She often deflected the questions with a joke, and those moments are a striking insight into how she might have had to detach to survive in the entertainment industry. At another point, she describes almost unconsciously playing into the hypersexual image thrust on her: “I catch myself living more like that than myself,” she says.
These reflections on being a straight woman in Hollywood are sad and affecting, but like Anderson herself, the documentary doesn’t really probe further beyond suggesting these patterns emerged from her parents’ own abusive relationship.
At another moment, she points out how her attraction to macho men often results in abusive situations. “Their initial attraction to me might be [a] ‘Oh, she’s [in] Playboy’ thing … but I’m not a damsel in distress. But some men hate you for being something else.” Keeping it general, she says that she was subjected to abuse. “They start grabbing you by the hair, and throwing you into walls and stripping your clothes off,” she says.
Still, despite the longtime prurient curiosity of the public and the media in her personal life, Anderson is candid in the documentary about her relationships, including her marriage to Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee, which recently inspired an unauthorized series on Hulu. She shares fun details about their courtship, like the fact that Lee flirted with her by leaving voicemails about his “large bologna” and how they put ecstasy into their champagne the weekend of their shotgun wedding in Mexico.
Then, she was punished for her sexuality by an audience that had been feeding on it. Anderson’s celebrity fell apart, she says, after videos containing personal footage — including of her and Tommy Lee having sex — were stolen from her home, to be packaged and sold as a nonconsensual “sex tape” to the public. There were no established PR or legal guidelines for how to deal with the fallout. In an archival clip from a news conference, Anderson talks about how “celebrities have rights too,” but now she admits her career never quite recovered.