If you think the documentary about the singer being released next week is going to be rainbows and unicorns for her freedom, it isn’t.

I was hoping for more, and this wasn’t it.

Framing Britney Spears

Britney Spears

‘Framing Britney Spears’ Is a Clear-Eyed Look at a Public Life Gone Silent: TV Review

Britney Spears was a symbol for her entire public life. And, even in her seclusion, we can’t stop seeing her as something more, and less, than simply a person.

The new Samantha Stark-directed documentary “Framing Britney Spears,” produced by the New York Times and Left/Right and airing on Feb. 5 on FX and Hulu, looks at both sides of the pop superstar’s troubled experience of fame. From childhood, Spears put her talents towards what the recording industry made available to her: a sort of flat, inoffensive notoriety, a life as an image onto which spectators could imagine anything, virtuous or otherwise. After a break — Spears’ well-documented struggles with mental health in the late 2000s, placing on hiatus her career as well as testing her personal relationships — the performer returned in a show of force, making music as well as money under the oversight of her father, who held a new judge-mandated power over her decisions, a legal conservatorship that endures to this day. (“Yes She Can!” read the Obama-era Rolling Stone cover announcing her re-emergence; what it was she could do was left vague.) In recent years, Spears’ backing away from work has raised, to her most devoted admirers, the notion that this artist’s stage may simply have shifted — that, through social media, she is subverting the control of powerful men and transmitting messages only the faithful can understand.

Both of these existences are iconic, with all that the word implies: not merely a sort of indelible impact but a stripping-away of humanity in the eye of the beholder. And either life, as teen-pop blank slate or isolated object of devotion, would be a lot for any person to have endured. Both in one lifetime makes Spears both a fascinating living document of how our culture treats those we purport to love, and a deeply sad case. – Source

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