As the pressures of fame mount once again, can Britney ever break free?
The singer denied reports of a late-night row at a Hollywood hotel, but fans fear a new chapter in her long battle to control her destiny, writes Edward Helmore in New York
Britney Spears has known the highs and lows of how the US treats its celebrities, from her days as a Mickey Mouse Club child actor, teen pop icon and global superstar to the 13 years spent under legal conservatorship following a mental health crisis. Finally, after a court battle to end the arrangement, she won the freedom, for the first time perhaps, to be herself.
But now there are fears of a new chapter in the Spears saga, or the return to an old unhappy one, after she reportedly had a late-night fight with her boyfriend at the Chateau Marmont in Los Angeles resulting in paramedics being called and pictures of her, mostly naked save for a pillow and a blanket, appearing in the tabloids.
Spears, 42, later said she had injured her foot taking a leap outside her room and had left the hotel with her own security team. TMZ, the tabloid news website, cited sources who feared that she had a “mental breakdown” at the hotel.
Spears later declared “the news is fake” on Instagram and the paramedics’ arrival – triggered by a call from her mother, Lynne – “caused this huge scene, which was so unnecessary”, when all she needed was an ice-pack.
“I’m moving to Boston !!! Peace,” Spears wrote.
Few entertainers have been as compelling and conflicting as the Mississippi-born, Louisiana-bred Spears since her breakout hit …Baby One More Time in 1998 that foretold the coming of a whole generation of Disney child stars that would take over pop music up to the preleast
now with rising superstar Olivia Rodrigo.
Her career has been a litany of memorable milestones, aside from her record of chart-topping hits. There was the onstage kiss with Madonna, who turned out to be one of Spears’ champions; the romance with fellow Mickey Mouse Club star Justin Timberlake; the marriage to back-up dancer Kevin Federline; and shaving her head in front of paparazzi as a way of “pushing back”. No star, perhaps, has played across the lines of childhood and womanhood more effectively. Or exhibited both the highs and lows of fame so intensely.
Spears has had a historically turbulent time, reminiscent at its bleakest of Frances Farmer, the actress who was subjected to sensationalised accounts of her life, including, as Spears has, involuntary commitment to psychiatric hospitals and placed under a conservatorship.
And like Farmer, whose mental illness and substance abuse dramatically altered the course of her studio-assigned career, Spears has spent years trying to correct the narrative.
Along the way, she became an LGBTQ+ icon, as Farmer, Judy Garland and Madonna had been before. “We know what it’s like to have our identities cast aside. To feel like we aren’t being heard. To have outside forces pressure us into conforming,” wrote Christopher
Rosa on gay website Them last year in an essay titled Why Britney Spears’ Freedom Means So Much to Queer Fans.
Last year, Spears published The Woman in Me , a stand-out autobiography in which she wrote freely about trying to cope with the pressures of being one of the most famous women in the world, and her struggle to get out of the court ordered conservatorship that had given control of almost every aspect of her life to her father and lawyers, including access to her two children from her marriage with Federline.
In a review, the New York Times said that Spears had “never stopped telling us who she was — in handheld videos on Instagram and, naturally, in her vast catalog of songs, with their lyrics about loneliness and emancipation, desire and defiance”.
In a successful 2021 bid to end the conservatorship she told a Los Angeles court: “I’ve been in shock. I am traumatised. I just want my life back.”
She also said that when she posted she was OK in Instagram posts, “I was in denial.”
However, her posts have recently taken a curious turn. In September, she was seen dancing and wielding kitchen knives, triggering a police welfare check, heck, and later doing handstands handthe in the Las Vegas hotel room she said she’d he’d been living in for four years. On Thursday, she posted another, again dancing, in her room with h a wild look in her eye.
Fans have long claimed an innate, subconscious connection with the singer, often via social media, and she with them. They just seemed ed to “know”, she wrote in the he memoir, addu adding: “If you stood up for me when I couldn’t uldn’t stand up for myself, from om the bottom of my heart, thank you.
“I don’t think people peohow knew how much the #FreeBritney ney movement meant to me,” she wrote, adding the e movement saved her life.
Last week, eek, those same fan accounts nts were stirring stirw, anew, prompting promptrgence a resurgence of the online #FreeBritney reeBritney movement nt that she credited with helpd helping to end her consent, conalumna. servatorship. They see the Chateau Marmont incident as part of an effort to place her back under the control.
In her autobiography, Spears wrote that while she may not have been “right to spiral”, she was expressing a fundamental right to test boundaries, “to find out who you are, to find out how you want to live”.
But, she continued, “other people – and by other people, I mean men – were afforded that freedom. Male rockers were rolling in late to award shows and we thought it made them cooler. Male pop stars were sleeping with lots of women and that was awesome.”
In contrast to her, she wrote, “no one had tried to take away their control of their body and money”. Even when her husband cheated on her and acted sexy, she wrote, it was seen as “cute”. TV interviewer Diane Sawyer had made her cry with questions about her private life. MTV had made her listen to criticism of her costumes. A governor’s wife said she wanted to shoot her. That criticism, and the control she was placed under, turned her into a robot. “But not just a robot – a sort of child-robot.” According to Brooke Foucault Welles, professor of communication studies at Northeastern University and joint author of an academic paper entitled You want a piece of me: Britney Spears as a case study on the prominence of hegemonic tales and subversive stories in online media, Spears’ battles are part of a larger issue of stories that emerge online, are picked up in the tabloids, but then fall back under the control of a conservatively aligned media. “What online activism is really good for is questioning mainstream assumptions,” Welles says, “because different kinds of people have the power to introduce different diffe kinds of narratives.
“Early in her career, her h manager and parents had control of her narrative,” rative,” Welles adds.
“She tried to reclaim power p and that power struggle became bec the focus of her public breakdowns. break Social media allowed her to directly re-introd introduce her voice and perspective, perspectiv and the fans picked that up as cries for help.” Britney Britn Spears, then, was never just a pop star but a prism for a larger debate d about control.
“There is a collective col understanding of what it is to be an independe independent agent in the world, but th that understanding standing shifts. shifts It is probably ably different for Britney than it is for you y or me, for parents or he her publicist,” Welles says.
“Which one is the t truth? I suppose we have to collectively tively agree on which wh story we find most compelling.” compell
She tried to reclaim power and that power struggle became the focus of her public breakdowns