Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me

An excellent documentary on a train wreck of a person. Anna Nicole had so many opportunities to do the right thing, to put in the work, to say no to bad habits, to put better structures and people into place in her life, but again and again she exploited people and took the easiest path available. Even over the heath and well-being of her kids.

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It’s not easy to even feel sorry for Anna Nicole because she didn’t come from an abused childhood. The only thing sad about her upbringing was that she didn’t get the insatiable amount of attention that she craved. As she became an adult, she tried to fill that hole in her being with all kinds of things: sex, money, drugs, fame - everything except love of self.

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We all get through life as best we can, but only some people are willing to do whatever to get money. To that end, she was delusional, unhinged, a lair, and she used people. Did she do those things because she didn’t have good friends around to stop her from becoming the worst version of herself and to pull her back from the abyss of drug abuse, or was it the other way around?

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Netflix does an excellent job of pulling together hundreds of bits of archival footage and images, weaving them together with contemporary interviews and telling the story in a way that allows us to come to our own conclusions.

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