Britney Spears: The Danger of Fame and the Power of Vulnerability

     Most of my days are suffused with a broad kind of sadness, a sadness that is made up of worldwide panic, and mixed with a personal anxiety that my, at times, recognizable and yet endlessly incomprehensible routine could stretch into the foreseeable future. It is a large amorphous sadness that lies in wait, ready to be triggered by the most unexpected, seemingly mundane events or memories. For me, the last few days have been punctuated by a particular sadness borne of nostalgia and the remembrance of cultural misdeeds. What I was feeling was melancholy at the rediscovery of Britney Spears. As with many days during the pandemic, I found myself researching random events or phenomena and this time I was drawn to the controversy surrounding Britney Spears and her conservatorship, an ongoing saga since 2007. As I found myself looking through Spears’s Instagram, I felt a deep well of sadness for what we, as a society, had put her through. As I viewed the heroic, unflagging optimism with which she still chooses to meet us, I realized that I was looking at, not merely a pop icon, but a woman whose truthfulness and idealism is an inspiration. In a post dated September 16th, 2020, Spears captions an image “Ask yourself today … am I truly happy ??? What makes you happy … coffee [coffee emoji] early in the morning ??? Dancing for hours ??? Making lots of plans for the day then canceling [woman shrugging emoji] ??? Whatever it is …. I am trying to find more ways to give myself more self-love ….. and feeling confident in my divine feminine body !!! I experience so much joy and passion ….. and always try to find ways I can demonstrate that to you all !!! I hope you are also finding ways to find joy and happiness… GOD BLESS YOU ALL !!!!”

     There is a sensitivity and a relatability to these posts, as if a dreamy-eyed friend is reaching out to you. Her Instagram account is filled with images of flowers, tea cups, kittens, and fairies. It is a place infused with hopeful wonder; a kind of prayer for the world to be a little kinder, an incantation for idealism, as if dreaming a little beauty into the world can be the thing that sets you free. Contrasted with her early career and the way the world treated her, it is a poignant reminder of the frailty that each one of us holds within ourselves, a reminder that behind the impenetrable facade of the pop star, there is a deeply sensitive human being (a thing that we often forget). It is a thing that, in mid-2007, was far from anyone’s mind as we all gleefully consumed the emotional and mental breakdown of Britney Spears. I’d like to say that this occurred during the early years of modern celebrity and that the boundaries were not yet drawn between the public and the private; that we were merely craving an inside look at the lives of the people who shaped our culture and our world. In short, I’d like to be able to say that we just didn’t know any better. But we did know better, or, at least, we should have known better. We had already had to contend with the public ridicule and humiliation that had swallowed the lives and careers of women such as Tonya Harding, Monica Lewinsky, Courtney Love, and Anna Nicole Smith. We had been through it before. We had watched on as women who failed to live up to all of the myriad and often contradictory expectations that are put upon women were mocked and became mere punchlines as they navigated drastic and often dangerous circumstances. We watched on, delighting in their pain and refusing to accept their stories of abuse and trauma, refusing to see any vulnerability, as if accepting their precarious position would force us to come to terms with our own, a thing that we could not allow ourselves. We had been through this all before. Britney was no new phenomena, yet we let it happen again. We voraciously consumed her pain and laughed at her for signaling a humanity, a crack in the image that had previously seemed impenetrable. But we’ve always had a morbid fascination with the destruction of the perfect image, relishing the details of the downfall, perhaps because it makes us feel superior. Think of Marilyn Monroe, in many ways a parallel to Britney in terms of fame and public persona. We relish the image of Monroe because she is forever beautiful and young. In other words, we relish her because of her tragedy, because she did not survive. 

