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When Colleen Applegate shot and killed herself in March of 1984, she gained more than the 15 minutes of fame supposedly reserved for those who seek celebrity as the primary goal for their lives. Colleen had already received some notoriety as a minimally competent actress (under the name Shauna Grant) in porn movies and videos, where her "peaches and cream good looks" compensated for a relative lack of enthusiasm and camera sense. But this was Hollywood, where, especially in the underworld, it is more important to look good than to feel good. And while Colleen Applegate may have looked good on camera, she had not felt good for a long time.
Eighteen years later, we still don't know exactly what drove Colleen out of Minnesota into the commercial fleshpots of the porn industry, though we can speculate that an unhappy, probably abusive childhood so common to people who fulfill themselves in self-destruction, was the foundation of the 18 months of consensual public rape that was her career. What makes this lack of knowledge particularly confounding is that within months after her death, Colleen's life and career had become the subject of two documentary retrospectives, among other commentaries, that purported to examine the truth about her death and life, one from the ostensibly high-minded PBS Frontline (Henschel), and one from the more unashamedly exploitative porn industry (James).
There is in these retrospectives some superficial information about Colleen/Shauna, and important information about the video media themselves, high- and low-brow, that reveals how lustfully dehumanizing they are at heart, how their motivations are equally prurient, for all levels of the media feed joyfully off the fresh meat of the dead and dying, as we have seen recently in the 0. J. Simpson, Princess Di, and Bill Clinton orgies of blood, semen, and decay. The case of Shauna Grant provides us with an early and well-refined illustration of their deeply cannibalistic lusts.
Shauna Grant was not the first "blond bombshell" to be sorely exploited by the media; her story exists in the context of a lineage of blonds, living and dead, who have provided ghoulish fodder for the press, from Mae West through Jean Harlow, Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, and most recently Pamela Anderson. Jayne Mansfield became the first...