Death of the American Dreamgirl
By: Taylor Syfan
Tags: Free Britney, Metoo, This Is Paris, Britney Spears, Paris Hilton

I want to understand what has changed for these women, women like them, and their audiences. I want to understand how this is all happening at once. So, I turn to Instagram. I ask my followers three questions. The first, what did you think of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears in the early aughts? The second, what do you think of celebrities like Paris Hilton and Britney Spears now? The final, what changed (or didn’t change) how you think of them from then to now?

The responses to this prompt were not few — I received messages from friends and family, from long-lost acquaintances, coworkers from three or four jobs ago, from followers with whom this was our first interaction, and from followers of friends who were kind enough to repost my post. No doubt, these questions appeared neither arbitrary nor irrelevant to those that came across them. I found no lack of intrigue on the matter.

Largely, the responses came from women. And, nearly all of their answers observed a similar trajectory. In the early aughts they despised Paris. Many cited suspicions that she lived among the “kind” of girl who had bullied them in high school. She was, to some, as “rich” as she was a derogatory word that rhymes with “rich” and starts with the letter ‘B.’ They saw her as “spoiled.”

But, their answers to my second question sang a different tune. Suddenly, even those who still can’t claim much interest in Hilton have nonetheless acquired a sort-of sympathy for her. An overdue respect. Some of these women simply learned to accept her. Whether they have done so indifferently or enthusiastically, I found, their disdain and resentment have transformed.

“It’s very much pivoted from this ironic, semi-ironic worship to this actually genuine reverence,” says Rolling Stone Culture Reporter EJ Dickson when we sat down to discuss This is Paris in early November. Dickson has been describing to me how she remembers viewing Hilton in the early aughts — associating her with her depiction on South Park, recalling college memories of idolizing Hilton on a purely ironic level. But, she goes on to tell me that now one’s judgment of Hilton is somewhat of “an intellectual exercise.” She says, “it’s sort-of like you’re not an intellectual if you don’t respect Paris Hilton now. Saying that you don’t respect Paris Hilton now is the counter-view.” And then, possibly citing the same change-of-heart as my Instagram followers, “I would not have anticipated that in a million years growing up.” And so, my question remains: Why now?

“I think the reason why it happened now is because she’s obviously an extremely savvy self-brander and self-promoter,” says Dickson. “I think that she saw an opportunity to rebrand herself as an advocate for survivors of abuse and she took it and that’s evidenced by the fact that she is listed as a producer on the film.” I recall Jeane Macintosh’s observation that Paris was “calculating.” I recall Paris’ unique ability to show up at the right club at the right time. Perhaps, this coming-out story is the entrance fee into the “right” club to be in right now. What was once the paparazzi shot leaving Les Deux after midnight is now the documentary baring your scars for the world, that exposes your inner-demons such that the audience may experience a change-of-heart. Such that, whether indifferently or enthusiastically, they may finally forgive you for appearing outside Les Deux, dressed like a derogatory word that rhymes with “rich” and begins with the letter ‘B.’

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I ask Dickson what this shift can be attributed to. I can’t help but feel it’s something to do with the #metoo movement. “Oh, absolutely,” she responds. “I think that she wouldn’t have been able to pivot without the #metoo movement.” She goes on to list other celebs who have observed a change in their public identity since the movement began, Rose McGowan and Alyssa Milano, for example. Coincidentally, although it isn’t her expertise, Kellie Syfan credits the #metoo movement for this sea-change in Paris’ rhetoric. My Instagram followers, though, were less specific; They pointed to events like “growing up” and “maturing.” Some even said they learned to “understand” women better than they had at younger ages. “Social media,” a few said, gave them a chance to understand the inner-lives of celebrity women a little better.

Social media. It’s apt, really, if not over-simplified. The #metoo movement and the #freebritney movement are inherently linked to social media. But further, according to ABC’s $ellebrity: The Go-To Girls, social media provided stars with the ability to define their images at their own discretion, free of the gatekeeping, money-hungry mob of Hollywood paparazzi. Not only does social media play host to incredible feminist movements, it allows for an unprecedented intimacy between the common celeb and her audience.

However. I don’t know if I’m sold on the notion that we’ve all collectively “grown” into a respect for famous blonde women. I don’t know if I can say we’ve “matured” into forgiving them for 2007 and 2008 and so on. I find it nearly impossible to believe that “growing” and “maturing” happens in a vacuum, without correspondence to cultural events supporting that growth and maturation.

This is instead a time when the players stay the same, but the board on which the game is played has changed entirely. This is a time when teenage girls are as necessary to pop-culture as they have ever been, but that they no longer hide their inner-lives behind commodified plastic veneers. They instead write albums about them; My Britney Spears is the younger generation’s Miley Cyrus. My Paris Hilton is their Kim Kardashian — Just hair of a difference between them, their trajectories nearly exactly the same, and yet world’s apart in their reception.

We are witnessing the death of the American Dream Girl. For generations we built Hollywood facades for our blonde bombshells to live out our lives by. All the way back to the Monroe days, the scaffolding of their monolithic constructs were held together by middle-men, the paparazzi and the studios et al. It feels only fitting that this delicate system could come crashing down with a head shaved and an umbrella smashed through a window. In the end, these very ‘dream’ personas are revealed to be people — People with needs unmet, who went to unimaginable lengths to achieve them. People who dance happy and wild in their living rooms with matted hair and smeared makeup, without anyone to point a camera at this spectacle but themselves.