Spears later apologized for taking an umbrella to a paparazzo’s car, and Ramos has even remarked in an interview that he and his colleagues were accustomed to working closely with her—that Spears was not averse to the attention. “Britney just loved it. She just enjoyed it, but there were times that it caught up to her. She didn’t give us the memo.”20 The tangled and conditional relationship between a starlet and a coterie of paparazzi is by no means specific to Spears’s variety of fame, and surely the opportunities and access attendant to celebrity breed certain aggravations (we are hasty to equivocate this way whenever we express empathy for a powerful woman). But if all of that is true, it’s equally possible that Spears had habituated herself to a set of circumstances—in particular, vastly truncated privacy, compliments of the paparazzi—that she understood as her new, permanent atmosphere. The weather brought a perennial deluge of camera flash: perhaps the path of least resistance meant learning to welcome it whenever meddling seemed something akin to fun, or at least like savvy public relations.
In years prior, at the height of her bubblegum prowess, Spears telegraphed a divergent response to celebrity from the one Ramos suggests, one in which she is tolerant, long suffering, and tragically fatigued. In the music videos for her singles “Lucky” (2000) and “Everytime” (2003), Spears dramatized the glamorous depression that would later become intertwined in Lana Del Rey’s persona: each performance, although gussied up with the trappings of popstar glitter, is unsettling in its vulnerability—Spears’s doe eyes have always broadcast a resigned sadness, as if her hopes have been dashed. As Alice Bolin writes in Dead Girls, Spears sings “My loneliness is killing me” over and over in her first—colossal—single, “…Baby One More Time”—but we hadn’t listened, not really.21 And maybe we overlooked her anguished isolation in these videos, particularly in “Everytime,” where Spears depicts the allure of death in the face of romantic misery and overexposure. We tie ourselves in knots in expeditions for authentic, wholly unmediated celebrity responses to the wider world, but the notion of personal authenticity is a red herring in any case. Still, the Spears who glides tragically through the videos for “Lucky” and “Everytime” seems to settle into the Spears listing against the window to her Mercedes, a warped metaphor if ever one existed: the automobile, so often advertised as the American symbol of freedom, becomes a gilded, wheeled prison where its occupant can still be hunted down like a dog.
The hair shaving and umbrella episodes sit alongside Spears’s hyper-performed tristesse as contrastingly unfiltered, raw, and ugly: they shocked witnesses in ways that her gentle, carefully produced videos purposefully did not. And for that reason, maybe we admitted to ourselves a few twinges of guilty relief: watching a famous woman throw caution aside and, instead, hand herself over to too muchness, even in a way that bespeaks punishing turmoil, can act as a pressure valve by proxy. Imagine not holding oneself together, imagine saying “fuck it” to decorum, and deciding that for a spare few days, it wasn’t worth trying. That, instead, the only thing left to do was fall. It’s not the sort of lesson we ought to take from this story; there is no deliverance in lapping up another’s pain, even when it is resonant. But knotted within our overlapping cultural corsets we can’t help but admit it: for a wisp of a moment, Spears’s rage seems delicious.
