It was right around when Spears married Alexander, Musial notes, that more and more publications began to slap Spears with the label “white trash”-especially after reports emerged that she’d worn a baseball cap and ripped jeans down the aisle. In doing so, the doc ignores multiple relationships that ignited the public derision toward her in earnest-like her brief dalliance with her back-up dancer, Columbus Short, and her infamously brief marriage to childhood friend Jason Alexander (not of Seinfeld fame) in 2003. It’s difficult to discern why Framing Britney Spears skips straight from Spears’ break-up with Timberlake in 2002 to her engagement to Federline two years later. Kentwood was central to Spears’ public image from her early years her parents, James (AKA “Jamie”) and Lynne Spears, famously scraped by to fund their eldest daughter’s career, even as the former’s contracting business collapsed. Overhead shots of the Kentwood water tower, farmland, and a church steeple play like a screen-saver as the bubbly, heavily accented Felicia Culotta-Spears’ assistant and chaperone for years-explains the town’s “hospitable and humble” nature. To understand how Spears “got here,” her womanhood is just one of several facets of her identity one must unpack.įor instance: How can we talk about the dehumanization of Britney Spears if we never address how her image morphed from that of a darling “small-town girl” from the South, to that of a backwards “white-trash” redneck who deserved no sympathy from the public?Īs with any project concerning Spears, Framing Britney doesn’t waste much time before reminding us all that she hails from the modest town of Kentwood, Louisiana. In reality, misogyny comes in different flavors, depending on other factors including but certainly not limited to a woman’s race, social class, gender expression, and weight. Misogyny certainly poisoned Spears’ relationship with celebrity, but Framing Britney’s examination of the horrible treatment hurled her way feels limited-reliant, above all, on the idea that misogyny is a fixed ideology. Despite the doc’s insistence that “to understand where Britney is now, we should understand how she got here,” the episode itself offers a cherry-picked biography-one that oversimplifies the many societal impulses that converged to dehumanize and torment a young celebrity in distress. But its study of the singer’s life and career in the public eye feels rushed and even superficial at times. More than a decade later, the clip is just one of countless pieces of chilling archival footage included in The New York Times’ explosively popular documentary Framing Britney Spears -which explores the singer’s life and career within the context of the fan-led movement to free her from the conservatorship that has ruled her life for more than a decade.Īvailable on Hulu following its debut on FX, Framing Britney Spears builds on the multiple robustly reported articles the Times has run over the years -each of which have lent gravitas to a fan effort that might otherwise have been written off-and is a handy primer for anyone who’s still not quite sure what cries to #FreeBritney actually mean. Her hair? Ding! Her husband? Ding! Her sanity? Host John O’Hurley’s voice boomed with classic game show boisterousness as he shouted, “Has she lost her mind?!” Ding! Other answers included “Her Children” and “Weight”-to which O’Hurley replied, “I guess.” In 2008, the same year that Britney Spears had been placed under a 5150 psychiatric hold after losing custody of her children amid a painful, tabloid-fueled public breakdown, a gaggle of Family Feud contestants took turns guessing at all the things she’d lost.
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