The Death of a Pop Culture…Icon?

She had no discernible skills. She couldn’t sing, couldn’t act, couldn’t dance, couldn’t write. She looked cut from the blonde bombshell mold that gave us Marilyn Monroe and Mamie Van Doren, but only sometimes. At other times, she ballooned up to disturbing proportions, inflated like a Macy’s Parade float as she wiggled her enormous ass in front of the camera on her MTV reality show.

Anna Nicole Smith, who died February 8, 2007, at the age of 39, contributed nothing of artistic or intrinsic value to American society, but she was a pop culture phenomenon nonetheless. In the age of multimedia supersaturation, it has become relatively easy to be famous just for being famous. Her IMDB listing mentions that “she likes lying in bed, watching TV and shopping”. Is this the modern recipe for superstardom? If so, some of my best friends are destined for fame of incredible proportions.

In a sense, she reflected that weird girlish fantasy dream that seems to still exist out there, the idea of being young and sexy and adored and marrying for millions. In another sense, she is a reflection of the great American stereotype of get-famous, get-rich, get-fat, and die-young.

Her fame, like that of Paris Hilton, Nicole Ritchie, and JFK Jr., seems based on nothing more than the public’s curious obsession with fame itself, that those who are without talents or merits can still rise to become stars, just so that we have something to gossip about around the coffeepot on Monday mornings. She was a lightheaded blonde with big aspirations, who showed her flesh in Playboy, married a millionaire older than time, and somehow spun it all into her own television show.

America’s obsession with her made her richer than J. Howard Marshall’s bank account ever could.