The Anna Nicole Story

[+ Charlie]

I have no idea whether the real person named Anna Nicole Smith was a saint, a monster, or a normal human being, and neither, dear reader, do you. All that we know is the play about her life that has been presented to us, for our entertainment, by the media. For most of the run, the story was presented as a farce. The dramatis personae were stock characters from comedy, some of them familiar from the plays of ancient Greece to nineteenth century Italian comic operas:

1. The poor but beautiful young woman who marries a wealthy old man, then leverages that into an entertainment career, although she has no special talent, just good looks and notoriety;

2. The wealthy old man who marries a young beauty, then quickly dies (by implication, from an overdose of hot sex, always treated as a funny topic if it involves the elderly);

3. His squabbling family, fighting over the inheritance with the bimbo widow;

4. The sleazy lawyer, using the foolish young woman for his own enrichment;

5. The young man who appears out of nowhere, claiming to be her real true love from the past;

6. The middle-aged European gigolo, married to a senile old woman who used to be a famous blonde bombshell herself at one time (the mirror image of the first two characters, a common dramatic device);

7. The self-important minister of a silly little country, who is easily manipulated by the the blonde celebrity and her lawyer.

 

The main character is herself threatening to morph into yet another stock character, the middle-aged woman pretending to be young despite the embarrassing appearance of an adult son (see "The Marriage of Figaro"), when she and the son suddenly die. The producers--the media--find themselves with a problem of presentation, because in a comedy only the old lecher is supposed to die. They would like to repackage it as a tragedy, but they are stuck with all the obvious comic characters. Knowing that American audiences love to get sentimental about celebrities who die young, they do the next best thing and turn it into a melodrama, with the bereaved mother and the questionable "husband" battling over where the heroine can truly rest in peace, while a weeping judge bewails her fate.

 

Alas! Elements of black comedy keep intruding into the storyline. The body is decomposing as the parties argue what to do with it. The government minister is forced to resign over photos of him and the blonde celebrity smiling together, in bed. Three of the comic characters continue to wrangle over who is the father of the baby. The play is far from over, and my bet is that no matter what spin the media tries, it will fall back into farce under the weight of those stock characters and situations.

 

No matters where her remains end up, I doubt that poor Anna Nicole will be allowed to rest in peace.

[Greathands]

>No matters where her remains end up, I doubt that poor Anna

Nicole will be allowed to rest in peace.<

 

From my perspective, she was never allowed to live in peace.

[Guest n2colour]

Isn't that the truth!:-(

[BgMstr4u]

Charlie, that's brilliant! It could be Aristophanes or Plautus or Boccaccio or Chaucer or Shakespeare or Rabelais or Moliere or Mozart and Da Ponte or Donizetti or Wilde or (closer to home) Mike Nichols or As The World Turns. Except it's actually happening. Who said comedy wasn't real?

[marylander1940]

I was going to start a thread about her movie and I found this previous posting.

 

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