Pamela Anderson wears Necklace (worn as bracelet) Celine. Shoes Pleaser.
Pamela Anderson Tells RonanFarrow How She Survived Hollywood
FRIDAY JAN. 6, 2023 8 AM VANCOUVER ISLAND
Midway through our conversation, Pamela Anderson name-checks the Renaissance master Titian and his “Diana and Actaeon.” The painting, one in a series of the artist’s interpretations of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” shows Actaeon, a male hunter, stumbling upon the virgin goddess Diana, who is bathing and naked except for a sick-as-hell bejeweled updo. The painting conjures a host of modern questions about objectification. Art historians have debated Diana’s agency, her reaction to the attention, and whether her blushing cheeks signify coquettishness or fury. Similar questions loom over the legacy of Pamela Anderson, an indelible piece of ’90s iconography who, in a surprisingly avant-garde new book and an emotional Netflix documentary, adds new dimension to a life story that has often been reductively eroticized. In our conversation, she is honest, funny, and extremely Canadian: that rare celebrity to emerge from the disorienting labyrinth of fame knowing herself more, rather than less. In a later painting in Titian’s series, showing the aftermath of the bathing scene, Diana, still baring one breast, has found her arrows. She chases Actaeon, who is now transformed into a stag and being mauled to death by his own hounds. Anderson tells me she doesn’t seek reevaluation, only catharsis, and I believe it. But, like Diana, she is, in her way, seizing control.
