BRITNEY SPEARS:
THE TRAUMA OF FAME
the sixth instalment of FX and Hulu’s The New York Times Presents series of standalone documentaries, premiered recently and aims to untangle for the casual pop-culture consumer the convoluted legal battles facing pop star Britney Spears. Director Samantha Stark reports on how Spears wound up under the long-term supervision of her father, Jamie Spears. The documentary gets as close to Spears as any other reporting project in the past decade – which is to say, not very close.
The list of people who are revealed to have declined to speak to the Times includes Spears’s parents, her sister and brother, her ex-husband Kevin Federline and a former adviser.
Then, an epilogue reveals that it’s unclear whether Spears received the requests for her participation.
Consequently, much of what’s in it has been known to devoted fans and interested followers for a long time: The conservatorship has historically given Spears’s father significant control over her daily life and her money, seems suspect to many outsiders, and has recently been updated by a judge to put a bank in charge of her finances rather than her dad. He retains authority over much of her day-to-day life.
The strength of Framing Britney Spears is in its thoughtful hindsight.
The documentary wisely revisits Spears’s breakneck-speed ascent beginning in 1998, quietly making the case that fame in that era, particularly for young women, was traumatising, and that the booming tabloid industry played a role in Spears’s predicament.
The press hounded women like Spears for disturbingly intimate details of their lives, then belittled and even villainised them for those very details.
To illustrate just how little of Spears’s private life remained private, Stark includes footage from the early 2000s of Spears being asked, before a room full of reporters, whether she’s a virgin; she confirms in a soft voice that she’s waiting until marriage. Moments later, a voice-over plays of Justin Timberlake, Spears’s ex-boyfriend, telling a radio host he slept with Spears. A Details cover depicting Timberlake and congratulating him for “getting into Britney’s pants” appears on-screen.
In an interview clip, ABC’S Diane Sawyer quotes the first lady of Maryland as saying she wishes she could “shoot Britney Spears” for being a poor role model. When Spears responds in horror, Sawyer says: "Because of the example for kids, and how hard it is to be a parent."
After Spears was pictured driving away from aggressive paparazzi with her son in her lap in 2004, NBC’S Matt Lauer asks her to respond to accusations that she's a bad mom for not using a car seat. Spears fights to hold it together before weeping in both interviews.
What Framing Britney Spears evokes so viscerally is the claustrophobia and frustration of being Britney Spears.
As a young starlet, Spears is seen grinning and bearing it while photographers crowd around her car at a drive-through; later, she’s seen covering her face from camera flashes while she exits a petrol station, hurries through a parking lot, dines in a restaurant. “I’m scared. I’m scared,” she repeats as she’s hustled through paparazzi gathered outside a store.
By the time the infamous 2007 footage of Spears – wild-eyed and defiantly bald, fresh off a confrontation with Federline over custody of their two sons – attacking a paparazzo’s SUV with an umbrella appears, what’s surprising about this well-trod storyline is that this is the first car door Spears has dented in nine years of fame.
“That night was not a good night for her. And it was not a good night for us,” the paparazzo whose car Spears damaged tells Stark. Then he changes his tune: “But it was a good night for us, because it was a money shot.”
The episode makes clear that Spears was unwell at the time; it’s said that her mother believed she was suffering from postpartum depression during her 2006 divorce and the subsequent custody battle.
But it also forces the viewer to consider it head-on: If this were your life, wouldn’t you act out, too?
The documentary then cuts to Spears’s hospitalisation and involuntary psychiatric evaluation following a dispute with Federline in early 2008, which led to the then-temporary conservatorship that Spears’s father holds over her today.
It’s come to light in recent years just how damaging the late ’90s and 2000s were for young women in the spotlight. It seems remarkable that Spears has not just lived to tell the tale but remained visible in the public eye.
The tragedy, of course, is that Spears still can't tell that tale herself.