Then again, we’ve cleaved to that moment, mulling it over and meme-ing it and firmly fastening it within our cultural repository of beautiful, distraught women. In a famous iteration of the 2007 Britney meme, Spears’s wild-eyed, growling visage glares beneath her shorn head, with block white text marching atop her photograph: “If Britney can make it through 2007, then I can make it through today,” it declares. The image acknowledges Spears’s personal trials, but any discernible sympathy is undercut through a cheap grab at freak-show humor. The photo, now infamous, invites us to gawk at the spectacle of Spears, as if she is a ghoulish hysteric trapped in the dim halls of an asylum.22 On February 17, 2017, media outlets celebrated the ten-year anniversary of the head-shaving event.23 But this feverishly commemorated incident exists as only one glaring point on a timeline in which the ebbs and flows of Spears’s mental health have been weaponized against her, both across tabloids and in more intimate contexts. In 2008, one year after the incident, she refused to relinquish custody of her sons to representatives of her ex-husband, Kevin Federline, a conflict that led to a call to the police. They surmised that she was under the influence of some undetermined substance, and ultimately Spears was delivered, involuntarily, into psychiatric care, circumstances commonly referred to as “5150”: a reference to California’s law code for involuntary commitment.24 Swiftly, she was divested of her autonomy. In addition to losing custody of her children, Spears was legally restrained by a conservatorship—a form of supervision typically reserved for those who are impaired by age, infirmity, or acute mental illness and thus cannot act in their own best interests. Spears’s father, Jamie Spears, and lawyer Andrew Wallet were named her conservators, although Wallet resigned in March 2019. To this day, Spears is constrained by the exacting terms of this guardianship. If she purchases something, it is documented. She is not permitted to drive a car or even to own a smartphone. She looms large as one of the world’s most famous women, an icon of sugar-sweet, hip-flicking pop music, and she is strapped into the most bedazzled and inexorable of harnesses.
In 2018, controversy over Spears’s sovereignty percolated anew when she unceremoniously withdrew from her Las Vegas residency and reentered psychiatric care. Ostensibly she vacated her Vegas spot because her father was ill and then sought care due to the stress engendered by his condition. But among Spears’s most staunch fans, speculations meandered about foul play: many suspected that Jamie Spears had forced his daughter from her residency because she was neither taking her prescribed medication nor heeding the “no driving” regulation. Some said she was being held involuntarily. A hashtag campaign, “Free Britney,” waxed across social media, and celebrities like rapper Eve and Miley Cyrus have taken up its mantle. It’s unclear whether these rumors hold water—regardless, recent events have rekindled a long smoldering anger harbored among Spears’s most devoted admirers, a vast indignation held in solidarity over the way her father, and others, have whittled away at her personal liberties. “As far as we know,” writes Josephine Livingstone, “she has no illness debilitating enough to warrant a conservatorship under the ordinary application of the law. She was once branded crazy, so crazy she remains: totally without autonomy, cut off from the world, at the mercy of people who control her access to her children. It’s no wonder that the plight of Britney Spears continues to haunt us.”25
Sometimes we covet celebrity gossip because it creates the illusion of access—for a moment, a kind of life utterly foreign to our own seems knowable. Spears’s tribulations invoke another breed of fixation, not mutually exclusive from the other, but shot through with dread: the blot of “crazy,” nearly as vague as the accusation of “too much,” sticks to a woman’s skin, leech-like and glaring and vigorous. We need only look to America’s prisons—a carceral system of damnation—to understand that we have never been interested in rehabilitating the most vulnerable among us, of supposing something other than the worst when our inclinations wander into prejudice. Spears, of course, is not marginalized like a black woman locked away without due process: she occupies a singular space in which she is technically in possession of colossal wealth and fame, while also being deprived of access—to her sons, to purchasing power without oversight, to mobility—by those close to her. And as her father endeavors to amplify his influence by extending his conservatorship to three additional states, including Louisiana, her homestead, Spears is treated evermore as a modern-day madwoman, an incurable hysteric.26 If Bertha Mason and Lady Audley were condemned according to archaic, anxious theories on mental health—a mother’s madness all but guarantees her daughter’s twin fate—then Britney Spears is subjected to an updated fiction in which she will always be imprinted by th
e cruelest aspersions, speculations witched into fact because when it comes to women living with mental illness, we are generally disinclined to be gracious. And assumptions, born from slips and scraps of information, become a feast ample enough to sustain her narrative, which, of course, has been snatched from her hands. A woman whose too muchness trickles into the realm of mental health is never granted the pen to her own story.
