Anna Nicole, the media and the dark side
Anna Nicole Smith was toxic to herself, but great for media outlets.
Watching Smith at the end of her rope on national TV was amusing. It was easy to call her a lush and a media whore while she was cracking under the pressure of celebrity. But we never thought the made up world of reality TV would ever be this, well, realistic.
Watching one of the "beautiful people" crash and burn is painful – something about those who have the world in the palm of their hand not finding happiness is off-putting. Knowing the warning signs were all on a TV show (a profitable one, too) and having no one step in to solve the problem mixes guilt in with the heavy dose of shock.
Media critic Tom Maurstad says everything I wanted to say in the Dallas Morning News (read the whole thing):
I don't mean to put too much emphasis on one celebrity while there is obviously so much wrong with the world. But this one should make us take a deep breath and ask us how far we are willing to push people for a laugh.
Watching Smith at the end of her rope on national TV was amusing. It was easy to call her a lush and a media whore while she was cracking under the pressure of celebrity. But we never thought the made up world of reality TV would ever be this, well, realistic.
Watching one of the "beautiful people" crash and burn is painful – something about those who have the world in the palm of their hand not finding happiness is off-putting. Knowing the warning signs were all on a TV show (a profitable one, too) and having no one step in to solve the problem mixes guilt in with the heavy dose of shock.
Media critic Tom Maurstad says everything I wanted to say in the Dallas Morning News (read the whole thing):
Were you one of viewers watching The Anna Nicole Show on E! who turned the show into one of 2002's cult favorites? If so, then you watched as a semiconscious and frequently incoherent Anna Nicole stumbled and slurred her way through a sad and silly life filled with creeps and hangers-on. She was great stand-up fodder for late-night comedians and provided endless threads of discussion for water-cooler and Internet chat groups. But this conclusion to her life is just the latest reminder that at a time when everything is grist for the reality entertainment mill, under all that entertaining fizz is cold, hard reality.
If Anna Nicole Smith had suddenly whirled to face all those cameras that were always clicking at her and set herself on fire, she couldn't have been any more obviously a person in terminal distress. As our ongoing immersion in rehab entertainment has taught us, what Ms. Smith needed was a core group of friends and family, along with the help of trained counselors (not to mention a camera crew to capture it all) to stage an intervention and get the help she so desperately needed. But judging from the parts of her private life that she broadcast to the world, she didn't have that core group, or she didn't listen to their warnings.
And so her life spun from one tragedy-scandal-crisis to the next, from the lawsuits over the inheritance from her oil tycoon and octogenarian husband to the birth of her daughter and the mysterious death of her son. But there's an oh-yeah moment that freezes all the flash and noise around this story: remembering that somewhere there's an infant girl who has lost her mother and hasn't yet had determined for her, in what will no doubt be a highly publicized court case, who her father is.
I don't mean to put too much emphasis on one celebrity while there is obviously so much wrong with the world. But this one should make us take a deep breath and ask us how far we are willing to push people for a laugh.
