Tara Reid, the actress, has had a wild up and down life, over-covered in tabloids. Her initial success in the popular teen sex comedy, American Pie (1999), later gave way to her being more famous for receiving reportedly "bad" plastic surgery on her belly and breasts. She drank alcohol to excess, leading to a successful rehabilitation in 2008 at the age of thirty-three, but then she didn't work for three years.
During her drinking days, she partied hard in the U.S. and overseas, had a relationship with MTV journalist Carson Daly. She later got into the habit of making up relationships, generating wedding announcements that proved to be false. A fucked-up kook, a has been, the kind that Hollywood personality gossips laugh at and dismiss over their salads during power lunches.
Tara Reid, though, made an unexpected career choice by embracing absurdity: she became the female lead in the six film Sharknado series (2013-2018) on the Syfy Network. As the films progress, her character loses one body part after another to vicious sharks caught up in whirlwinds until she's essentially a robot, but one with enhanced technological powers, including the ability to fly.
In this character, we see someone overcoming limitations to face challenges, extreme as they are. Tara Reid isn't a robot but her earlier long struggle as a Hollywood star, including with addiction and dealing with harsh tabloid scrutiny focused excessively on her image, something actresses more than actors face as they must satisfy the industry's physical standards in order to achieve success, has found some vindication in a ridiculous film series collecting, thus far, four billion dollars in profits.
Tara Reid, in these six films, is increasingly funny, her character performing ever more miraculous feats. Making viewers laugh in a world so beset with tragedies and losing battles amounts to a valuable gift, something like what all artists have done throughout human history and prehistory: the making of art, in whatever medium, for the edification of others.
Tara Reid's fabulist constructions about having boyfriends and fiancés who denied having relationships with her could be regarded as mental meanderings, a sick mind crying for help. Maybe so. Imaginary boyfriends or girlfriends, though, can be found in many people as we fantasize in idle moments, but an actress in the spotlight could also amuse herself by fucking with entertainment reporters, the same people speculating earlier in her life about Tara Reid's "botched" boob job after someone photographed her breast inside a revealing dress at P Diddy's birthday party.
This "nip slip" along with reports of her "party girl" behavior surrounded Tara Reid's life during the 2000s, a contrast to the more respectful way she was regarded as a promising newcomer at the time of American Pie.
For some prudish and, ironically, prurient reason, entertainment and mainstream news media reporters exhibit a fascination for the fact that young unattached women enjoy going to parties, they like to dance, they might just express interest in young men at these engagements. Tara Reid, in her twenties, partied and drank, hung out with Paris Hilton, probably had some sex--like what a lot of college students and other young professionals and working class people do in their twenties. Why is this news?
Years later, Tara Reid made up stories about men to whom she was supposedly engaged. Were these her attempts to get into the spotlight after a fallow period when Hollywood didn't want to hire her? I don't know, but I see her playing games with the same entertainment news medium that published the "nip slip" pictures and writing about "the worst boob job ever," body shaming her, in other words, on the worldwide stage. How would you, or anyone, handle that?
Be who you are, Tara Reid. I think you're all right.
Vic Neptune
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