Spears’s reactions to public ruminations about her life, whether on the “anniversary” of the head shaving or to the paroxysm of conjecture surrounding her personal affairs, are typically subdued. She chose to indirectly commemorate the ten-year head-shaving event with an Instagram post quoting Pslam 126:5, “Those who plant in tears will harvest with shouts of joy,” indicating to her fans that she was not scrubbing the incident from her public narrative and was instead incorporating it into a story of religiously grounded recuperation. Perhaps some of the media attention she received for this vague acknowledgment was offered in good faith. But perhaps Spears—together with the aid of her handlers—recognized that she must seize the reins of this story before someone in the blogosphere did the math and broke it anew, particularly for younger fans who, in 2007, might have been too young to recall the media feeding frenzy: remember when our sweet pop princess lost both mind and mane as we swarmed her like flies in hot honey? And while it would be encouraging to believe that the story was one foregrounding emotional rehabilitation, we can only shit ourselves so much.
The “Free Britney” campaign prompted a more direct address from the starlet because, as Spears wrote in an April 23, 2019, Instagram post, “There’s rumors, death threats to my family and my team, and just so many…crazy things being said.” She explains that her former manager, Sam Lutfi—who must now adhere to a temporary restraining order taken out against him by Spears’s legal team—misrepresented her circumstances years ago by writing fake emails purportedly from Spears, and that these recirculated missives, suggesting that the conservatorship is destructive, are false.27 “I am trying to take a moment for myself, but everything that’s happening is just making it harder for me,” Spears writes. “Don’t believe everything you read and hear. These fake emails everywhere were crafted by Sam Lutfi years ago…I did not write them…My situation is unique, but I promise I’m doing what’s best at this moment.” These comments are accompanied by a video that, while shorter, amounts to the same thing: a brief assurance that nothing is amiss. “Don’t worry, I’ll be back very soon,” she emphasizes. Her voice, still candy-dipped and husky, like a sweet bourbon, is measured, matter-of-fact. She appears neither happy nor rested—understandable, after a volley of death threats to her family—but she addresses her audience’s solicitude with calm.28
I don’t count myself among the participants of the Free Britney campaign, but since 2007 I have spent unnecessary time worrying about her. It’s difficult to resist: vulnerability has always been entwined with Spears’s sex appeal. Her trademark look—straight ahead, eyes wide and mouth partly open, as if she thinks she might be in trouble—wafts through her oeuvre of music videos: after a head toss, or as she dances (and who could look away when she danced?). She seduced us while appearing to recognize something precarious in her midst. For my part, I revisit “Everytime,” one of my favorite Britney Spears songs, and the video that most shocked me: it never occurred to me that this beautiful woman who, as a teenager, I had regarded as my absolute opposite, thought about death the way I sometimes did, as a refuge. It hadn’t occurred to me that she might be sad, and I’ve been rattled by this sadness, which strikes me every time I see Spears or listen to her speak—but then, this might be my own variety of fetishization.
Whenever my mind totters over to this place where I think of Britney, and the loneliness that’s killing her, I cannot help but feel silly. Because Spears is wealthy, famous, white, and conventionally beautiful, she recovered from her mid-aughts image crisis and public relations emergency, wherein the burden of emotional distress cracked the veneer imperative to anyone living in the glare of high visibility. She will, I hope, untangle herself from these new imbroglios in a way that privileges, rather than exploits, her mental health. It would be encouraging if, over a decade after the dramatized episodes of the shorn head and the umbrella, flagrant gawking at a celebrity—at anyone—so mired in suffering were not so explicitly tolerated. On the fifteenth anniversary, there might be think pieces admonishing against these lurid reminiscences. But with the crush of this new controversy—Free Britney—and the pathological ogling, the intrusions that seemed to motivate Spears’s April 2019 Instagram message, I confess my pessimism. Too muchness is always treated as pageantry, and so we will watch.
