Movie Review : Framing Britney Spears (2021)

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Whether you like her music or not, Britney Spears is one of the most influential cultural figures of the twenty-first century. Need proof? The more inactive she gets, the more people are talking about her and trying to deconstruct the meaning behind everything she does. She did almost nothing for two years and conspiracy theories about her sending coded messages through her Instagram are swirling like a whirlpool on social media. Who else ever inspired that?

In the New York Times produced documentary Framing Britney Spears, you’re going to learn very little about who she is and what she wants. But you’re going to learn a lot about the way media work in the twenty-first century.

Framing Britney Spears is more or less what I thought it would be when I first heard of it: a historiographic retelling of our obsessions with the first female pop star manufactured in the internet era. There is very little biographic quality to it. Lead by New York Timed senior editor Liz Day, it retraces every cultural conversations around Britney Spears that climaxed in the #FreeBritney movement and all the weird conspiracy theories surrounding her.

Britney Spears is not a person

The first thing you’ll realize about Framing Britney Spears is that it doesn’t feature people who have been directly relevant to her life since her father’s conservatorship took hold in 2008. But it doesn’t really matter. This documentary is not really a work of journalism. It is a piece of cultural criticism framed by the evolution of our conversation surrounding one of our biggest icons. In other words: Britney Spears is barely even a person. At least, to us mortals.

I do think Framing Britney Spears makes that point on purpose, because it starts with her very beginning where she was a child prodigy, moves to her glory years as a hypersexual young adult, her troubled time alongside Kevin Federline and so on. Our perception of Britney Spears evolved with her life, which really evolved along the perceptions of celebrity and womanhood in our culture. Spears stood in for a lot of stuff, but never for herself.

She first was the daughter who embraced her sexuality without ever wanting to discuss it. She became the irresponsible mother, then collateral damage of celebrity culture and slowly rehabilitated her image under her father’s conservatorship. These perceptions speak so much more about us than they do about her. Through our collective judgements of Britney Spears, we’ve slowly learned to let go of our desire to control what a woman should be.

Or not. Right now, Britney Spears is representing another symbol that is greater than herself. For the last thirteen years (or at least since she opened her Instagram account), she transformed into the damsel in distress. People are still not tired to project ideas onto everything she does. I mean, it’s better than to be repudiated like she was in the difficult years, but Britney Spears is still today whoever the people who are interested in her want her to be.

Framing Britney Spears does a splendid job at explaining how important the symbolic dimension of Britney Spears is. It’s the documentary’s raison d’être.

The closest you get to a Britney Spears statement in the documentary is this scene. Brace yourself. It made me laugh out so loud, I woke up my dog. It’s fucking awesome.

What if not being a person was the point?

I believe Framing Britney Spears makes an even stronger point than the one it is trying to make. Perhaps inadvertently, perhaps not. If you’re not asking yourself the question: why hasn’t Britney ever taken ownership of her public image? Why isn’t she ever speaking out about what she’s going through? That is where I believe her genius lies: it works for her. Better yet: not deconstructing yourself might be the best way to prosper in the social media era.

All of these narratives we’ve projected on Britney Spears are the reasons why she’s become a transcendent cultural icon. She doesn’t need to be a person. At least not publicly, because she’s an idea that lives in our consciousness and ideas are a lot more difficult to kill than people. They are forever open to interpretation and debate. All that Spears needs to do to perpetuate this status is to keep making pop songs or just not do anything at all.

It’s not a conservatorship either. She was already consciously refusing to deconstruct herself in this 2003 portrait by Chuck Klosterman.

I mean, she’s got the fucking New York Times doing a documentary on her and she’s been borderline invisible for two years now. They even got one of my favorite critics ever Wesley Morris to dissect her cultural importance. I mean, how cool is that? Britney Spears achieved this status using our brains to manufacture stories about her. Not hers. Not a swanky content marketer’s. She won pop culture in the twenty-first century.

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I could talk about Britney Spears for hours. I’m not really a fan of her music, but I’ve lived through every era of her cultural via dolorosa and the power she exerts over institutions fascinates me. I wasn’t sure whether or not I liked Framing Britney Spears after finishing it, but we both know by now that I obviously did. It’s not a documentary about her. It’s a documentary about us and how we’re evolving through our relationship to cultural figures.

Recommended for nerds like me.

7.9/10