Many of the songs on Blackout, the 2007 album Spears released shortly before her breakdown, convey a sense of relentless exposure and — as in “Piece of Me” — of being devoured, bite by bite.
In February 2007, Spears appeared at a hair salon. As a mob of paparazzi hammered on the salon doors, Spears demanded the stylist shave her head. When the stylist demurred, Spears grabbed the clippers and did it herself. According to the hairdresser, she declared: “I’m sick of people touching my hair”: as though making herself ugly might stop people touching her, staring at her, wanting a piece of her.
It didn’t work. Later that year, another swarm of paparazzi photographed Spears strapped to a gurney, being wheeled away into an ambulance.
But her longing to re-assert personal boundaries, and some measure of private existence, wasn’t in the interests of those around her. Following a similarly public breakdown over roughly the same period, Lindsay Lohan more or less abandoned celebrity, and has since largely disappeared from the limelight. But rather than allowing Spears to withdraw like Lohan did, the Britney-industrial complex sent her to rehab, then deprived her of personhood with the “conservatorship” legal arrangement — before putting her back to work as Britney Spears the celebrity.
Since she was deprived of control over her own affairs, Spears has released three albums and undertaken four stadium tours. We could debate whether or not this is an ethical thing to ask of someone who is deemed by the courts not to have capacity to manage her own affairs. But from the point of view of the fame machine, Spears’ inner life and personhood are largely beside the point. For there’s no money in privacy.
Lohan retreated into private life, and has been (by celebrity standards) skint ever since. Spears made, or was forced to make, the opposite trade – and the Britney-industrial complex has cashed in. Where she was reportedly down to her last few million at the point of breakdown, the New Yorker reports that she’s worth more than $60m now.
In the intervening years, the collapse between public and private that drove Spears and Lohan to breakdown has come for all of us. Every public social media post positions us as our own paparazzi: curators of our own micro-celebrity mythos, in exchange for the dopamine hit of one more “like” or “share”.
And in a world where privacy is increasingly meaningless, the fantasy-worlds of movie and music seem increasingly don’t cut it. Stronger, more intimate stuff is what garners the clicks. We’ve moved on from voyeuristically documenting the mental health difficulties of attractive young celebrities; now, it’s a race to give a platform to whatever is darkest and most baroque in the human psyche.
Chris Crocker’s own career trajectory epitomises the insubstantiality and sleaze of this new environment. Since 2007, he has cycled through every form of digital-era micro-celebrity imaginable, including attempts at reality TV and a music career, a stint in porn, and recent migration to — where else? — the intimate-seeming subscription porn website OnlyFans.
The hunt for dark, intimate, click-worthy curiosities has spawned a whole genre of (often female) confessional, including an entire sub-genre devoted to women losing things up their vaginas. If it’s not confessional, it’s grotesque: a Netflix dating show dresses contestants in given prosthetic makeup so a shark and a devil can go on a date. Drag queens read stories to children in public libraries. A male who identifies as a woman “breastfeeds” a real newborn baby on US television, and it’s treated not as child abuse but entertainment.
More subtly, every time we post, like, or share, we’re part of it. We’ve all acceded to the trade that was forced on Spears: hyper-visibility, at the expense of a private inner life. What does “privacy” even mean, in a world where hundreds of millions of people are happy for Google to index the content of their private emails in exchange for bottomless email storage?
It’s ironic, then, that Spears should have launched her legal campaign to end her conservatorship in 2020. For the pandemic has given us all a taste of the Britney lifestyle. Under Covid we were all suddenly in conservatorship: mediated, surveilled, shorn of autonomy, every movement controlled. And, also, pressured to go on working even as the norms of what we thought about citizenship dissolve around us, real-world social institutions collapse, and we transfer ever more of our inner lives into the attention economy.
The end of history, it turns out, actually was peak liberal democracy. We all laughed at Crocker, but he wasn’t just complicit in the new economy. He was also right about its tradeoffs. “All you people care about is making money off her,” he sobbed. “She’s a HUMAN!!!”. Crocker recognised the way Britney Spears’ personhood was already collateral damage, in the rush to transform her into a never-ending source of lucrative content.
Her song ‘Gimme More’ was fitting, Crocker declared, because “All you people want is more, more, more. Leave BRITNEY ALONE!!!” But instead of listening, we turned him into a meme. And now it’s too late: we’re all memes as well, passing figures in a parade of grotesques, our personhood discarded in exchange for free apps, hygiene theatre or a moment in the online limelight..
We need to reclaim a sense of what we won’t offer up to the entertainment machine: to find a way back to some measure of private life, as Lohan did. For it’s already becoming clear that a culture willing to replace private life with never-ending public carnival will be governed as Britney Spears is governed. It will be run as a therapeutic conservatorship by those who know best, whether we like it or not.
