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How many documentaries on Britney Spears is too many documentaries?
As the popstar’s conservatorship battles continue, there have been a series of non-fiction films that have chronicled the feeding frenzy that has surrounded Spears for decades. Most revolve around the conservatorship that grants her father Jamie the legal right to oversee and control almost all aspects of her life, whether personal or business. It all started in February this year with the New York Times documentary, Framing Britney Spears. Preceded by months of media speculation and the growing chant of #FreeBritney, the Emmy-nominated film’s impact was seismic. Spears’s story had been told before and perhaps most comprehensively in the Rolling Stone cover story, The Tragedy of Britney Spears. What Framing Britney Spears benefited from though, was an audience that revisited the threads of her life and career through the post #MeToo lens.
Then came BBC’s Battle for Britney: Fans, Cash and a Conservatorship that was directed by Bafta winning filmmaker Mobeen Azhar. While the hour-long documentary had new interviews and footage, including Azhar’s visit to Spears’s hometown Kentwood in Louisiana and his summary of one of Spears’s conservatorship hearings in December 2020 that he attended, it doesn’t really tell us anything new. Last week, we got a third documentary – Controlling Britney Spears, again by The New York Times. Directed by Samantha Stark, who also made the first NYT documentary, this one focused more on the lurid details of her conservatorship, like her phone and bedroom being bugged and being forced to perform while in the midst of a panic attack. And yet, it doesn’t say anything new about the circus that Spears’s life has become.
Latest to join the Spears bandwagon is Netflix’s Britney Vs Spears that premiered just four days after the NYT follow up. The film’s release date coincides with the next hearing (scheduled for 29 September) in her conservatorship case that could determine whether her father Jamie will be removed as her legal guardian. Director Erin Lee Carr teams up with Rolling Stone veteran Jenny Eliscu, who played a small role in a covert operation to help Spears secure a new lawyer in 2009. The 90-minute film has the duo sitting around a desk, drinking coffee, poring over text messages, legal documents and medical information and saying things like ‘That’s the patriarchy!’ and ‘You don’t get out. Until you scream’.
We also get many, many lingering shots of text from documents. Far from giving us any major revelations after the previous three films, this one at times ends up looking like an amateurish attempt at making a whodunit. The only thing missing was the white board with pictures, maps, board pins and a sinister web of red string. Even when there is new information like Spears being given ‘stimulants’ to perform on stage and while she was a judge on the American X Factor, there’s no clarity on what the simulants were or why she was given them.
What the film benefits most from is a slew of new talking heads who make up the who’s who of dubious characters from Spears’s past. There’s her ex-boyfriend and paparazzo Adnan Ghalib; Sam Lutfi who was accused of drugging her (which he denies, calling himself ‘the perfect scapegoat’); cinematographer-turned-close-friend Andrew Gallery who shot her for the 2008 MTV documentary For The Record; Dr James Edward Spar whose expert opinion might or might not be what the conservatorship hinged upon; and Britney’s former business manager Howard Grossman. And yet, none of these interviews add anything to the Spears lore. The filmmaker doesn’t question them beyond the story they want to tell. Also making an appearance, though a much-guarded one compared to the NYT documentaries, is Felicia Culotta, Spears’s former assistant.
Britney Vs Spears tells us that one of the highest paid female musicians in the world is given a monthly allowance of $8000 and needs permission from her father to get a hamburger. It tells us that she was diagnosed with dementia around the time she was guest-starring in How I Met Your Mother and entertaining fans around the world during the Circus and Femme Fatale tours. And it tells us that Samuel Ingham, the court-appointed attorney who Spears had no confidence in and tried multiple times to remove, made $3 million while working for her. When Netflix announced the doc earlier this month, it promised ‘a thorough portrait of the pop star’s trajectory from girl next door to woman trapped by fame and family and her own legal status’ using exclusive interviews and previously confidential documents. While it’s still imminently watchable, Britney Vs Spears pales in comparison to its predecessors and builds a discombobulated snapshot of Spears’s situations.
And, I am back to my original question – how many documentaries on Britney Spears is too many documentaries? While the first NYT film made Spears’s trauma public and perhaps helped move the needle towards her getting more autonomy, the rest of them only revel in the drama.
What started out as an attempt to raise awareness about the exploitative nature of the superstar’s 13-year-old conservatorship and how her father was controlling her, these documentaries now feel like they are preying on her misery. These films not only capitalise on the news cycle around her court dates, but feed on her fans’ morbid fascination with grim revelations about her life.
In 2007, as Spears spiralled out of control – shaving her head and attacking paparazzi with an umbrella – she was constantly surrounded by dozens of photographers documenting every misstep. Publications, in turn, used these pictures to profit off the very public meltdown of a 25-year-old young woman. Fifteen years later, her life continues to be hyper-scrutinised.Only, this time around it’s being peddled as a righteous cause as she fights for her freedom.
Spears called out this hypocrisy herself in an Instagram caption from May this year:
2021 is definitely way better than 2020 but I never knew it was gonna be like THIS !!!! So many documentaries about me this year with other people’s takes on my life ... what can I say … I’m deeply flattered !!!! These documentaries are so hypocritical … they criticize the media and then do the same thing ?????
It is time to leave Britney Spears alone.
Watch the trailer here
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