Silverstone bleached her hair, let her self go, got breast implants and got kinda crazy. That would have made "Excess Baggage" a much better movie.

[texas state university book store]

Agree with a flat tax system

[dealer discount tire]

An integrated, segregated society is better

[Vtvuerwv]

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