In the past few years, a wave of documentary films have revisited the lives of famous (or infamous) women of the 90s, examining how their careers exploded under the weight of misogyny and undue media scrutiny: beginning, perhaps, with the 2017 Lorena Bobbitt docuseries, and spanning Anita Hill in Speaking Truth to Power, the righteous exposé of Finding Britney, Monica Lewinsky in 15 Minutes of Shame, and Netflix’s new Pamela Anderson doc. The podcaster Yasi Salek has termed this cottage industry/genre “We’re Sorry” docs. Conveniently, “We’re Sorry” docs serve both the millennial need for accountability over the toxic culture they were raised in, and allow for some Gen X cultural sin-eating for not caring earlier, having come up in a time where any beautiful blonde on TV was deemed a “bimbo” and any woman aspiring to fame deserved whatever she got.
Yet, as moving and necessary as all these documentaries are, there is little in the way of recourse. The sanctity of these women’s careers and lives is already spent, with empathy and hand-wringing mea culpas coming only in retrospect. How do we rectify this? How do we set about properly appreciating and seeing women’s ambitions now?
