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I watched two documentaries last night. The first was Frontline's famous 2001 essay "The Merchants of Cool," about the big, cynical business of marketing to young ones. It particularly focuses on MTV and how they, with definitively ugly success, figured out a way to throw advertising at kids without the kids really noticing. Then I watched that network's unveiling of Britney: For the Record, a supposed "tell-all" featuring Britney Spears, the smeared and unfocused pop star, that was, in my opinion, the acme (or nadir, not sure which) of this sneakily integrated marketing strategy. Here was not just the party, not the curious almost-normalness of Ms. Spears, not her childish funny voices, not even just her well-guarded children. No, here was something deeply sad—a bit haunting, a bit evocative—but nonetheless blatantly selling a new album and some chintzy perfumes. It was an infomercial asking us to, in some ways, buy a wayward young person. It was strange and vaguely interesting and I'll talk a bit more about it after the jump.
First a big hat tip goes to Pedro Castro, whose gorgeous, lush cinematography made me feel like I was watching something wayyy more important than I was (just like that sweeping camera work on The Hills. MTV has cornered the market on fake swelling gravitas). There was one shot taken from the front of Spears' car as it pulled up out of an underground garage and onto a New York City street. The gate was opening to reveal hundreds of paparazzi and gawkers, their camera bulbs flashing. Really lovely, really telling. Also lovely was Ms. Spears herself, who has slimmed down and brightened up since her darker days of umbrella attacks and suspicious head shavings. She spoke, you know, pretty articulately about her wobbly old life, but was mostly careful to avoid the bigger potholes. Why did she shave her head? To shake off bad juju? To have a change? I couldn't quite parse it. She did say "people shave their heads every day" which was kind of a sad and sloppy thing to say. But there was no mention, not even close, of the allegations that she did it to avoid drug testing.
So she was sort of withholding but also not in parts, and I found myself wondering if this was some small example of her rumored mood swings, her bipolarity. Though it would be awfully convenient if the cameras were always trained in soft solo close up when she was muddling through a trough. Her happier scenes were always with her friends/employees—the noble choreographer who has been with her since the beginning and who finally sees that fire back behind the performer's eyes; her back home cousin and best friend, two suspiciously pretty girls; and her father, big ambling shambling Southrun daddy that he is, with his LSU cap and comfy gut. He almost seemed like a regular sorta warmly embarrassing Dad, until the camera pulled back and there he was, watching as his daughter gyrates on video or, as we're forced to assume, as she catastrophically implodes over the past few years.
So yeah, there was a weird dichotomy between the happy and sad moments. The two most poignant bits were when Britney, arriving at this point from a murky point of origin, just said quietly and tearfully to the camera "I'm saddd." And at that moment, yes, indeed she was. The other soft gut punch was when she said with a sigh that she felt bored and dull all the time, like she was living in the movie Groundhog Day. It gave some real insight into the spoiled, wannabe heart of young celebrity—when fabulous and exciting become tedious, when a normal day seems like adventure. But this kind of "raw" "honesty" was belittled by her saying, not a few minutes later, that she loves her job and her life and is a naturally happy person and la di da da listen to my funny voice.
It was hard to tell which was the realer Britney, the emotional disclosure interview one, or the goofy and mysteriously happy hangin' with friends one. Part of me wants it to the former—what is it with my kind and tragic, eyeliner streaked divas?—and another part, the more compassionate part I guess, wants it to be the latter. A happy bouncy young person with a surprising sense of humor who stumbled no more, necessarily, than any other twenty-something, but was "prisoner" (a word she used several times) to paparazzi and media attention.
I get the prisoner metaphor, but to me she's more like a test tube person. A crop cultivated for public consumption from a very young age. Whose growth is pulled and stifled in strange ways, there are ceilings where walls should be, doors and windows at strange angles. And now that she's a functioning adult, a mama to boot, she's told to teeter off on her own, unbalanced and gangly. Too famous to ever be normal again (what's that great Dave Chappelle line about becoming infamous, rather than un-famous?), and too scarred and precarious to ever be the feel good pop star that she once was. She's a mild freak show oddity now I guess, so how fittingly and depressingly apt and oddly self-aware that her new album, the one heavily promoted on this lilting little confessidocumercial, is called Circus.
But judging from last night, I'm not quite sure she exactly gets just what her "Circus" really is. And maybe she doesn't want to. To her it's about her crazy breakups and like all the photographers and stuff, to us it's about nothing short of the ruining of a young person. I don't think she'll ever make that leap of realization. Because, as we and her handlers and probably the star herself all quietly suspect, if the bear were suddenly to take off the Fez, stop driving in circles in the tiny car, and turn to the audience and talk to them honestly and with a sense of closure about all of its deep beary feelings, I think we'd kind of grumble and shift in our seats and most of us would go home. And then the Circus would be over!
Despite her best efforts last night, I don't think Britney's big top show had ended just yet. Not quite. What a good thing. And what a sad thing, too.