hey, umm, they're doing it to Britney all over again
was this the point of #FreeBritney?
On February 16, 2007, Britney Spears shaved her head. US Weekly broke the story — the tabloid said they were “there as Britney left her Malibu home” and that they stalked her to a salon in the Valley where she “commenced her infamous shave-a-thon.”
Photos of her very-public breakdown sold for outrageous prices and were printed in all the tabloids. She appeared half-bald on the cover of the New York Post and the Daily News. Only two sentences into their story, the Daily Mail promised “a video of Britney getting her shocking haircut.” And then, apparently to add color, they wrote that “the 25-year-old wept in her car before going inside, sitting in front of a mirror and shaving her head herself with a pair of clippers.”
When asked why she was shaving her head, Spears said, “I don't want anyone touching me. I'm tired of everybody touching me.” And if you pair the action with the words, that’s some heavy psychological shit, the kind of scene you might get in the last chapters of Kafka or Dostoyevsky. She had been properly fucked-up by the world. She was 25-years-old and after she shaved her head, Britney Spears mostly disappeared into the conservatorship under her father. Until the public outrage sparked by a series of New York Times documentaries in early 2021.
You’ve probably seen the documentaries (they’re on Hulu) — the most evocative, titled “Framing Britney Spears”, examines the media and entertainment industry’s treatment of the singer. And it caused a shitstorm. Justin Timberlake apologized to her, by name, on Instagram. So did Glamour Magazine. Gavin Newsom signed a law putting new restrictions on conservatorships in California. In November of 2021, Britney’s conservatorship was finally ended.
Since then, what’s happened? She got married to some hulky-looking dude and she put out a banger with Elton John. Or, it’s not great. But it was a power-hour song that knew it was a power-hour song. You didn’t see much about her in the news, but when you did, it seemed like Britney Spears was happy.
And it really felt like hey, maybe we’re all better people now. And a lot of us really, really hoped it was true. With Ted Lasso as our messiah, dammit, we were going to be better people. After the Britney Spears documentaries started changing things, the Editor-in-Chief of Glamour told the New York Times, “hopefully we’re in a place where we won’t do that again, where we won’t lift up these celebrities — in particular women — and then proceed to rip them down.”
But, come on, if the past few years have revealed about us, it’s quite clearly that we’re not any more decent or more evolved or considerate of the humanity of strangers than we ever have been. And yet I still caught myself getting irrationally sad and pissed off when I was in a dentist’s office last week and looked up to see the TMZ headline BRITNEY SPEARS: ‘MANIC’ EPISODE IN RESTAURANT.1
The TV was muted and so I couldn’t hear what they were saying but you didn’t need to hear them to see that they were loving this. Harvey Levin’s body language: his faux-concern and unconvincing seriousness. It took only about five seconds before you realized what was happening. They were doing it to Britney all over again. We had #Freed her and now they were going to continue this very public murder.2
Whatever, I was pissed off. Here’s the clip, somebody posted it to YouTube:
TMZ’s whole story is based on this grainy twenty-second video (which they almost certainly paid for) of Britney Spears holding up her menu to block whomever is filming her. TMZ claims they have an unnamed “eye-witness” who said Britney was talking gibberish. But that doesn’t mean shit. There’s no comment from any named member of the staff at the restaurant, which is the obvious source you’d go to on a story like this. And Britney Spears holding up a menu to block somebody from filming her isn’t strange behavior. Honestly, if you noticed somebody conspicuously filming you at a restaurant, you’d probably do the same thing. Most people don’t like to be filmed by strangers — it’s weird. It makes us uncomfortable.
Anyway, TMZ did multiple stories on this. They went out of their way to build a narrative about it. When Britney deleted her instagram account, TMZ connected it to what they called her “dinner disaster.” The Daily Mail covered the dinner story with the same tone, claiming in their headline that “fans fear again for her mental health.”
And when an employee at the restaurant told Page Six that the diner filming Britney Spears was actually the one acting erratic, it was barely picked up. That development never appeared in TMZ.3
But there’s still some hope — some rational voices in the room saying hey, we all got together on the internet and said we were better than this. Cosmopolitan ran this really good piece about it. And plenty of people on Twitter were calling TMZ out for their shittiness. But then again, there were rational voices way back in the aughts during the last time we did this to Britney.
You might not remember it, but there was a South Park episode in 2008 titled ‘Britney’s New Look’ that parodied the head-shaving incident. And these South Park episodes usually close with a monologue where one of the characters delivers a level-headed assessment of the societal touchstone parodied in the episode.
In ‘Britney’s New Look,’ the closing monologue is delivered to the Spears-chasing paparazzi but it’s obviously addressed to the wider American public. One of the characters begs us: “look, you guys are going to end up killing her. Can’t you see that Britney isn’t in any condition to handle this crap anymore? I know that watching celebrities can be fun … but maybe, just maybe, it’s time to let this one go. Just this one time, let’s all stop before it’s too late.”
So yeah, that’s all I’m saying. Maybe let’s all remember that we said we were going to stop before it’s too late. Let’s all remember that it’s 2023, not 2007 and we are all supposed to be better people.
As I was writing this, or examining the way we previously treated Britney Spears (and seem almost certain to treat her again), I kept thinking of that brilliant Camus lecture. You know, the one he delivered at Columbia just after the end of WWII. Where he argued that humanity was at a crisis-point “because in today’s world we can contemplate the death or the torture of a human being with a feeling of indifference, friendly concern, scientific interest, or simple passivity.” Idk. I think about that lecture all the time — because doesn’t it feel weirdly relevant in the post-Trump era?
I am not and never have never been a fan of Britney Spears’ music — I don’t dislike it; it’s just like, not my thing in the same way that Tool and K-pop are not my thing. If they’re you’re thing, cool. Do your thing. I watched the NYT documentaries on her because everybody was watching them. I didn’t even know Harvey Levin’s name before I started writing this-here post. I just knew him as that short, old TMZ guy with the skin of a taxidermied lizard. But, obviously, the discussion around Britney Spears is hardly about her music anymore.
The weird thing about TMZ’s Britney obsession is that they’re always making these broad claims about her “mental health.” With all the expertise of a haruspex, Harvey Levin goes on the local news in LA and discusses Britney’s mental health. But who died and made Harvey Levin (or any of those vultures at TMZ) the arbiter of mental health? They don’t seem any more sane to me than the people talking to the streetlamps on Hollywood Boulevard.