After the FX documentary Framing Britney Spears first aired last Friday, it wasn’t just the familiar hashtag #FreeBritney—favored by the fans who want to free her from her binding legal conservatorship—that started trending. There was also the phrase “We Are Sorry Britney” signaling a lingering sense of guilt and complicity.
The ’90s chewed up Britney, Diana, Monica, Tonya, Marcia, and more first-name only female celebrities who were terrorized by a misogynistic, hungry gossip industry. But Framing Britney Spears suggests there is also a reckoning due for the rest of us, anyone who passively watched these media circuses play out and is only now realizing what we could have known and done better.
“We wanted to look back at the media coverage of her,” Framing Britney Spears director Samantha Stark told Vanity Fair, “realizing how differently we think of women, sexuality, and mental health. We started watching all this stuff from the early 2000s and it was very shocking now post–Me Too and post this mental health revolution.” Though the documentary is bookended by the #FreeBritney movement, Stark’s reassessment of Spears’s career involves taking a closer look at the media, friends, and family who let her down time and again. Everyone, from Justin Timberlake to Diane Sawyer, bears some blame for the media frenzy that surrounded her public 2007 breakdown, and the conservatorship that was established in the aftermath.
But while #MeToo, which picked up widespread reach in 2017, may have made it easier for Stark and New York Times journalist Liz Day to get their film made, we have been making our mea culpas to these women for much longer. It’s tricky to precisely source a phenomenon that has its kernels as far back as Princess Diana’s paparazzi-hounded death, but 2016 marked a turning point, the year that Sarah Paulson and Ryan Murphy won Emmys for confronting the unjust pillorying of Marcia Clark with 2016’s The People v. O.J. Simpson. That same fall, things got even more complicated when, however disingenuously, the Donald Trump campaign tried to seat Bill Clinton accusers Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, Paula Jones, and Kathy Shelton in his VIP box at the presidential debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton.
The following year brought the Oscar-winning I, Tonya, which along with two other documentaries had reframed the story of Tonya Harding. In 2014 journalist Sarah Marshall wrote a blockbuster article for The Believer magazine about Harding and Nancy Kerrigan titled “Remote Control: Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and the Spectacles of Female Power and Pain.” Five years later Marshall and cohost Michael Hobbes revisited the story on their popular podcast You’re Wrong About, in which the duo switch off debunking big media stories and celebrity narratives we have mistakenly come to accept as truths. They’ve lately dedicated more episodes to women including Marcia Clark, Courtney Love, and Jessica Simpson, and their most popular episodes, Marshall says, are the five they recently devoted to Princess Diana that just happened to coincide with the latest Diana–centric season of The Crown. They call these subjects “the maligned women of the ’90s.” Marshall tells Vanity Fair: “That’s kind of our bread and butter.” But their most-requested topic by far? Britney Spears.
“I remember feeling a lot of resentment towards Britney Spears because, you know, I was conscious of the fact that she was being sold to me by a group of men in a room somewhere,” Marshall told Vanity Fair. Marshall was about 10 years old when “…Baby One More Time” came out—in other words, almost precisely the age Framing Britney Spears described as the song’s targeted demographic.
Though Stark and her documentary reject the narrative that Spears was merely a prepackaged product, she describes a similarly tense relationship with the Spears phenomenon: “My memory of Britney, which is so shockingly wrong, was that she was this ideal teenager that we couldn’t ever achieve. Where did that narrative come from? She was actually quite rebellious to that her entire career. Why was I set up to have these kinds of negative, jealousy feelings toward her when she was not trying to put that out at all?”
In her work on You’re Wrong About, Marshall often talks about these public figures, usually women, being the only visible target we can lash out at when, really, it’s the larger capitalistic structures of power that deserve our scorn. Marshall has found that extending empathy toward people we might have misjudged in the past means extending empathy to our younger selves. “It’s not your fault. You were lied to overtly over and over again. And calmly, I might add. There were no countervailing voices, no forum for discussion that brings you perspective the way that you get it now. We were given insufficient tools and we were asked to pillory someone and we either consented to do it, or just, you know, assumed that this was just a frivolous tabloid story.”
