There’s a striking scene in the new Disney+ series – I emphasize the “plus” – Pam & Tommy, about the famous explicit homemade video of the couple Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee, which whetted the public’s appetite for the sextapes of celebrities in the mid-1990s.
Posted yesterday at 6:00 a.m.
The drummer of glam metal band Mötley Crüe is blazing naked at home, standing in the bathroom, as the star of Baywatch waiting for him in bed. That’s when he strikes up a conversation… with his penis.
Her sex, the embodiment of her conscience in a moral dilemma (like the imp over her shoulder in cartoons), weighs the pros and cons of her indecent proposals. And answers him. The glans close-up. His urinary meatus articulating each syllable.
It’s surreal. I saw the scene over a week ago and I haven’t decided yet: is it the most ridiculous or the most outrageously comical sequence I’ve seen on television from the horse series bright white Felix Leclerc ? Maybe both.
Pam & Tommy will only be available on Disney+ – I emphasize “Disney” this time – on February 2. But I bet I won’t be the only one talking about that wordy rod by then…
The series, that said, is less burlesque than this unfortunately unforgettable scene suggests. It revolves around an incredible news item, but also focuses on the very different look that we have, today as yesterday, on the sexuality of men and women.
I did not know the details of the incident. If you fear disclosure and plan to watch the series, do not read the next two paragraphs.
In 1995, a carpenter named Rand Gauthier was cavalierly fired by Tommy Lee while renovating his Malibu home, shortly after his impromptu wedding to comedian Pamela Anderson on a Mexican beach. Lee refused to repay the thousands of dollars he owed Gauthier, and later threatened him at gunpoint when the worker wanted his tools back.
Gauthier, in revenge, stole Lee’s safe, in which he accidentally found, among jewelry and firearms, a homemade video that left little to the imagination. Gauthier teamed up with an XXX film producer with whom he had already worked as a porn actor, in order to market the sextape. He had no idea that the web, then in its infancy, was going to take over.
In the role of Rand Gauthier, with a Longueuil cut already dated for the time, Seth Rogen is very entertaining. Britain’s Lily James is unrecognizable as Pamela Anderson and Sebastian Stan, the Winter Soldier from the Marvel movies, is quite convincing in his unflattering portrayal of Tommy Lee.
The series highlights the humiliation felt by Pamela Anderson who, at the same time, was missing with the turnip Barbwire what she hoped would be the start of a film career.
The Canadian was for months the Turk’s head for late-night talk show hosts, who kept reminding people that she had already been “revealed” by Playboy. On the other hand, the fact that Tommy Lee was able to activate the horn of his yacht with his lower abdomen (without hands, in the video) only earned him high five. Two weights, two measures.
Pam & Tommy reframes the story to the advantage of Pamela Anderson, who has certainly suffered the most. The fact remains that Disney, through its subsidiary Hulu, is preparing to present a series of eight episodes of nearly an hour inspired by an explicit eight-minute video.
We can talk about the first sextape of celebrities to go “viral” on the web – long before those of Paris Hilton or Kim Kardashian –, of patient zero of a global epidemic of reality shows featuring famous people (or presented as famous, in Quebec), the question arises: did this story require eight hours to be well told?
It seems to me not. This unusual slice of life, which testifies to a period teeming in popular culture, at the crossroads of the digital revolution and the decline of the hair metal, could have been summed up in a well-packed film of an hour and a half.
I have often thought about this for some time: what justifies that such a story is a series rather than a film, and vice versa? And Just Like That…, Following Sex and the City, would it have been less painful in the cinema? Carrie Bradshaw would have worn fewer ridiculous hats under any circumstances, but in light of the films taken from the original series, the answer is no.
Opportunity knocks. For two years, we have been more or less captive to television. Prisoners of the algorithms of the most popular digital platforms. We often fall back on what is offered to us first, without looking any further. And rarely is an Iranian film like the excellent A hero, by Asghar Farhadi (on Prime Video since Friday).
The temptation of telegavage has never been stronger. It is an easily accessible drug. Stopping his wheel requires effort and we are tired. Me first. Why did I watch Pam & Tommy until the end ? To be able to draw this chronicle from it, of course, but also, mechanically, to fill the void.
However, you have to have the reflex – and the means; because it all ends up being expensive – to look beyond Netflix. This week I saw a fascinating documentary on art collector Peggy Guggenheim, thanks to the Quebec platform ARTS.FILM, linked to the International Festival of Films on Art.
I also reviewed, thanks to the Elephant platform, tell us about love, a scathing satire by the late Jean-Claude Lord on the world of media and stardom. A 1976 film which, as Pam & Tommy, implicitly deals with the conception that we have of the sexuality of men and women, to be divided between “fallers” and “sluts”. And that reminds us how some things don’t change quickly.