Many of the people doing the talking recognized it.
It was entirely possible to recognize that the way powerful conversation-driving people talked about Spears circa 2007 was messed up. Or maybe we are just unoriginal assholes.”
we have minutes, not hours or days, in which to prepare and present our thoughts about her. Maybe we do this because we think it is funny, or because it is expected, or because. Day after day, week after week, we taunt her, question her, suggest she could benefit from a lobotomy and gleefully compare paparazzo shots of her to the troubled protagonists of two classic Stanley Kubrick movies. “We’ve been complicit in the frenzy that has enveloped Britney Spears. “We’re not innocent here,” wrote Anna Holmes, founder of the pop feminist blog Jezebel, of Spears in 2007. And it is sheer revisionist history to suggest that no one knew that the way the mainstream media talked about Spears was wrong at the time. They were working within a system of incentives and consumption that they did not build.īut it also remains the case that it was well within the capabilities of people like Reinstein and Ramos to stop working with that system, even if they did not build it. When Reinstein and Eichner and Ramos argue that they weren’t personally victimizing Spears but merely giving the people what they wanted, there’s a certain amount of truth to what they’re saying. And the reason they commanded such a hefty price tag was that there was a demand for them - because all of us, the people living in the society, the people who read Us Weekly and Perez Hilton (I didn’t, maybe you didn’t either, but I mean the general “us” here) wanted them. Photographs of Spears at the height of her fame could sell for up to $1 million each. “It sucks you in,” he says, “and it’s hard to get out of it once you start making the kind of money that these guys were making.” Daniel Ramos, the paparazzo whose car Spears famously beat with an umbrella, notes that he was drawn to his work by the wealth made available to him by photographing Spears. Some of the figures who are interviewed in Framing Britney Spears make similar arguments onscreen. Everyone is complicit to varying degrees.” “Trust me, we wouldn’t have kept reporting out the saga if public interest weren’t rampant. “I admit I wrote many of those Us Weekly cover stories back in the day,” replied current Us Weekly film critic Mara Reinstein. “Lots of virtuous folks on here pretending they didn’t read Perez Hilton or Us Weekly’s abusive coverage of Britney religiously in 2005,” tweeted the comedian Billy Eichner after the documentary debuted on Hulu on February 5. Most of us are comfortable now saying that this treatment was unjust, that it hurt a human being when she was at her most vulnerable, and that it contributed to the circumstances that left Spears locked in the conservatorship that controls both Spears’s finances and her personal life.īut now a new question develops: Just how much responsibility do we all bear for the way Spears was treated? Major news outlets called Spears fat, slut-shamed her, reprinted paparazzi upskirt shots, and mocked her for her increasingly erratic public behavior. It is slowly becoming conventional wisdom that the way mainstream media talked about Britney Spears in 2007, as she went through a public breakdown, was inappropriate and wrong.
In the wake of the New York Times documentary Framing Britney Spears, a new conversation is building around the pop star and her legacy.
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