The show is one of many sprinkled throughout the archive of their interviews that feature Mary-Kate and Ashley being asked to revisit a childhood they would not have picked for themselves. “I look at old photos of me, and I don’t feel connected to them at all… I would never wish my upbringing on anyone,” Mary-Kate told Marie Claire.4 There is a bittersweetness in that they had each other to rely on during that childhood but also that they had to watch one another’s suffering through it.
As the cruel game draws to a close, an image of the two of them as toddlers appears on the screen and their befuddled stares give way to recognition. Ashley points at the photo and declares, “Mary-Kate’s on the right!” to which Ellen replies, “How do you know that?” Ashley says, “Because Mary-Kate still makes that face today,” much to the amusement of the studio audience. It seems a charming sisterly jab. But it is also a declaration that her sister is and always has been her own person—despite rampant insistence that the two are fused into a single unit as they inhabit separate bodies and minds. In the end, only the sisters themselves could bear meaningful witness to the peculiar marvel of the other, a lesson learned only by those who have felt what it means to be merely half of something.
American Pain
The Suffering-Class Spectacle of Anna Nicole Smith
ANNA NICOLE SMITH WEARS A floor-length royal blue gown and a full face of makeup as she stares in disbelief at the local news on the television. It is 2002, and she is in a hotel suite preparing for a party hosted by Guess, the brand that launched her from moderate fame as a Playmate to iconic stardom as the face of their 1992 denim campaign. “You know those bumper stickers where it says, ‘Shit happens and then you die?’ They should have ’em where ‘Shit happens and then you live’ because that’s really the truth of it,” she says, shaking her head at the volume of violent stories plaguing the news. This moment of poignant clarity is captured halfway through the first episode of The Anna Nicole Show, a reality series that ran on the E! network from 2002 to 2004.
The Anna Nicole Show was a study in the grotesque even before anyone knew the extent of her dysfunction. “Anna, Anna, Glamorous Anna, Anna Nicole!” the show’s theme song starts, a joke that is either ironic or tone-deaf about the actual content of the show, none of which is especially glamorous. Anna is visibly under the influence of either drugs or alcohol for most of the season, often slurring her words and losing her train of thought. Her lawyer and future husband, Howard K. Stern, would go on to notoriety for having seized control of Anna’s life and enabled her drug dependence in the years before her death, but on the show he just seems to leave a layer of slime behind him wherever he walks. There is a larger-than-life interior designer named Bobby Trendy who never met an animal print or a shade of pink he didn’t think would make great furniture. It is not clear if it’s genius performance art or sincere affection when he calls velvet couches and feather boas “luxurious.” There are cameos by cousins from Texas whose appearances and antics make Anna look positively refined in comparison.
Her son, Daniel, features in most episodes, and it is hard to watch, knowing he would die within five years of the show, and not focus exclusively on him. He lingers mostly in the background, his head instinctively turning away from the cameras. Though he is embarrassed by Anna’s antics, he gives his mother reassuring smiles through braces and unabashedly embraces her substantial frame with his slight one when she wants a hug. In one episode, Anna slurs at him over the phone in her signature baby voice, “Do you love me? More than all the raindrops in the world and more than all the fishies in the sea?” He sighs and responds, “Yes.” Daniel speaks with a hesitation that sounds less like the reluctance of dishonest appeasement than the sadness of a particular kind of truth.
“It’s not supposed to be funny. It just is!” was the tagline that E! used to promote the show, making clear their intentions of portraying Anna as a sideshow attraction from the beginning. A New York Times review called it “freakish” and a “cruel joke of a reality series” but did not hesitate to take its own cheap shots at Anna’s weight gain and her seeming lack of self-awareness.1 The Chicago Tribune review describes Anna as “voluminous” in its first sentence and “a zaftig celebrity-for-no-particular-reason” later on.2 Entertainment Weekly’s Ken Tucker was the only critic who seemed to bring his empathy or his intuition to work the week the show premiered when he wrote, “In exploiting a barely coherent Anna Nicole Smith, E! is doing something that comes pretty close to being obscene.”3 Though it is mostly remembered for an eating contest scene, that first episode primarily focused on the family finding a new home in Los Angeles. The last line of the episode is Anna speaking to the cameras, not a slurred word to be found, her eyes focused and her posture determined. “Our future absolutely seems brighter.” I remember watching the show in high school and believing her. If not because the future looked especially bright but because their present reality looked so very grim.
The idiomatic remix of “Shit happens then you die” is a combination of the expression “Life’s a bitch and then you die,” with the standalone “Shit happens,” and is just one of the many verbal mishaps that Anna experiences on the show. It demonstrates the distance between Anna and mainstream American linguistic norms: She is close enough for her meaning to be understood but far enough off the mark to reveal herself as an outsider. The American public would keep her at this distance for the duration of her fifteen years in the public eye. From her rise to fame as a model in the early 1990s to 2006, when she endured the sudden death of her son, few saw fit to extend her the benefit of any doubts when it came to acknowledging her as a human being. Anna was never more than a punch line when people were being kind and nothing short of a deserving pariah most of the time.