As anyone with a pulse knows, Anna Nicole Smith is dead. (This implies that she does not know that she is dead, which might not necessarily be true.) I once saw a television special which featured an extended interview with a woman who made her living as an “Anna Nicole Smith impersonator.” This woman, through her uncanny resemblance to Smith, made appearances at conventions, business parties, etc. and seemed to make a comfortable living traveling often and receiving star-like treatment.
Now, as an Anna Nicole Smith impersonator in the light of said celebrity’s death, what is the job future for this intrepid impersonator? Will her business increase or decrease? Will she fill the void that the now dead buxom blonde has vacated, effectively doubling her impersonator business? Will the market for Smith impersonators remain steady, not unlike the heavily saturated Elvis and Santa markets?
My prediction is no. Unlike Santa or Elvis, Smith has contributed minimally to the arts, assuming that commercials and pictures of her sans clothing do not count as art. I say minimal because she was (sort of) a vanguard of the reality TV movement. Smith was one of, if not the first, in the recent plague of celebrity-driven reality hunger. Before Flavor Flav, Gene Simmons or the Gotti Posse, Smith agreed to bare “all” (unfortunately, often literally) to America, and the network E! reaped the benefits.
But in spite of her brief reality stint, why is Smith’s death the headline of the week? With all of the other incidents occurring in the world – astronauts on vendettas, continuing war in the Middle East and ridiculous weather – the death of this arguably C-list celebrity is being made out as though she were a saint.
Is it a vague attempt to recapture the mystique of figures like Marilyn Monroe? This “Monroe Effect,” as I will call it, seems too overtly romantic to be an actual occurrence and more of a news tag-line ploy.
Another person might argue that we’ve grown to be attached to Smith, seeing her each day hawking weight loss drugs and shyly winning our favor in a court case over J. Howard Marshall’s billions.
Do we feel sorry for this intriguing lucky-as-hell former stripper from Texas? Has she ascended to the plain of martyr to our harsh and terrible world, along with Cobain, Aaliyah, Lincoln and Hendrix?
I can presume her actual death has had little effect on our every day lives. And that’s something that can’t be said about a woman somewhere who now must redefine her livelihood based on the death of the woman she was impersonating.