The series of the week: Pam & Tommy | An orgasm heard (and seen) by the whole world

Pamela Anderson had promised herself never to flinch for a naughty rascal again. That was until Tommy Lee sat down next to her in a nightclub and licked her face. They were married four days later, in February 1995, on a beach in Cancún. Today they give their first name to the jubilant miniseries Pam & Tommy.

Dominic Late
The Press

The bad boy boogie

Inspired by an article by Amanda Chicago Lewis published in 2014 in the magazine RollingStone, Pam & Tommy begins as Tommy Lee (intense Sebastien Stan), drummer of the legendary phallic rock band Mötley Crüe, renovates his mansion in order to transform it into a temple of coitus, in which he and his new wife (unrecognizable Lily James) can honor the other’s body. Tired of the unpredictable demands of his boss (who walks everywhere in a thong), carpenter Rand Gauthier (touching Seth Rogen) dares to stand up to him one day. He is fired, then threatened at gunpoint by the bad boy, a big baby who refuses to hear the word no. Classic confrontation between the king of the mountain, who has everything a man can dream of, and the worker who is tired of always having to bend his back.

on the dark side

“I’ve never been very popular with people,” Rand Gauthier told RollingStone in 2014. “But I had never been threatened with a gun. It played in my head. “Ex-porn actor, ironically endowed with a small reproductive appendage, the carpenter is a not magnificent loser, whom the insult of Tommy Lee propels to the dark side. He steals from the couple a safe containing money and jewels, but also a cassette, on which are eight minutes of passionate sex between his enemy (him, equipped with a virile member to make all the marquises turn pale de Sade) and the playmate whose booty made the millions of devotees of the soap Baywatch. Sold illegally on VHS through this new technology called the web, intimate video is now considered the Citizen Kane from sextapes of celebrities. Their orgasm will be heard (and seen!) by the whole world.

home sweet home

Produced by Craig Gillespie (Me Tonya), Pam & Tommy could easily have generated laughs by depicting them, her, as a nunuche, and him, as a bozo. Without trying to present them as candidates for a Nobel, the series nevertheless manages to give them back this humanity that the tabloid press has long denied them. Episodes two and three, essentially devoted to their love at first sight and their hasty nuptials, are the most memorable of the eight, in that they suggest that, had it not been for the release of their home video, the lovebirds, surprisingly endearing, had everything to live happily. Tommy Lee is touching like an overexcited child, and Pamela, moving in her desire to become a mother and found a house. Procedures disturbed by the media and judicial circus that will knock on their door.

Girls, girls, girls

At times surreal (Tommy Lee converses with his penis), Pam & Tommy is part of a recent line of works shining their light on the horrors experienced by iconic female figures of the 1990s and 2000s. While documentaries invited us to finally consider as such the misogyny of the odious treatment reserved for Britney Spears and Janet Jackson, this fiction which draws its raw material from reality highlights the humiliations experienced by Pamela Anderson, whom all the talk shows will make fun of relentlessly. Engaged in a legal process to stop the proliferation of sextape, the fatal beauty takes in a lot of grossly lustful questions from the defense lawyers. Although the screenplay sometimes puts lines in her mouth that are hard to believe, they are so worthy of a reader of Martine Delvaux, it is easy to imagine that even the real Pamela knew too well that no one would be moved by fate. of a girl who earns her living with her breasts and her buttocks.

Restart my heart

Tommy Lee and Pamela Anderson will try as best they can to protect their relationship from the intrusions they suffer as well as the bitterness that feeds their career setbacks. While the film which was to consecrate her as a credible actress (Barbwire) is a potato at the box office, Tommy Lee’s group, Mötley Crüe, is struggling to swallow its decline in the charts. If they survived grunge, the Los Angeles saints are struggling to get rid of their reputation as posers, and one day even surprise Third Eye Blind (!) when they show up at the studio where they have their habits. Tommy Lee is quickly overtaken by his old habits, the booze and the punches, which he distributes in bars to admirers, however well-meaning, who try to congratulate him for… the size of his machine.

theater of pain

Skillfully playing the line between caricature, drama and social criticism, Pam & Tommy goes back to the root of our unhealthy obsession for these stars that we like to see fall from their pedestal. Beauty and the Beast wanted to bottle their love by immortalizing it on film. They unwittingly offered web porn their spark plug. They would still be locked away for a long time between the walls of this theater of pain and shamelessness, that of an era that loved its stars, but not to the point of respecting them.

Pam & Tommy is available on Disney+.