A wave of films about the singer’s troubled conservatorship reveal our thorny, uncomfortable fascination with her pain
It’s understandable to feel overwhelmed by the current wave of Britney Spears content – the last week of September saw the premiere of not one but three documentaries (FX on Hulu’s Controlling Britney Spears, Netflix’s Britney vs Spears, and CNN’s Toxic: Britney Spears’ Battle for Freedom) on the subject of her conservatorship, the peculiar and suspect legal arrangement that has left her father and a business team in charge of her affairs for 13 years. Last week, a judge suspended Jamie Spears as the pop star’s conservator following allegations of emotional abuse and exploitation, claims spotlighted by the #FreeBritney movement that has ballooned over the last year from fringe
Social Media group to pop cultural cause du jour.
The public interest in and intense feeling for Britney’s situation – by all investigative accounts, one of undue control and exploitation for the better part of her late 20s and 30s – is a natural outgrowth of both the gravity of the allegations and Britney’s ubiquity as a millennial pop icon. How broken must a system be to entrap one of the most famous
Women in the world in silence for over a decade? How was this happening for years in the public eye?