The Hard Lessons of Amanda Bynes’s Comeback
In 2008, writing for The Atlantic about the slow-motion car crash and paparazzi dissection of Britney Spears’s apparent mental breakdown, David Samuels assessed the significance of the moment when the pop star shaved her head in full view of photographers in a Los Angeles hair salon in 2007. After that point, Samuels wrote:
Britney Spears departed the planet of normal bubblegum celebrity story lines and entered the heavenly realm of pop myth. America’s sweetheart had dramatically and publicly un-edited herself, removing the customary trappings and protections of celebrity to reveal the damaged psyche of a fractured person who was no longer able or willing to regulate her public behavior.
Spears, in other words, was literally broken down in the public eye, enabled in her self-exposure by a fleet of photographers who’d turned stalking into a highly lucrative, highly predatory industry. Embedded in their morbid routine of waiting for her, sometimes for 12 hours at a time, was the seeming inevitability of the biggest payday of all—the chance, as Samuels wrote, that “one day Britney will roll her car into a ditch or be taken away again strapped to a