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SubscribeI’m always impressed–amazed might be more accurate–at Mary Harrington’s ability as a writer. She seems to brim with words and ideas on any subject related to popular culture.
The internet has doubtless exacerbated celebrity exploitation (although the author doesn’t consider the extent to which some celebrities are complicit in their own exploitation, for example with strategically timed ‘breakdowns’), but it’s far from a new phenomenon.
Google the sad lives and careers of the massively talented Judy Garland and her fellow child star Mickey Rooney. They started their careers in the 1940s as teenage performers in the popular ‘Andy Hardy’ movies. To keep them at peak efficiency, studio doctors prescribed uppers (amphetamines) then downers (barbiturates) so they could work long hours then sleep. These were licensed physicians (“First, do no harm”) prescribing addictive drugs to children for commercial gain. Garland became a lifelong drug addict and died before the age of fifty. Rooney lived longer but with a troubled life.
We’re all complicit in the public treatment of media stars, and in our own treatment if we agree to be part of the social media circus.
I agree with you about the quality of the writing. This is the most important point that I have read all year: yes, those who are public commodities have always been exploited. But with a movie studio, marketing department and GPS tracker in our pockets, we in our own way risk becoming public commodities as well.
Don’t Google anything ever.
“We’re all complicit in the public treatment of media stars,”
No we are not.
I am always amazed at silly things people say.
Thanks for your Constructive contribution to this discussion…
It is perfectly constructive to suggest avoiding lazy generalisations like “We all ..” and “ Why did nobody foresee … “ etc.
What follows statements like this is often poorly thought out.
Fortunately Mary seldom uses these structures …
Clickbait titles like the one given to this article are pretty moronic … and it’s important to discourage them.
When I rule the world, or at least the UK, if it still exists (yes, I have been driven mad) I will ban Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Tiktok, Instagram and Amazon, and nationalise Google. There will be howls of outrage, and then everyone will go back to using their phones for talking to friends, pubs for meeting them, and maps for working out where they are. Simples.
Really good article – as always Mary.
My one criticism though is that the ‘music’ has always been part of the whole charade.
The music as fake as the hair extensions and over-produced videos. She is not a musician in the traditional sense and her songs are written by others as part of a committee – like most pop music in the past 15-20 years. They are deliberately written to reflect whatever hell she may or may not have been going through as it’s all part of the same marketing. Boom or bust they will try and sell it and her product.
I don’t say it to be a music snob – each to their own – but this is the undeniable truth. It’s not the artist revealing her true feelings, it’s part of the marketing machine to sell out tours and sell records. Capitalising on her misfortune as if she wasn’t a real person but a character in a soap opera.
I was intrigued this week that Facebook was deemed not to be a monopoly because the definition only applies financially. But what I think they were going after with Big Tech was their ‘monopoly of efficiency’. These tech behemoths provide whatever you need in the quickest and most effective way possible.
This suits our time-poor life experience and effectively hooks you in. I wanted to look at a brand new website but DuckDuckGo (which I use to keep some privacy) couldn’t find it. Google had it instantly. It’s tough for humans to break out of the addiction of instant response or gratification. It’s actually hard work supporting local shops or taking the trouble to buy a card, write it and post it in good time instead of messaging HBD! I don’t want to give up on this unequal struggle.
Mary at her very best. Always worth a second read.
TRY TANGO!
Like other comments to the article I find the author’s description of “The End” accurate- the disastrous breakdown of privacy (and authenticity) with Britney Spears as the obvious example.
The fact that Spears’ story can take place shows the crudeness of the “cultural movement” behind – a celebrity person cuts her hair off in order to become ugly – a desperate attempt to save remnants of personhood – leading, however, to no change.
I am not sure if I agree with the article’s conclusion, though. Or is the conclusion just “We are all Britney Spears now”? I agree that we are all surrounded by this “culture”, but do we have to join it? Can’t we fight against it and at the same time find some fragments of real life to take part in? E. g. to endorse Harrington’s article verbally or even with a “like” I hold for resistance – not joining.
Regarding fragments of real life – let me tell about an improvised tango scene I visited last night here in Berlin, outdoor in rainy weather under the corona restrictions. That little scene has its “likes” and its vanities like other human arenas. But the people you meet are not dead! You can seek contact aiming at friendship, a relationship or just a dance. It takes time and it is a bit awkward. Being somewhat open and authentic is now more risky than ever thanks to the circumstances so accurately described by Harris, but people are not dead! You can always try to reach out.
Mary Harrington goes into this, and more, in an interview on Triggernometry broadcast a couple of days ago, Well worth a listen.