For all the obsession with political correctness that dominated the ’90s, it was, in retrospect, a mean-spirited era, from the tabloid media to its most enduring cultural artifacts. “Friends is a very mean show, and I say that as someone who grew up watching it and loves it,” Marshall said. “There’s so many punchlines, at least in the early seasons, [that are just]: someone’s gay, someone’s fat, Joey’s dumb. What is the purpose of this? I wonder if living in this weird time of prosperity created almost a sense of superstition in people.”
The ’90s were home to a new age of celebrity where, absent the studio-controlled spigot of gossip columnists of yore like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, wild packs of paparazzi roamed the streets to capture the unflattering and invasive candid images that populated supermarket check-out stands. Britney Spears got her start in this decade, but she and her generational peers—Lindsay, Paris, Jessica—were truly forged during the brief and out-of-control explosion of the online gossip blogs at the turn of the next century.
Jessica Morgan and Heather Cocks founded the snarky, witty fashion blog Go Fug Yourself in 2004, and by 2005 Time had named it one of the “50 Coolest Websites.” It was part of a boom that included the emergence of far more merciless figures like Perez Hilton. Devoted followers of Morgan and Cocks, known as Fug Nation, always prized wit over mean-spiritedness. Even so, Cocks said, there is a lot they did in those early days that they wish they could take back.
“It sounds like making excuses, but the internet was the Wild West in 2004,” Cocks told Vanity Fair. “If you were getting good feedback from people around you, you think, Well, this is what I got to keep doing. You’re in your 20s and you’re not putting any more thought into it. That’s the kind of growing up that we had to do over the years. [But] I wish we could [have done] things differently.”
The internet was media with no word limit, and, in many cases, no editorial oversight. “You can run as many photos as you want,” Cocks said. “You can run a Britney Spears update every day if you want. People were figuring out the spaces on the internet and how to fill them…and that, in turn, was feeding the paparazzi photographers.”
As Stark explores in Framing Britney Spears, the relationship between the paparazzi and their celebrity targets has never been simple or straightforward. At its best, the paparazzi, the celebrity, and their publicists share a working relationship where someone like Spears can arrange to be snapped as a way of elevating her profile. The Kardashian family has, famously, elevated this symbiotic relationship to an art. In those earliest days, Morgan said, “celebrities as a whole were kind of getting used to, Oh, it’s not just about getting your picture in People magazine anymore. There’s a whole market for this and they want more and they want more and they want more. Suddenly, you know, you’re not just exposed, you’ve gone to way overexposed.”
The “they” wanting more and more, in this instance, being us—the readers and watchers who made this arrangement seemingly worth it for both parties. But for anyone who has seen Framing Britney Spears will know, there’s a difference between clicking through static images of Spears and seeing and hearing the context. Stark obtained much of the paparazzi video used in the documentary from Daniel Ramos, a paparazzo who is also interviewed for the film. In it you can hear a fearful Spears and her distant cousin begging to be left alone immediately before Ramos captures the infamous photo of Spears wielding an umbrella as a weapon.
“His video helps you see what was outside the frame,” Stark says. “There’s an idea of consent, right? What is Britney consenting to? There are these times where she is not consenting to them capturing her image and making money off of it.”
Cocks and Morgan describe 2007, the year Spears shaved her head, as the climax of the gossip-blog frenzy. “I think that that heyday of celebrity gossip with Britney and the umbrella and Lindsay and the coke pants came while all these bloggers were in the act of learning on the fly about what their responsibilities were,” Cocks says. Those blurred lines of consent, often violated by the paparazzi and, in turn, by those of us who feasted on those images, were made all the more confusing by the simultaneous rise of reality TV where Paris, Nicole, Britney, Lindsay, and the Kardashians were feeding the public a highly controlled version of their lives and inviting their fans to come inside of it. But when Spears grabbed those clippers and publicly distanced herself from the blond bubblegum babe she had been since the age of 15, something shifted for many, including Cocks and Morgan.
