It is hard not to think of Patrick Bateman, whose exhaustive beauty routine necessitates a great deal of time spent with the bathroom mirror, and whose capacity for self-reflection extends only to the realisation that there is no there there. ​“There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman,” Harron has him drone over a shot in American Psycho where he peels off a literal mask, ​“some kind of abstraction, but there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory, and though I can hide my cold gaze and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping you and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable: I simply am not there.” The problem with women like Anna Nicole Smith and Britney Spears, and to a lesser extent with an actress as atypical and ​“real” as Brittany Murphy, is that they eventually prove too there, not illusory enough.

In The Brittany Murphy Story, Murphy’s inability to be as slender as her co-stars without pills is her undoing. In The Anna Nicole Story, it is Smith’s unhinged commitment to being ​“the international celebrity and balls-to-the-wall party girl Anna Nicole Smith” that makes her first too much for public life, and then too much to live. The Britney Spears of Britney Ever After ruins her untouched and untouchable public image for the sake of men who tell her she’s ​“da bomb,” or have the nickname ​“meatpole,” or who have nothing at all in common with her other than being from Kentwood, and reminding her of home.

These kinds of tragedies do not possess the great, epoch-defining arcs that make a biopic about a Johnny Cash, a Judy Garland or a Marilyn Monroe, but are instead full of the minor-key vicissitudes suffered by regular civilian girls, plus fame. Lifetime, whose bread and butter is in making horror movies for the mothers of suburban, wayward daughters, have succeeded in producing three new classics of the genre: too ​“fat,” too full of love or lust, too loud and too outclassed by peers who did not come from Queens or from the trailer park, these women’s famous names do not entirely distinguish them from the protagonists of Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?, or Fifteen and Pregnant, or Too Young To Die. Each star was first made famous by a kind of catalysing coup de foudre, first on the behalf of some male producer or executive, then on the behalf of America itself, the bloom rapidly wearing off the rose in the way that blooms tend to do. In each case, ​“an entity, something illusory” remains; the living girl behind it either dies, or fades away so that it is no longer simple to discern what is illusory, and what is real.