She embodied America, and that's not just a metaphor.
BY TUNKU VARADARAJAN
Breathless commentators these last few days have likened Anna Nicole
Smith--whose untimely death, like her much-observed physique, was not the
result of entirely natural causes--to Marilyn Monroe. This comparison is
preposterous: Arthur Miller, who married Monroe, would have had little
time
for Ms. Smith beyond the obvious dictates of chivalry. It would be hard to
imagine Ms. Smith courted by contem****ary playwrights either, and not just
because so many of them do not, as it were, handle women well.
Playwrights notwithstanding, Ms. Smith was the object of a fierce popular
fascination. It could be said--and said not entirely as metaphor--that
Anna
Nicole Smith embodied America. She embodied its bounty as well as its
overabundance; its exploitability, and its propensity to exploit. She
embodied, also, its litigiousness, its enterprise, its universal offer of
the chance to remake oneself (Gatsby did it one way, Anna Nicole Smith did
it another). And to many foreigners--particularly foreign men--she
embodied
America in a literal way, too: in a brassy blondeness that people in
repressed cultures marvel at. It is no coincidence that the places in the
world where women such as Ms. Smith are the most popular are typically
those
with which the U.S. has the worst diplomatic relations.
For all her gaudy excesses, there is in some of us--or there ought to
be--the urge to treat Ms. Smith gently. Hers is a pathetic story, of
ersatz
celebrity, dead children and the pursuit of money, ***, drugs, weight loss
and validation-through-litigation. That this pursuit was so thoroughly
unembarrassed is a comment not so much on Ms. Smith's personal aesthetics
as
it is on human folly, U.S.-style, taken to its logical extreme.
A girl boosted almost to the point of malformation married a wheezing,
aged,
wheelchair-bound Texas billionaire (one can visualize his clawlike fingers
laying claim to her torso): Some have condemned her as a "gold digger,"
but
she wanted what you are supposed to want--money--and she worked
industriously with what she had. And one must note that in America--where
most adult relations have been recast as transactions--breast enhancement
is
the perfect meeting of commerce and ***: a means to lay bare the frankness
of your opening gambit, and to make plain that it invites a response. What
you see is what you get; now let me see how you propose to get it.
We watched Ms. Smith take off as if from nowhere, then crash-land in our
midst, and then self-combust, all through a process of theater designed to
give us a perfect view of the repellence in others, while sparing us from
taint or complicity. The scale of the celebrity meltdown in the U.S. is
phenomenal--supersized, as it were; and Ms. Smith's was no different.
Everything in America is larger than life (and, alas, despite America's
best
efforts, smaller than death). But without the camera, she might only have
caused forgettable (if scandalous) damage in a small town, and crumbled
inconsequentially into the smallness of her natural milieu.
In fact, Ms. Smith turned us all into inhabitants of that small town, the
American blonde who burst her bounds, expanding her conduct along a vector
with no known or safe landing strip. One of those women who instantly
turned
us all, men and women, into voyeurs--if only to see where her story could
possibly end--she was a permanent invocation of the question, "What
happens
to a woman who . . .?" In American culture, the arc of some lives still
promises something uncharted, just as the country itself offered that
promise at its inception.
It is possible that in private, Ms. Smith's life held its own sad end in
view--she must have known her own trajectory, even as she shrank from its
darker motions. But in her media incarnation, her outsize smile and busty
brightness suggested always that she'd burst out of the frame and create
an
entirely new possibility, a new plane where such creatures as she triumph,
or laugh afresh all the way to the bank.
Finally, a critical word. Anna Nicole Smith was also a lowbrow (or,
really,
a narcissistic) version of the American dream--the American dream of only
bravado and guile, bereft of character or principles or talent. She was
proof that the dream applies even to people with nothing to offer but
themselves. If she is a tragic and cautionary tale to Americans, evidence
that the American Dream requires substance and character, she may be
evidence of the opposite to outsiders who see only the magic of wealth and
fame won through the mere presentation of self. She inflates the
reputation
of American possibility abroad, making it seem like anything is possible
in
America--even reward without merit.
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