“Heather and I realized that like, whatever was going on with Britney was much more serious than whatever she was wearing, and that it would not be funny or cool for us to continue to be posting stuff about Britney,” Morgan says. This would be a turning point for the tone of their blog, which remains as popular and beloved as ever. “We carried that going forward. You never know what’s going on with someone behind the scenes. For Britney, and then for a few other people after Britney, we just decided that she obviously has problems that are far more severe than whatever is happening with her styling. So we’re going to just dial out of that.”
One year after Spears’s umbrella moment, Twitter’s popularity had exploded, and celebrity-gossip blogging began to wane with the rise of social media. Direct exposure to a favorite singer, actor, etc. through their Twitter profile or Instagram account cut out the middle men of bloggers and paparazzi. (Though they obviously haven’t gone away entirely. Just ask Ben Affleck.)
In theory, social media offers celebrities the chance to regain control—and, as Framing Britney Spears shows, it’s what Spears has done, sharing videos of herself goofing off with her kids or painting a watercolor on her patio. “She wants to be seen,” Stark said. “Watching these videos where you can see her lens, like she’s holding the phone and you can hear her laughing or singing ‘Happy Birthday’ to her kids. How she portrays herself as a mom, it’s so different from anything you ever see in any media. And so touching to me.”
That measure of control, at least, may come as some relief to Spears. But Cocks and Morgan are unsure social media has solved the problem. Said Morgan, “I actually think celebrities being so accessible on their social media is potentially a very bad thing because if you’re a 17-year-old girl, you don’t need everyone all over the world weighing in on your stuff.”
The intensity of comments on celebrity Instagrams, as Morgan point out, suggests that the possessive, emotional relationship between celebrities and their fans has perhaps only intensified. And the perception of that relationship is, of course, the engine behind the #FreeBritney movement which, as Framing Britney Spears observes, may have played some kind of role in moving the needle of Spears’s ongoing legal battle for control of her own life. The wider-spread guilt and shame that comes from recognizing our passive (or active) involvement in tearing down women has transformed, for some, into an almost radical empathy. (Sometimes that empathy grows so intense that we see maligned women even where there are none. Melania doesn’t care, why should you?)
At the same time, our idea of celebrity has become much less remote. Massive and untouchable stars are far scarcer these days, while virtually anyone stands a chance of touching fame for going “viral” with a well-worded joke, clever photo, or catchy dance on TikTok. And while most of us will likely never know the hell of being trailed by the paparazzi 24/7, we’re also all much closer to the pillory when a thoughtless, offensive joke on Twitter can get you fired. Are we all more eager to apologize for our past celebrity sins and more hesitant on the shame trigger because we know, on some level, that we could be next?
Maybe. And if so, Spears is the perfect lightning rod for those questions of shame and over-identification. She has always, from the very start of her career, been positioned as a down-to-earth girl. Your older sister or the coolest girl in the senior class. That, Stark said, is why she doesn’t see the Spears story as one of celebrity. The cycle of building someone up, tearing them down, and then apologizing to them doesn’t just belong to the rich, white, and famous anymore. “I actually really think it’s a story about how we treat women, all women,” she said.
Stark said she wishes the documentary could have included stories she heard of Spears’s fan base actually growing stronger after 2007: “The people who saw her being so vulnerable—a lot of LGBTQ people and people who had been bullied and outcast as children became these really fierce fans for her. They were judged and criticized so much for who they were and when she was judged and criticized so much for who she was, there was this connection.”
Being kind to Britney and Marcia and Tonya means we can be kind to ourselves. This is the gift of this era of reckoning. “I think,” Sarah Marshall said, “I think we're getting better.”
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