Who has the right to tell your story?

"Salt in the wound," says Pamela Anderson, looking away from the camera. "Not necessary…" Anderson is promoting her new memoir and her Netflix documentary, Pamela, a Love Story, but talking about another recent release about her life: the Hulu series Pam & Tommy. This one, she had nothing to do with.

It was well known that Anderson was unhappy about the series. In fact, not only was she not happy, she was not consulted. In her documentary, we see her fighting back tears at seeing billboards with Lily James and Sebastian Stan playing her and her ex-husband Tommy Lee (she calls them "Halloween costumes") and begs her son Brandon to stop telling her about the episodes he has watched. She tells the camera she feels the same as she did when the notorious sex tape was stolen. Ironically, while the show purported to ‘rehabilitate’ her image, and ground the theft in the moral mores of our post #metoo landscape, all it did was re-exploit her.

Anderson’s comments on the show have chimed well with a currently churning discussion about the ethics of the biopic. Many were already recoiling from the genre thanks to Blonde, the 2022 Marilyn Monroe film which divided fans for being ‘trauma porn’ and lensing Monroe’s life squarely through her abuse and victimhood, negating her talent and business acumen in favour of a rather one-sided portrayal of her life. Spencer, the Kristen Stewart-centred film about Princess Diana, was largely received in a similar vein. It made many wonder whether either film needed to be made at all, or if we might not, in fact, let these tragic women rest in peace.

The forthcoming Amy Winehouse biopic, Back to Black, has already (prematurely) been criticised for re-opening the wounds of the late young singer’s life. While it may still prove its naysayers wrong, the argument against its making is not only that Winehouse’s life was tragically public enough, without needing to expose it once again, but that it has been made with the full co-operation of her father, Mitch Winehouse. Controversy already circles the man (who runs her estate) with allegations that his exploitation of his daughter while she was alive was a contributing factor in her addiction and deteriorating mental health. What this backlash hints at, therefore, is who has the right to tell—and crucially, profit from—your story?

Winehouse, Diana and Monroe are, of course, no longer with us. The nature of what they would or would not have wanted, becomes a slightly grey area; perhaps their stories feel even more vulnerable for it. The potential for denting someone's legacy when they have no say, feels almost as violating as Anderson watching her story play out without her, except that those likely to suffer directly from the release of these stories are the loved ones left behind—family members and friends. When those are mired in controversy, like Mitch Winehouse, this relationship feels complicated, for others it feels cruel.

It is why, though The Crown has courted controversy from its inception, it feels more potent the closer the series gets to the modern day. This was never more so than in the latest series, airing so soon after the Queen’s death. It felt raw—both for those mourning a mother and grandmother, and for those whose recent histories have been excavated for entertainment. Interestingly, watching one episode, when a bugged (and extremely private conversation) between Charles and Camilla is published in the press and repeated verbatim in the show, you wonder if this was not exactly how Pamela Anderson must have felt. An intimate moment, stolen and played out to the world, then taken up by actors and replayed all over again. Salt in the wound.

It is tempting for us to dehumanise the royals, and celebrities like them, assuming that they signed away their right to confidentiality the moment they became famous. Why then, after all, shouldn’t their most personal moments be mined for our entertainment? This was the commentary Pamela Anderson received when she fought back against the sale of her sex tape: that as a woman who posed nude for Playboy, she had forfeited her right to privacy. The question of the humanity beneath the surface, the story untold because someone else has told it for you, was also the very backbone of Prince Harry’s memoir, Spare. What was that, after all, if not a man stepping out from everyone’s else’s ‘biopic’ of him, and deigning to make his own?

The great tragedy of Pamela Anderson was exactly this: that everyone wrote her story but her. Much like so many maligned women in the world’s eye—the type who so often get the biopic treatment, the Winehouses, Dianas and Monroes—the world decided who she was, without her say. The stolen sex tape cost Anderson her career and, frequently, her dignity. To make ends meet, she admits to having to play out a caricature of herself for the ensuing decades. That was the only Anderson people wanted, the one "with the porno" the one "with the boobs". It was this image that paraded ahead of her when she approached publishing houses to write a memoir. The executives all assumed she couldn’t write. "But I like proving people wrong," she comments.

So, is there ever a responsible way to tell the story of someone who has been so unfairly treated? The Back to Black biopic may still prove its naysayers wrong, while Baz Lurhmann’s Elvis was a prime example of a tragic story told sensitively—and with his family’s consultation. Lurhmann reports how Priscilla Presley cried at the first screening, saying how accurately her late husband had been captured. There is also, of course, having the input of a living subject. Madonna was, until it was recently shelved, planning to produce her own biopic, starring Ozark actress Julia Garner. Incidentally, Garner, of course, had already portrayed a real-life, living woman, Anna Delvey, in Inventing Anna. The con artist was heavily consulted and, ironically, it was her former friend Rachel Williams who had cause for complaint; suing Netflix for "making her the villain".

The course of making art imitating life clearly never did run smooth. Something The Crown was forced to claim continually was that it was drama, not a documentary, and yet when something is so rapaciously consumed and based on real-life people, it can so easily supplant the truth. There is, therefore, clearly a level of responsibility here, not only to the subjects themselves but to society at large, whose ideas of those in the public eye are unfortunately inarguably informed more by entertaining fictions than straightforward facts.

Anderson’s new documentary shows that not every biopic needs the total creative control of the subject, but merely responsible consultation and respectful consideration. Crucially, she herself handed over her words, her journals and home tapes. In light of this willing participation, biopics like Pam & Tommy begin to feel like another stolen home movie.

This piece originally appeared in Harper's Bazaar UK