It could be argued that a celebrity is somebody who cares more about what strangers think than the people who actually know them. Ceding their identity in exchange for the corrosive heat of fame, they end up living as projections of somebody else’s imagination, which is surely a path to self-obliteration and madness.
Take Britney Spears, who, at the age of 26, seems like she’s been around forever. Born in 1981 and raised in Louisiana, Spears first appeared on national TV in 1992 on Star Search. She then starred on The New Mickey Mouse Club from 1993-94, and in 1999, she released her first solo album, … Baby One More Time. It was at this point that she shot into the stratosphere, becoming perhaps the biggest star on the planet.
Dressed like a sex-starved schoolgirl, she swung her hips and tossed her hair like a femme fatale. Teasing her audience by proclaiming that she was going to remain a virgin until marriage, she seemed right on the cusp of realizing her precocious sexuality. It was on this razor’s edge that her fame was established, and it seemed like the entire nation was mesmerized, greedily imagining the day when the sexual tension would finally be released.
However, this didn’t go on indefinitely, and, in 2004, Spears got engaged to Kevin Federline, a backup dancer and all-around dubious character. At the time, his previous fiancée, Shar Jackson, was eight months pregnant with his child. Regardless, Spears and Federline married, and soon produced two children.
Spears, having used her sexual potential to fuel her career, found there wasn’t much left to continue her forward momentum after that potential had been realized and she was a wife and mother. It didn’t help matters that K-Fed — as he had taken to calling himself — was such a shabby character. Revealing themselves positively remedial when it came to life skills, they got divorced in short order, and Spears’s life became a very public train wreck.
Even though the reason the public was interested in her had changed dramatically, Spears, having lived her life in a bubble of unwarranted adulation, seemed oblivious. The media still pursued her, but now they were derisive rather than fawning. She was the punch line of jokes, and it didn’t take long before news reports and photographs of her acting erratically became a staple of our daily diet.
There was Britney driving recklessly with her unrestrained baby on her lap. She’s a bad mother! There was Britney intentionally exposing her crotch as she stepped out of a car. She’s a slut! There she was drinking mojitos at 10 in the morning. She’s a drunk! And before we knew it, she had shaved her head, gotten a bunch of tattoos, and was attacking the paparazzi with an umbrella. Her behaviour had stopped being amusing, and when she was seen at a hotel desk, armed with only a scrap of paper with a couple of digits of a credit card number on it, wailing “Nobody wants me anymore!” she seemed to have fallen into a florid, and tragic, state of madness.
She then bounced from rehab clinic to rehab clinic, before eventually being institutionalized and losing custody of her children. Like Anna Nicole Smith before her, Spears seemed destined to be sacrificed to the failed ambitions of her audience, for, in America, if celebrities don’t prove that they are in fact better than the rest of us, they are destroyed.
However Spears was not done, attempting a disastrous comeback at the 2007 MTV Video Awards. Moving listlessly about on the stage, she lip-synched the words to Gimme More as if in a narcotic haze. It was not pretty, and it bore more resemblance to a scene from a David Lynch film than one of her earlier videos. The public, as you might remember, was unkind.
No matter, she has continued to work on her rehabilitation, both personally and professionally, and on Tuesday, her 27th birthday, is set to launch Circus, her new album.
Tomorrow, as part of the media blitz surrounding the CD launch, MuchMusic is airing a documentary called Britney: For the Record. This is supposed to clear up any lingering questions we have about Spears, as she tells us, in her own words, what transpired during her freefall from public favour.
Although no advance copies of the documentary have been made available to the press, a clip has been released in which we see Britney in soft focus. Wearing a pink tank top, she moves in slow motion, rehearsing with her dancers as if in some gauzy paradise. Dreamy, ethereal music plays in the background, and Spears looks focused and in control, as if wholly integrated in her native environment.
She tells us that she doesn’t need to talk about her past in order to conquer it, and that for her, art is therapy. This seemed less a reflection upon her past than an avoidance of it. There was a desperate and illusory quality to the clip, like the only thing that Spears could conceive of was to return to her past, so that she might see herself, through her audience, as the golden girl she once was and not the frightening cautionary tale she might just become.
BY MICHAEL MURRAY, THE OTTAWA CITIZEN
Britney: For The Record,
MuchMusic