In recent years, a variety of public figures including Jennifer Lawrence, Missy Elliott, Emma Stone, and even Oprah Winfrey have offered testimonials to their own struggles with anxiety. But of course testimonial offers a more innocuous kind of visibility than what Spears has endured, one less likely to garner stigma. There is no risk in referencing a private struggle so long as one’s public image remains pristine. There is no threat of the lampooning directed at Fiona Apple in 2000 when, during a set at the Roseland Ballroom in New York, she had her infamous “meltdown,” running offstage after only forty minutes29 or the performative concern oozing from headlines after a concertgoer body-shamed her during a 2013 show, bringing her to tears.30 And there is no hazard of the vicious scrutiny faced by the R&B singer Kehlani after she posted on social media about her suicide attempt, prompting—for whatever reason—singer Chris Brown, a suspect in various assault cases, to accuse her of fabricating the story, which then encouraged scores of others to do the same.31 But although I feel gratitude when highly visible women lay bare their ordeals with mental illness, and empathy for those, like Britney Spears, who did not precisely choose to do so, I could never begrudge anyone for preferring silence. Too muchness has made it difficult, often insuperable, to conceal my serrated edges: my face speaks before I do. We do not, however, owe the world testimonies of our pain; we owe one another the willingness to bear witness.
Yet these are herculean lessons when our milieu repurposes women’s mental illness as a gateway to men’s emotional clarity. In twenty-first-century pop culture, mentally ill female characters shore up a fantasy of mental illness as a charming, whimsical trait possessed by rosy-faced white girls whose suffering has bestowed upon them a bone-deep wisdom. In Garden State (2004), Zach Braff brings us what Nathan Rabin coined as the Manic Pixie Dream Girl, but the film pays little attention to accurate depictions of mania. Natalie Portman’s Sam lobs quips left and right, her mental illness indexed by compulsive lying, which is hardly interrogated, her presence in a psychiatrist’s waiting room, and some adorable non sequiturs (“I can tap dance; wanna see me tap dance?”). Meanwhile, Tiffany (Jennifer Lawrence) from Silver Linings Playbook (2012) embodies excess that the film mitigates with her sexual desirability—Jennifer Lawrence, after all—and conveys emotional insight that, similarly to Garden State, shepherds male protagonist Pat (Bradley Cooper) back to a healthy life trajectory (and, of course, into her arms). In each case, the film’s interest resides in the hero’s journey, and in the case of Silver Linings Playbook, Cooper’s performance as a man reeling from the one-two punch of divorce and a nervous breakdown is both sensitive and visceral. But Tiffany, a young widow who, like Pat, rails against the hell of her own mind, serves as a lesson in self-acceptance and resilience. She cannot be too “crazy” if she is to perform her role as a romantic and emotional restorative.
As a matter of fact, even Tiffany’s too muchness is harnessed for the purposes of education. “You know what, forget I offered to help you,” she snaps at Pat in a diner after weathering his condescension. “Forget the entire fucking idea, because that must have been fucking crazy, because I’m so much crazier than you…I’m just the crazy slut with a dead husband!” In some ways, the scene is pure delight: Pat, after looking askance at Tiffany’s sexual history, is deservedly mortified by her w
ild, ferocious laughter and cyclonic departure from the diner—all of which looks cathartic, in its way. But the scene is meant as a lesson, an early entry in Pat’s rehabilitative curriculum. Before long, Pat and Tiffany become friends as they practice for a dance competition—despite the former’s monomania regarding his ex-wife—and he gradually enjoys what amounts to free, take-no-shit therapy masked by amateurish choreography. Tiffany’s pain, as has long been the case, is treated incidentally, and is easily soothed by a promise of love. She is one more female character among scores of others who fall on swords for men, beating back, or even exacerbating, their own deprivations. We meet—extensively—with Rochester’s rough, self-indulgent, but nonetheless genteel agony before Brontë reveals to us the full narrative of Bertha’s imprisonment, that her mind creates its own hellish cage, trauma-born and unrelenting. Lady Audley’s Secret treats the titular character’s mental illness as, first and foremost, a hazard to the men in her midst. We hail from a tradition in which women’s mental health is compulsively packaged as a male inconvenience, or worse. Physicians in the Victorian era were chronically reluctant to consider female suffering on its own terms. And still today, we do not take it seriously.
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