There's No Trace of Anna Nicole Smith's Voice in Netflix's Exploitative Documentary

If its subtitle is to be believed, Netflix's Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me ostensibly offers a window into the private life of the model and actress, who died of an accidental overdose in 2007. Director Ursula Macfarlane (Untouchable) combines never-before-seen footage of Smith (born Vickie Lynn Hogan), archival clips from talk shows and her E! reality show, and interviews with friends and family to craft what the streamer describes as an "unflinching and humanizing examination" of a woman unfairly maligned by the media and largely unknown to the public.

"Many previous books and films about Anna Nicole twisted her narrative," Macfarlane tells Netflix's Tudum. "I really feel like she is telling her own story in her own words. And with the contributions of people in her life who genuinely knew her, I feel that we've been able to get closer to her truth."

Can a woman who is no longer alive ever truly tell "her own story in her own words"? Despite Macfarlane's confidence, You Don't Know Me suggests the answer is a resounding "no." Though it includes clips from revealing interviews with Smith, the documentary allows the people in her life — many of whom admit they weren't that close with her at all — to co-opt her story, rendering Smith voiceless.

From the outset, You Don't Know Me paints Smith as someone who "craved attention," as her uncle says, especially from men, and sought fame above all else. Friends like Missy, who grew close to "Nicky" during their time at a Houston strip club, lay out her career trajectory: In 1986, Smith left her hometown of Mexia, Texas with her infant son Daniel and moved to Houston, where she was hired as a dancer. Convinced that "the only thing holding her back was her boobs," claims Missy, Smith got a breast augmentation, at which point she began taking prescription painkillers. A few years later, Smith began dating 86-year-old oil tycoon J. Howard Marshall, who brought enough financial stability into her life that she was able to quit her job at the club.

This fairly straightforward account of Smith's life is illustrated with photos of her smiling with Daniel and Howard and footage from an interview of her explaining what she's looking for in a man. But Macfarlane also dots the sequence with more intimate photos, including shots of Smith in just a bra, posing pantsless in the back of a limo, and draped in a towel immediately after a shower. A phone call between Smith and Howard in which they discuss her "rosebuds" is also intercut with multiple topless photos of her posing with horses (presumably ones belonging to Howard).

It's implied that these are private shots being shared with the world for the first time, but it's done without any regard for Smith's consent. Viewers are given no indication that Smith wanted these photos to be released — in fact, just a few minutes later, the film reveals how hesitant she was to pose nude.

"Getting nude was really hard for me," she said in an interview about her first Playboy shoot in 1992. Playboy's West Coast photo editor Marilyn Grabowski also remembers a "terrified" Smith "sitting in the corner with a sheet on" during her preliminary shoot. It wasn't until Grabowski played the record Smith brought with her, Marilyn Monroe's "Diamonds Are a Girl's Best Friend," that the model "changed" and felt comfortable enough to remove the sheet.

Smith's drug use is handled with even less tact. While You Don't Know Me stops short of hiring an actor or body double to play Smith in reenactments, it does reconstruct various settings, such as the hotel room where she died. As the February 8, 2007 phone call between the police officer who found Smith unresponsive and a 911 dispatcher plays, the camera lingers on an unmoving body under the covers and the many prescription pill bottles scattered around the room. These inelegant dramatizations present Smith's struggle with addiction as something to be gawked at, rather than a problem deserving of our sensitivity. Interviews with paparazzi who covered Smith during her heyday only reinforce this sense: One admits her 1994 hospitalization from a drug overdose "made her more attractive to us" because it meant "there's some dirt there that we can go after." He says it with zero introspection about why this is problematic, and no follow-up from producers about whether he feels he played a role in her downfall.

Time and time again, Macfarlane's documentary proves to be just as exploitative as the cultural landscape it aims to criticize. Without Smith's perspective, a segment about her changing body in the early 2000s — in which Bonnie Gayle, the sister of Smith's lawyer Howard K. Stern, says she "saved Anna's life" after discovering she was extremely dehydrated due to an unsafe diet — feels just as cruel as a clip of Howard Stern (the radio host, not the attorney) and his co-hosts guessing her weight. The same came be said for Missy's assertion that she was Smith's "first female lover," a claim that takes advantage of the star's inability to respond.

In the context of the many recent projects about women who were wronged by a misogynistic media, You Don't Know Me is indicative of all that can go wrong when producing a documentary (or docudrama) without the involvement of its subjects. For women like Brooke Shields and Pamela Anderson, who spoke candidly about being sexualized by Hollywood and commodified by the public in Pretty Baby and Pamela, a Love Story, respectively, telling their stories was a defiant act, a means of reclaiming their personhood after decades of maltreatment. Notably, Pamela also afforded Anderson the opportunity to sound off on Hulu's Pam and Tommy, which was made without her blessing, a fact that undercuts anything meaningful the show may have had to say about consent or the private world of celebrities.

Of course, a star's lack of participation doesn't always mean a documentary like this is without value. FX's Framing Britney Spears broadened the public's awareness of her conservatorship, though Spears has since called the film, and others made about her legal battle, "insulting." On the flip side, a subject's involvement doesn't automatically make for a comprehensive look at their life and career: A&E's 2022 Janet Jackson docuseries, executive produced by the pop star, was widely criticized as a glowing hagiography that declined to address difficult subjects like Michael Jackson's alleged abuse.

But while Framing Britney Spears synthesized an astounding amount of information about its subject into a 74-minute film, making up for Spears' missing perspective, You Don't Know Me fails to get a similarly thorough grasp on Smith. To a certain extent, this is intentional: Macfarlane's conclusion rests on the idea that, even after all we've seen, the model and actress remains unknowable, as she was "swept away" by a false story she created about her life. This may very well be true, but at least that was a story Smith chose for herself, rather than a narrative crafted by someone else to fill the void created by her absence.

Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me is now streaming on Netflix.

Claire Spellberg Lustig is the Senior Editor at Primetimer and a scholar of The View. Follow her on Twitter at @c_spellberg.