After weeks of enduring a media blitz worthy of the Olympics or a nuclear blast, Anna Nicole will finally be laid to rest today. The amount of attention this whole tragedy has received still boggles my mind. Newspaper articles, Magazine covers, cable news, evening news, talks shows, and everyone else in-between all focused on every aspect of Anna Nicole and her life.
Ridiculous, mainly because of the goings on in the rest of the world: The genocide in Sudan dragging on covertly; War raging in Iraq with the body count climbing higher and higher; North Korea’s own egomaniac agreeing tentatively to a deal; Israel and the Palestinians and Hamas playing out a never-ending drama of one-ups-manship. And yet the powers that be continually feed the life that was Anna Nicole to the beast of media consumption. Why?
Ever since Anna Nicole popped on the scene, squeezed into a pair of Versace Jeans and next splashed naked across the pages of Playboy, she has been an oddity of pop culture. Her personification of the blonde bombshell, babes like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansefield, was so uncanny that it made me wonder if she or her handlers produced, polished, and packaged her image, readying it to be spoon fed to the American public.
But, as her old octogenarian husband probably knew, Anna Nicole didn’t go down, at least not smoothly. She had a few jagged edges that revealed themselves whenever she opened her mouth. No, I’m not talking about her teeth. When Anna’s slow, stumbling, nonsensical words, voiced in a baby doll whisper, combined with her glassy eyed stare transformed her into a creature worthy of a Mary Shelley novel.
Whether this behavior was calculated or the result of too many drug and alcohol binges, the result proved addictive. Here was this beautiful creature, envied and desired for her looks, whose behavior warped her into an object of pity and ridicule. Everyone from Kathy Griffin to the folks on Saturday Night Live lampooned Anna Nicole with heartless glee. I laughed right along when TV Funhouse imagined Anna Nicole as slovenly and horny Smurfette out to seduce and eat everything in sight. But, funny enough, this side of her served to temper Anna’s movie goddess beauty and do something for her that other blonde bombshells never achieved: become relatable.
Anna Nicole was messed up just like the majority of us and so America fixated on her and held onto her so tightly that it wouldn’t let her go even when death claimed her. Lets hope finally, with her burial, that she and the madness surrounding her can finally be laid to rest.
Sorry, who?
Young people!