This is Paris shows us the persona, but we are left wanting more of the person.
“How many voices do I have?” We see Paris Hilton in a place that harkens back to her social zenith: the studio. Paris’s song “Stars are Blind” was one of the highest debuting singles on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2006, yet follow ups have been decidedly less successful. She wears sunglasses indoors and tries on different voices at the mic. “This is Paris,” she says over and over. Hilton is synonymous with Y2K-era. In the era of The Simple Life, “that’s hot,” and party pictures that featured surprise visits from her vagina, she was downright unavoidable. This documentary, however, is a reintroduction to the socialite. How many voices does she have? How many Parises are there?
Director Alexandra Dean wants us to start with the version we know best: Party Girl Paris. Cut to a montage of “Hilton mania”: Hilton at some charity benefit with platinum fanned out hair, chihuahua in hand. Hilton in a black monokini gyrating on top of a car as she digs into a Carl’s Jr. burger. The director, however, wants us to understand the hypersexualization to which Hilton was subjected, that the treatment she received in the early 2000s would not occur today with the same brazenness. We hear Matt Lauer describe the young woman as a “gossip column favorite,” a sinister inclusion. We see David Letterman ask his studio audience how many people had seen 1 Night in Paris, the sex tape Hilton was coerced into making at 18. Letterman and a few audience members raise their hands.
“Sorry, I’m so used to playing a character that it’s, like, hard for me to be normal,” Hilton says, sans quintessential vocal fry, while driving to her grandmother’s house, the site of her infamous 2000 David LaChapelle photo. Given the public attention and sexualization surrounding her at that time, it is no wonder why she created the character in the LaChapelle work: she is standing, legs wide, in a pink mini skirt and see-through mesh tank top, breasts exposed. She wears aviators and a shag haircut and bites her lip as if in the middle of saying “fuck you” to match her upturned middle finger. The figure she cuts - that of a rock’n’roll nubile alien - is in direct contrast to the all-white WASP compound in which she crash-landed.
Now 39 - Adult Paris - Hilton looks like a perfectly preserved swan that was cryofrozen at age 26, a woman we know next to nothing about. Adult Paris, we soon learn, is an anxious insomniac. She feels guilty for being the “original influencer.” She worries about young women and what filtering and photoshop does to their self-esteem (though she does not stop filtering her own photos). She describes the sextape leak as an “electronic rape,’ an experience that has further closed her off from forming healthy romantic relationships, so much so that she installs a spy camera behind a plushie on her mantle when her new boyfriend comes to visit. Hilton insists that the adult that she is - and the trauma she still suffers - is all the result of an experience in childhood about which she has never spoken publicly, until now.
After a streak of wild partying, Kathy and Richard Hilton sent Paris to troubled teen schools, from a number of which she escaped. After multiple break-outs, the Hiltons had Paris taken from her bed in the middle of the night and shipped off to Provo Canyon School in Utah. During her 11-month stay at Provo, she experienced physical and verbal abuse by staff and other students, which even included nude stints in solitary confinement. In describing this experience, Hilton draws a direct line from the abuse at Provo to subsequent attention-seeking and reckless decisions. The maltreatment she suffered blurred the lines between tough love and abuse. She still feels unable to trust her family, friends, and romantic partners. She feels the most secure with fans, who worship the persona she created.
Adult Paris does not claim to be an adult: she fears growing up, giving her a childlike sweetness that Dean imbues throughout the film. Hilton describes her goal in life to make $1 billion with a conviction that feels less materialistic but more about control, a way to prevent herself from being snatched away from her bed ever again. She slides around the house in footie pajamas. She gets into an awful fight with her Eurotrash boyfriend before her DJ set at Tomorrowland and orders staff to cut his bracelets off, which she later says is “the worst thing you can do to a person.” Hilton’s caring nature is most apparent when she reconnects with her Provo Canyon classmates, one of which roasts her for pretending not to know how to clean on the Simple Life. This Paris is sweet, smarter than she appears, and terrified.
Hilton’s reveal, though brave, is an odd stake to put in the social justice ground. In the middle of a pandemic with a life-or-death election, the documentary suffers from not taking the wider context into account. Neither Dean nor Hilton provides a reason as to why now was the time to make the abuse she suffered at Provo public. Further, Hilton does not mention the school-to-prison pipeline, nor does she put out a larger call to action on stopping childhood abuse. Her revelations on the electronic rape and social media impact suffer from the same fate: there’s acknowledgement, then nothing. I was left wanting to meet a new Paris bent towards advocating for children and young women, yet the lack of promise left her newfound conviction feeling hollow.
“People think they know me but they don’t,” Hilton says. And mostly, we still don’t. Who is this Paris, now that we know of her time at Provo? Where was Paris when she was no longer the number one influencer? Where was she when Kim Kardashian - categorized in the documentary as “Paris’s former assistant” - eclipsed her, with a sex tape no less? In spite of these questions, Hilton still fascinates. No longer just Party Girl Paris, or Provo Paris, or LaChapelle Paris, Hilton is attempting to bring these fractured figures together. A new, more-layered Paris is coming into view, albeit blurry. And yet, blurry or not, she’s still Paris fucking Hilton.
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