Angelyne’s prescient art of self-promotion


NOW THAT THE TRUE IDENTITY of the eccentric Los Angeles persona Angelyne has been exposed, one essential query nonetheless stays: Is she a celeb, or is she a efficiency artist? Finest identified for showing on a collection of eye-popping billboards throughout LA, starting in 1984 and peaking within the ’90s with 200 simultaneous advertisements, she is a self-made, closely augmented pin-up who turned well-known for being well-known when Kim Kardashian was nonetheless in preschool. Barbie-like, virtually comically pneumatic, she was by no means promoting something on these billboards apart from her personal existence, making the entire undertaking an intriguing commentary on the hole, facile nature of Hollywood stardom itself. If she is a celeb, she is precisely the type of celeb that drives cultural purists bonkers, being each very sexualized and really pointless. If she is an artist, how may I describe her? I’d say that Angelyne is what may occur if, as a substitute of being married after which horribly divorced, Jeff Koons and Cicciolina, by way of some misbegotten lab experiment, had been compelled to share a single physique. She is Cindy Sherman if, as a substitute of slipping on a thousand totally different personalities, she had spent 4 a long time embodying and reembodying one, letting it overtake her till she finally went at the very least just a little mad.
Angelyne could also be a genius. She can be, arguably, a genuinely vital up to date art-historical determine, one whose candy-bright oeuvre of self-détournement deserves as a lot evaluation and inquiry because the work of many extra “severe” artists. Accordingly, I used to be considerably nervous to look at Angelyne, a evenly fictionalized biography now streaming on Peacock. The five-episode miniseries arrives on the peak of what I’d describe because the Gillespiefication of the latest historical past of celeb ladies: With I, Tonya (2017) and the latest collection Pam and Tommy, the director Craig Gillespie has pioneered a particular fashion of biopic, focusing particularly on ladies who’ve weathered both scandal or derision, after which punching up their tales with a pressure of irreverent, prankish black comedy that’s both playfully punk or terribly unkind, relying who you ask. Though Gillespie was in a roundabout way concerned in Angelyne, its creator is his Lars and the Actual Woman screenwriter Nancy Oliver, and the present shares some stylistic DNA along with his materials. Current are the brash and flashy needle-drops; the all-caps, brightly coloured titles; the actress hiding beneath prosthetics; the humorously conflicting studies of occasions delivered both by way of simulated interviews or by way of replayed and edited scenes. Fortunately, although, Angelyne diverges from the latest Pam and Tommy in its dealing with of the buxom blonde babe at its middle: The place the latter collection’ Pamela Anderson was too typically depicted as a simpering naïf, Angelyne is totally credited because the canny architect of her personal picture, describing herself as “a Rorschach take a look at, however in pink.”
The present is partly an adaptation of a 2017 piece in The Hollywood Reporter which revealed that, despite her earlier claims about having been born both within the US or in outer area, Angelyne was in truth the kid of Polish Jews who met within the Chmielnik ghetto throughout World Struggle II, and her household had emigrated to Los Angeles in 1959. Desirous to reinvent herself as an American lady, it occurred to Angelyne within the early ’70s that there was no more practical approach to turn out to be American than to turn out to be very well-known, and that being well-known for being blonde and having an infinite bosom could be extra American nonetheless. (Pamela Anderson, lest we neglect, had an identical concept, having moved to LA from British Columbia.)
“I’m one thing you need to really feel, one thing you need to expertise,” she tells an interviewer within the present, a tagline so clean and so generic that it’d as simply be used to promote a automobile, a chocolate bar, or a brand new model of razors. Emmy Rossum, lacquered in a metric ton of make-up, approximates Angelyne’s babyish purr and Betty Boop mannerisms to a tee; she additionally lends her an unnerving mix of enterprise savvy and dissociated otherworldliness, with the episodes dissolving into fantasy at any time when Angelyne feels life turning into too “actual.” Does Angelyne consider its titular platinum weirdo as an artist? Nicely, like many artists, its model of her lives virtually completely in her head, utilizing ache as inspiration for her observe. Like some artists I can consider, too, she balances an avowed curiosity in “deliver[ing] the consciousness of all mankind just a few steps greater” with a ardour for materials items and private wealth. “Your automobile is meant to be an extension of you,” she says about her well-known pink Corvette, sounding for all of the world like J. G. Ballard Barbie. Later within the present, showing as a talk-show visitor, she proves that even when she was as soon as the daughter of Polish immigrants, she is now as American as they arrive. The host asks why she needed to be well-known within the first place, and he or she appears to be like at him as if he’s an fool. “Nicely, to generate income,” she says, smiling. “Isn’t cash lovable?”
— Philippa Snow
Angelyne is at the moment streaming on Peacock.