~Wednesday~
I watched The Eyes of Tammy Faye online and free and I wanted to capture a few of my thoughts about it for posterity:
- Overall, this film didn’t really change my thoughts and feelings about Tammy Faye, which I’d describe as “neutral” or at least “not negative.”
- There was a time in my life when my answer would have been “extremely negative,” though, and that was around the time that “PTL fell” and its subsequent gasping as it morphed from The PTL Club to PTL Today to Heritage Ministries. At that time, I had started reading to my blind friends Jeane and Milton, who were counted among the members of “the club,” and thus among the bilked.
- Not that I ever thought Jerry Falwell was anything other than the opposite of a Christian, but I thought that even more so after seeing this film. With that said, I get that this is only Tammy Faye’s perspective on what happened. And finally, I think it’s interesting that they (Tammy and Jerry) died within months of each other in 2007.
- I actually saw Tammy Faye in person back in 2004 when she co-hosted Durham’s Drag Bingo.
- I thought the most interesting scenes in this documentary were when—later in her career in an attempt to “freshen up her persona” to pitch to TV execs several ideas of shows she wanted to do—she agreed to a photoshoot with a famous photographer, and they wanted to remove and re-do her make-up. It was just fascinatingly telling about how much a part of her being her looks were—or perhaps more accurately, her “look” was—to her.
- Of all the adjectives I’ve seen used to describe Tammy Faye, the one that resonates the most with me is “misguided.”
In a complete aside, here are all the movies I’ve seen since I started tracking them in my blog back in February of 2003.