Does 'Barb Wire' Actually Suck?

Does It Suck? takes a deeper look at pop cultural artifacts previously adored, unjustly hated, or altogether forgotten, reopening the book on topics that time left behind.

This past February, scientists made a startling announcement: They'd discovered a nearby solar system that itself confirmed the existence of seven Earth-sized planets, all orbiting a central star and potentially capable of housing life. The news was a welcome shock to a world on the precipice of destabilizing change. The notion of an alternative to the political hellscape of contemporary culture was a relief; the potential for realties in which our recent trauma had not come to pass, a fantasy.

In none of these realities or planets would 1996's Barb Wire have fared any better.

Still, I couldn't help but think of that news story as I watched Pamela Anderson hogtie Ron Howard's brother to the back of her motorcycle: What aren't we capable of? What is beyond believing?

Based on a comic book of the same name, Barb Wire was bafflingly co-written by Ilene Chaiken, co-creator of Showtime's The L Word (the early DNA of that show's interest in feminism, punk, and hair are found at their malnourished infancy here). It was a disastrous flop when it was released 21 years ago; at the time, it was seemingly meant to capitalize on Pamela Anderson's budding fame, largely by depending on her other budding assets. Like everything else she had been involved with up to this point, the film has a sense of humor about itself, never too labored in convincing us of anything other than Pamela's already well-grasped Pamela-ness.

Barb Wire takes place in the dystopia of—believe it or not—2017, during the Second American Civil War. There isn't much else there to unpack, but when talk of borders, war, and Russians come up, you may bristle at both the world you live in and the fact that a movie like this could be labeled prophetic. But "timeless" may be a more apt descriptor: The film is a loose adaptation of 1942's Casablanca, one of cinema's crowning achievements, and it swaps the very real Second World War for a fictional one.

The audacity notwithstanding, Barb Wire ends up feeling like a product of its moment, in whatever way you choose to look at it. The film opens, naturally, with a striptease by one Barb Wire (then Pamela Anderson Lee), in a familiar position: at the center of the male gaze. A group of unspecified big spenders watch Anderson in stages of undress as she seductively trickles down her leg to the buckle of her heel. A little caressing of the ankle, and suddenly the hooting and hollering of a particularly loud patron is replaced by a high-heel, hurled like a ninja star at the man's forehead.

It soon becomes clear that Barb is a bounty hunter for hire by night. By day, she manages a rowdy motorcycle bar, the Hammerhead, in Steel Harbor, the last free city in the United States. The country is still ravaged by war—the vagaries of which persist to the end credits—and a war that we learn Barb was a soldier in. While there, she lost a lover who suddenly returns with a favor to ask.

Talking about Barb Wire as a separate entity from Pamela Anderson feels about as appropriate as "post-apocalyptic remake of Casablanca set in a sleazy nightclub." The film hinges not on her role but on her existence—not on her character but on her persona. What makes Barb Wire fascinating is how it reframes our memory of Anderson at her prime. Time may place her in the coquettish grouping of Marilyn Monroe by way of Anna Nicole Smith, but the film doubles down on her equally palatable identity as a rebel rouser. Her more devilish features—that toothy grin, those cat-like eyes—instantly reconfigure just what it is we may remember her as being. Her sexuality isn't just objectified but framed as rather dangerous.

As much of a mess as the film is, something about Anderson holds up the collapse. An actress she is not, and the film seems to know it; for a movie that needs her so clearly, there are stretches where Anderson is absent, and it feels almost like the movie is trying to hide her lack of vocational training. But she is a surprisingly powerful nucleus, even without the nostalgia: Something about Pamela Anderson proves entrancing, and her sexuality informs it without being the totality of it.

Of course, life is always more bizarre than art. If you're looking to place Anderson in a seemingly unbelievable story, you hardly need to look much further than her own. Anderson became famous for her appearance on a Vancouver stadium jumbotron, which she successfully parlayed into modeling for a record number of Playboy covers, and eventually an acting career. By 1995, she had appeared on family-friendly sitcom Home Improvement as well as Baywatch, which catapulted her into international superstardom.

The following year, Anderson appeared in Barb Wire, which has some of the same coy savvy as Baywatch—but here her persona takes the lead. As with all things camp, Anderson exists in quotation marks, fusing her buxom presence with her reputation as a rock 'n' roll goddess. Any semblance of plot falls apart around the time it becomes clear that the only thing standing in the way of conflict in the last free city is literally Pamela Anderson. In reality, the film fits nicely in a cannon of movies designed with the exclusive purpose of breaking in a new lead actress; movies like Easy A and The House Bunny were made with the sole interest of pushing an actress into that next strata of stardom, often to varying degrees of success.

It didn't quite work, and little else does either. Aside from the mental gymnastics you have to do to make sense of a bounty hunter in stilettos, the film's plot proves hair-brained. I interviewed Anderson in 2013, and even she admitted that she "still [doesn't] know what the movie was about." The answer is easy, though: It's about her, and perhaps there is a better version of this movie to be made by a filmmaker more fascinated by the female body as an intellectual idea—someone like Paul Verhoeven, who always found sexuality to be a concept on par with science-fiction. Yet as baffling as the plot was, it's hard not to love the audacity of it: Pamela Anderson, a hero of the dystopian world, using her feminine wiles to operate outside the law and good taste, tearing down big men, stealing their eyes.

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