Dueling Britney Spears docs capture the drama
New films examine her conservatorship.
For the past 13 years, pop singer Britney Spears has been under a conservatorship that limits any kind of meaningful agency over her life or her finances. A pair of new documentaries investigate how that has played out — and why — ahead of this past Wednesday’s court hearing in the case.
Both films paint a deeply unsettling portrait of a person whose intimate relations and day-today experiences are micromanaged. It’s hard to wrap your head around the extent of it, and what it’s been like for her to exist in that kind of environment. Even so, there have been prominent voices publicly denouncing any concerns that Spears’ attempts to advocate for herself have been thwarted time and again.
In the Netflix documentary “Britney vs Spears,” Mark Vincent Kaplan, who is the attorney for Spears’ ex-husband Kevin Federline, has this to say to filmmaker Erin Lee Carr:
“I’ve heard from many different quarters that Britney is being held as a prisoner. In effect, against her will. And when I’ve been asked, do I think that’s accurate, I think you have to say to yourself: It’s not as if Los Angeles is some type of fascist gulag where, in order to get a message to the outside world, you have to write it down on a piece of birchbark, in code, and then throw it over an electrified fence to an unsuspecting gardener.”
“Controlling Britney Spears” (available on FX and Hulu and produced by the New York Times) offers a blunt rebuttal. Director Samantha Stark and New York Times reporter Liz Day uncover allegations that Spears’ phone was secretly monitored — including her text messages, notes and browser history — and that a recording device was hidden in her bedroom without her knowledge, capturing 180 hours of what she presumably believed were private moments with her boyfriend and her children.
Of the two projects, “Controlling Britney Spears” (a follow up to “Framing Britney Spears” from earlier in the year) is considerably stronger. The surveillance allegations are substantial and the film itself is simply more cohesive and better organized.
Conservatorships are not meant for “just anyone with a mental health issue or substance abuse issue,” Day says in the film. And in California, she explains, the standard “is that you are unable to feed, clothe or shelter yourself.” But Spears started working almost immediately after the conservatorship began. That includes a guest appearance on the sitcom “How I Met Your Mother” just weeks later.
If she’s able to show up and memorize her lines and perform as needed — like any other person on set — why did she need to be in a conservatorship?
For the last decade, even as she worked a grueling schedule,
including tours and a Vegas residency, she remained under rigid control of the conservatorship, and therefore her father, Jamie Spears. Why didn’t the court see this contradiction as worthy of scrutiny? That’s one of the main questions driving each film. Though both are stylistically ordinary, you’re watching for the information above all else, and it’s notable that these projects are led by women, although neither team really steps back to contemplate, in depth, how larger societal factors — namely, ingrained misogyny and biases around mental health and disabilities — may have specifically shaped many of these outcomes.
“Controlling Britney Spears” began shooting after the singer gave testimony at a hearing this past June, and audio excerpts from that transcript are included. A lawyer for a member of the conservatorship team asks that “we please seal the transcript and clear the courtroom so we can preserve those medical rights. I think it’s really important.”
Spears’ cuts her off. “You’ve done a good job exploiting my life,” she says. “So I feel like it should be an open court hearing and they should listen and hear what I have to say.”
Then she elaborates: “It is embarrassing and demoralizing what I’ve been through, and that’s the main reason I’ve never said it openly. I honestly didn’t think anyone would believe me. I thought people would make fun of me or laugh at me and say, ‘She’s lying, she’s got everything, she’s Britney Spears.’ I’m not lying. I also would like to be able to share my story with the world and what they did to me, instead of it being a hush-hush secret to benefit all of them.”
Those mocking words of Federline’s attorney sound especially curdled in light of Spears’ June testimony.
Both films also underscore Spears’ own fear — especially of running afoul of her father and losing visitation with her two children — as well as the financial implications and motivations for the conservatorship. “The one thing we know for sure is that Britney worked nonstop and made other people a lot of money,” Carr says in “Britney vs Spears.”