![]() ![]() ![]() Women who invoked sexuality as part of their image had to be reduced, like Smith, to “trash,” diminished not with a scarlet letter but with the crude penises Perez Hilton drew next to their faces on his blog. In the aughts, enabled by the internet and by stigmas surrounding mental health, people reveled in the spectacle of women-particularly beautiful, famous ones-breaking down in public. (He’s since apologized, writing, “I do not want to ever benefit from others being pulled down again.”) ![]() Framing Britney Spears also touches on how Spears was excoriated by the tabloids for supposedly cheating on her then-boyfriend, the pop star Justin Timberlake, and how Timberlake stoked the scandal in a music video that framed himself as the victim. “Everyone’s talking about it,” a middle-aged Dutch interviewer tells a teenage Spears in one archival clip from the documentary. (My colleague Spencer Kornhaber wrote last year about the “Free Britney” movement that’s arisen in response.) But the film feels revolutionary now because it confronts viewers with the larger arc of Spears’s career-how her magnetism and talent were constantly undercut by the media’s inability to comprehend, as one subject puts it, how she could claim to be sexy and virginal at the same time. The recent New York Times/FX documentary Framing Britney Spears is largely about the legal battle over Spears’s conservatorship, and her legal inability for more than a decade to control her own money and make her own decisions. When she picked up fast food, or drove away from paparazzi with her young son on her lap, or drank soda, or got out of a car without wearing underwear, the resulting photos would usually sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars, because they chipped away at the pop star’s golden image. The early days of the internet collided with nonstop cable-news coverage and submerged us into a peculiarly banal kind of drama: Spears buying snacks at a gas station, swarmed by photographers waiting for her to cry, or yell, or do something that affirmed the public perception of her as unworthy of her renown. This same strain of cynical, depersonalizing disdain helped Spears’s mental-health crisis become a gripping public spectacle-“the Britney Show,” as The Atlantic framed it in its 2008 cover story about the monstrous evolution of the paparazzi. Read: The hard lessons of Amanda Bynes’s comeback “But add a little show-business success to that package and top it with a potential half-billion dollars, and you’ve got a story.” I guess? After Smith’s death, Slate’s Jack Shafer analyzed the breadth of media coverage and found it not excessive: “Fat, no-talent, bleach blondes from Texas with breast implants aren’t rare,” he wrote. “I guess they just found the picture we chose unflattering,” the magazine’s editor, Kurt Andersen, said at the time. The headline was “White Trash Nation.” Smith sued: She’d been told that she was shooting an all-American look with glamour shots, and the chips photo was taken for fun during a break. In 1994, New York magazine put Smith on its cover, wearing a pink halter top and white cowboy boots, with her legs akimbo and a family-size bag of chips covering her crotch. Here was an audience so conditioned to seeing women in crisis as punch lines that even the death of one of them felt inevitably comical. To the people in that room, though, it had obviously felt like one. Ferguson interjects to stop them: “It’s not a joke.” “And I think we’re holding the camera,” Ferguson continues. “You know, you’d be laughing at the kid falling over and then you’d go, ‘Wait a minute, put down the damn camera and help your kid! What the hell is wrong with you?’” The audience splinters into laughter. He opens by invoking the media, and says that, lately, he’s had a similar feeling watching the news to when he used to watch America’s Funniest Home Videos. TV viewers have become accustomed over the past few years to talk-show hosts digesting difficult news and processing it for a nation to grasp, but in early 2007, when Spears’s erratic behavior and self-administered buzz cut consumed the public, Ferguson did something unexpected: He declared that he wouldn’t be making jokes about Spears. In a video that recently went viral after it was dug out of the aughts time capsule, the former late-night host Craig Ferguson brings up Britney Spears. ![]()
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