     According to a Vox article that lays out the details of Britney’s conservatorship, in 2007, when she shaved her head, she was heard “telling a nearby tattoo artist that she was sick of people touching her hair…” For anyone who was alive during this period of Britney’s all too public life, the image of Britney shaving her head is an infamous one, etched into our consciousness with the guilt borne of moments too intimate for our knowledge. For it is with simple statements such as this that we realize the true toll of our obsession with her. We realize the depths of our entitlement, as if our love for her music decreed that her pain was our property as well. So, of course she attempted to force a distance between her and the ravenous consumption of her image. It was an act of desperation for peace, for a moment of silence against the roar of our derision, it was Britney attempting to place a barrier between herself and her image and, for a moment, it must have felt like a revolution. It was a drastic attempt to carve out space for herself in a world that wouldn’t allow her to be a complex woman, that only allowed for the exploitation of her image. Imagine for a moment the horror of Britney’s daily reality, the excessive scrutiny and the endless parade of people pawing at you. Escaping by almost any means necessary becomes an instantly understandable, even recognizable, desire. 

      Britney Spears has always been resolutely all-American; a promise through which we, her audience, could hone all of our aspirations about love, womanhood, and success. She was the image of perfection for so long, that the fracture seemed somehow both inevitable and cataclysmic. But even though this, she is also the image of the survivor. The image of resolute optimism. And even after we betrayed her with our ridicule, she offers us a glimpse of her dreams, of life as she prefers to imagine it. For that we should feel extremely lucky because it is a sweet dream of a simultaneously simple and magnificent life, graceful, innocent, and excessive in its girlishness. Sometimes it is necessary to retreat into these created worlds for our own safety, a fact that Spears’s Instagram feed appears to acknowledge. Britney’s tale is one of resilience, but it is also a cautionary tale about fame and the ways in which we, as consumers, relate to fame. All too often, we end up feeling entitled to the pain and suffering of our idols. It has been thirteen years since Spears had to retreat from public life for a brief time and I want to believe that we have changed as a society, but the truth is, if it were to happen tomorrow, to another pop star, I fear that we would not act any differently. We can see Britney and her story as a plea that we strive to be better, because we need to be better. We were given the perfect pop star, and instead of protecting her, we tried to destroy her. 

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Grady, Constance. “Why Britney’s Fans are Convinced She’s Being Held Captive.” Vox. Last modified August 19, 2020. https://www.vox.com/culture/21328341/britney-spears-conservatorship-explained-free-britney. 

Spears, Britney (britneyspears). “Just a Touch of Rose [red rose emoji]/ Ask yourself today … am I truly happy ??? What makes you happy … coffee [coffee emoji] early in the morning ??? Dancing…” Instagram, September 16, 2020. https://www.instagram.com/p/CFNPd6nAWlr/?igshid=fh8ispkuibdl.

The Empty Promise of Nostalgia in the World of “Twin Peaks”

“When this kind of fire starts, it is very hard to put out. The tender boughs of innocence burn first and the wind rises and then all goodness is in jeopardy.”

-The Log Lady to Laura Palmer, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, 1992. 

     A profound nostalgia for an imagined past and an invisible but omnipresent force control and shape the small town of Twin Peaks. It is a place where contemporary life fuses seamlessly with an idealized mid-century sensibility. The notion of mid-century normalcy has been exposed as a fraud, but the myth is persistent, as is this town’s insistence on preserving its particular brand of pristine Norman Rockwell-style Americana. But what the town refuses to admit is that when you give yourself over to nostalgia, a darkness borne of unresolved conflict and trauma often thrives. In an early episode of Twin Peaks, whose original two seasons aired from 1990-1991, Sheriff Harry S. Truman explains to FBI agent Dale Cooper, an outsider, that there is some unknown but powerful force that lurks in the woods surrounding Twin Peaks and that it is the necessary price for the town’s very specific eccentricities, it’s idealism and quaintness. Inherent in this is the notion that for something to be perfect, there has to be a darker truth that is obscured, that we sacrifice a very real knowledge of ourselves and of the larger world in order to keep the simplicity of a different time. But it is this dichotomy on which the show’s aesthetics are built; the beauty and simplicity of nostalgia, of the American mid-century suburban dream in contrast with the darkness that comes of such an intense and self-imposed blindness in a drive towards normalcy. The show is aware of this dichotomy and exploits it, marking the suburban home as a place of horror, not comfort. Throughout the original run of the series, we are shown the disintegration of this very specific, very stylized American dream, but it is in other Twin Peaks-related media that David Lynch, without trepidation or restraint, explores the true human expense of such saccharine dreams. 

