![]() When she gets naked with that grief and those secrets, she'll be an artist again, and she'll matter to people.Hi my my name is Farrah. Fawcett's salvation is in her face - her anguished, haunted face. ![]() If "All of Me" is an actress' attempt to let her rear-end save her career, it can't work. The irony is that she's more distanced and remote from us in that moment than at any point in her clothed career - and more covered than Rosalind Russell ever was. Yeah, right.įawcett quotes the Rosalind Russell remark that "acting is standing up nude and turning around very slowly." Next thing we're treated to the sight of Farrah, fully, frontally nude, standing up on a stage and turning around very slowly. Hugh Hefner, wearing silk pajamas, appears on camera and, with a straight face, talks about how wonderful it has been to see Farrah "grow" over the years into the "remarkable, talented, independent woman" she is today. But the Playboy guys are in another category. One can feel sorry for Fawcett and wish that her friends might intervene. Watching her is like watching a woman with bound feet paint with her bound feet, as if limitation were a form of expressiveness. Fawcett seems stuck in some tortured narcissistic loop. "I wanted to use my body parts to paint," she says. ![]() Then she puts paint in her hair and paints with those Farrah tresses. Fawcett puts paint on her breasts and on her buttocks and rolls around on a canvas. The painting scene, which follows, is a disaster. She should have quit while she was ahead. One is impervious to time the other isn't. Along the way, she disrobes and covers herself in the material of the sculpture. The highlight of the video is a set-piece in which Fawcett sculpts a life-size statue of a woman from the ground up. She says that art allows her to express her "feelings about nudity." She wants us to know that she is a painter and a sculptor, and guess what? She specializes in nudes. Feminist performance artists such as Karen Finley have spent their entire careers trying to create what Fawcett and Playboy have apparently managed to do unwittingly: a chilling, cautionary piece that shows the cruelty of exploitation and the utter dead-end of narcissism.įrom the beach debacle, "All of Me" moves to 1997, with Fawcett preparing for her recent pictorial. If anything, it's something mothers might want to show their teenage daughters. "All of Me" is not for beer-swilling slobs who want to look at a naked woman. Her anguish and embarrassment suggest a woman circling around a sense of betrayal - but she can't figure out who has betrayed her. ![]() She can't finish a sentence without punctuating it with a mirthless giggle. So why is she doing this? She looks like a trauma victim. We see her at 48, on the beach, caressing herself for a 1995 Playboy pictorial. But then we get to Farrah: the Nude Years. The video also celebrates Fawcett's hard-hitting acting performances from the '80s, with clips from "The Burning Bed" and "Extremities." The video traces the phenomenon that was Farrah in the late '70s - the popularity of "Charlie's Angels" and of the Farrah poster, which the ubiquitous Camille Paglia describes as one of the most significant pop-culture images of the century. She was discovered by a talent agent and within weeks of arriving in Hollywood was doing bit parts and TV commercials: "Joe-eey, Mama never told me about Ultra-Brite!" The 72-minute video begins with a mini-documentary of Fawcett's life and career. ![]()
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