     The nostalgic aesthetic of Twin Peaks is nowhere more evident than with the styling and characterization of the women. In their saddle shoes, calf-length tartan skirts, and houndstooth suits, they seem to reference a mid-century simplicity and austerity along with a notion of 1950s young womanhood that prides itself on innocence and virtue, a young womanhood both exemplified by and condemned in the figure of Laura Palmer. It is a town steeped in a past dominated by the image of the white picket fence, but as we now know, the white picket fence did little to protect those who erected it from deep-seated discontent and rampant emotional and physical violence. Similarly, the inhabitants of Twin Peaks, who yearn for the days of the white picket fence, find themselves contending with the failures of such an ideal, finding themselves with only a useless fence with which to trap themselves alongside these very real dangers. It is a nostalgia that hides the realities of adultery, rampant drug use, domestic abuse, and sexual violence. 

     The price of this false ideal is interrogated further in two pieces of media created in relation to Twin Peaks. The feature-length film Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me (1992) and the novelization The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer (1990) explore in stark terms the human expense of the world that Lynch and Mark Frost created without the benefit of quirky, endearing characters. These works explore a more nuanced world in which pervasive Lynchian dream logic crashes menacingly into the all too real trauma of a world so hell bent on revering the empty symbols of Americana that it leads to the suffering of those who spend their lives in service to such illusions. The film and book are an exploration of what Americana really means; what it stands for and what it obscures. Without the trappings of nostalgia, we are left with the discomfiting presence of the overwhelmingly impoverished, the unwanted, the decrepit, and their suffering. We are forced to face the senseless violence that is America and we are forced to accept that Twin Peaks is, without a doubt, a part of this America. In Fire Walk With Me, a kind of prequel to the series, we are shown Twin Peaks as a claustrophobic world from which Laura Palmer cannot escape. It is a complex and frightening world, where she is forced to face an ever-present violence. She, in turn, becomes as frightening and erratic as she possibly can be in an attempt to challenge danger, to challenge death. She channels her grief into her own self-destruction, craving it as much as she fears it. Her grief and her anger is so immense it pours out of her, threatening to destroy her and those around her. These are very human explorations of trauma and their every manifestation, and Lynch offers us no reprieve, no moment of levity in which to turn away from this young woman’s suffocating pain. We are drawn into this claustrophobic world with Laura, her pain surrounds us. The film gives us Laura Palmer not as symbol, but as human being; her image is no longer a blank slate onto which all of the other characters project their own needs and desires. We are shown a girl with a complex and troubling inner life. We see her suffering plainly in the routine that is her daily existence. She is never able to escape herself. Forever banished is the notion of Laura as the symbol of the sweet, beautiful blonde, the girl next door, the homecoming queen. She is no longer the uncomplicated face staring out of a picture frame, a frame which, within the series, serves to highlight the confines of her life and her story. This indelible image, with its literal framing, bars anyone from truly seeing her trauma. They are instead dazzled by the seemingly sincere smile that emanates from the photograph, by the facade. These are the confines under which she herself struggles as she strives to find a sense of safety in herself, in her life, and in those around her, a sense of safety that she is ultimately never able to find.Twin Peaks allows us a glimpse into the dream of America, a dream that offers so much and continuously fails to deliver, a dream which, contrary to its image, serves to hide deep wells of horror. With the companion piece, Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, we see the suburban dream opening up into a vision of hell, a destructive force rendered in powerful imagery. In this film, Lynch appears to be saying, in as strident a way as he possibly can, that your particular brand of nostalgia will not protect you, it will not save you, and may very well kill you.

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