The Burning Playground
Britney Spears and Monetising Female Trauma
The devil works hard, but Netflix works harder – if there is a story to tell, Netflix has sold it. Maybe even before you had the idea – and with better cinematography, no less. I use Netflix here as a pennant for streaming platforms; something like how all Jacuzzis are hot tubs, but not all hot tubs are Jacuzzis. Netflix is how we now define entertainment. Netflix is now a verb; very similar to how Google has become conjoined with Internet access – if you don’t know it, Google it.
I’m thinking of how one night, I chanced upon the Reddit forum discussing Britney Spears’s torturous conservatorship. I really only wanted to Google how to use the word ‘pennant’ in a sentence; instead, I opened two tabs out of habit and knowingly hopped on a burning slide of the pop star’s 2007 breakdown timeline. Reading about Britney’s abusive, law bound, multi-million dollar riptide of fame, I thought about my school: more specifically, the playground with swings and wheels and bars and one very hot, very tall, slide made of steel. In my memory, the playground is always barren, with only the swings slightly moving from the last girl who had been called by her father, and who, in a hurry, had jumped and landed on her feet narrowly missing the slim steel bench of the swing hurtling to heat stamp her forehead. The inertia eventually lulled the swing’s hinges into a creak of someone having been there not too long ago. The last few oscillations were easy to count – for every second; there would be one back and forth. I would often stay at school long after the throngs of sweaty girls had happily boarded the buses for their homes. I don’t know if all of them were happy to be going to their home specifically, but most of them seemed more hopeful stepping on the bus, perhaps to find a better place than our school grounds.
My years in school had given me a forehead full of acne, a dislocated disc in my neck, and a permanent red bunion on the underside of my little finger of my left hand. I assume it was the hours of writing on exam sheets, with my littlest finger grazing the paper that I can best describe as a hard rock laminated in talcum powder, or it may have been softer; but my finger would disagree, that was responsible for the flattened circle of dead skin invisible to anyone but whose hand it beleaguered. Even so, dead skin and improper bones, I was happier at school. I was stressed and starving all the time, yes, but it was better than going home.
The playground was around the back of just about everything. The oblong stretch of sand and uneven rocks peering from underneath the dry soil was geographically unimportant to the school. The playground was behind our canteen, and ran parallel to the back wall of the teachers’ room.
The playground and the sun were never friends.
The bell for the midday break would ring at about eleven in the morning, and the swings would bear the weight of two best friends pushing themselves back with the heels of their feet, biting into their ice lollies. Sometimes, when the clouds would give way in the summer, and the sun would wipe its face with its palms, to come out whole and dazzling, the swings would shine with heat. We knew then that we couldn’t touch them. In the winters, we could use the sweaters tied around our waists to cover the bench’s face like a salve, between wound and air. But the sweaters would slide off mid flight, and so we would settle for entwining the chains of the two benches and then tugging the locked metal at the top, so that the swings would slowly unravel like spinning teacups.
The slow creaks of the swings weren’t the reason for its hauntedness, rather, it was the inertia reminding me that someone had been very close to the same surface that I am sitting on now, except that I probably wouldn’t know her even if I did see her, because all I remember is her white canvas shoes landing in the dry dust.
I never looked directly at the top of the slide; it must have been at least ten feet tall. The thin striped salwars I wore to school were breezy, flapping like a tarp on a windowless car against my thighs. The sides of the slide were dotted with chipped paint. The sun must have been to blame – the slide was the closest to heaven, and the wrath of the heat, slowly, every day, melted away its preppy yellow coat and bared the hard steel of its exoskeleton. There were about twelve steps to climb before we could safely return to the rocky earth. I don’t know why we slid down steel in the summers; the handles were ablaze with the fury of the afternoon sun and we would have to keep our hands in our lap while wiggling our behinds to gain balance.
The two-second ride would be burning and bumpy regardless. But we would go queue again once we reached the bottom, to show ourselves and all the other girls, that we weren’t afraid to mount the heavens one more time.
Britney Spears, as we know now, never left the burning playground.
And here, it is not just Britney Spears that I want to talk about. Her conservatorship has added texture to the story of the meteoric rise of an attractive, thin, and white sixteen-year-old girl in pigtails, and her eventual breakdown in 2007 with a baldhead and a baseball bat to the car. Her story is not hers, and it was never was. It will be written, produced, and televised regardless. Her story will make money. Whether it will help her at all is meaningless. This is the thin line between awareness and the monster of capitalism that swallows us whole, before we’ve even digested the tidbits of traumatic information.
The intersection of trauma and memory in new media is defined by the monetisation of the viewers’ attention span. We collectively consume, watch, swipe past stories of horrors every day, some of us more than others depending on the social circles we find ourselves in. However, the treatment of media when it comes to catering to the binaries of men and women remains apologist. The male perpetrators are treated with the dignity of mental illness and promise of talent despite their many, many violations of others’ personal identities. The women, should they find themselves bald and in rehab, are treated with the indignity of cruel punch lines and viral memes. Following closely is Armie Hammer’s story: that of a rich, white man who has tortured and abused young women, and who continues to frolic in Hawaiian shirts with cocktails in hand in the Cayman Islands. His story will make money too, but in an entirely different genre of cinematic television. His victims are still largely nameless and faceless, and in his story, he will be the conventionally handsome protagonist with a few loose screws.
In the case of Britney Spears, a large part of her paralysis is her absolute loss of financial and bodily independence under the mandate of conservatorship controlled by her father. In the marketplace of tours and merchandise, her status as an iconic pop star has never faltered. As we know now, throughout the release of her album, Circus in 2008; her years-long residencies in Las Vegas; and the launch of her perfume and namesake lingerie lines – Britney Spears has never had a say. Her fortune is vast – approximately $60 million, and for the past twelve years or so, her father, Jamie Spears, has been legally controlling her wealth.
A thirty-nine-year-old woman with two kids is not allowed to carry a credit card of her own.
A thirty-nine-year-old woman inducted into the Hollywood Walk of Fame as the youngest artist in the recording industry is barred from exercising creative freedom on her own social media accounts.
A thirty-nine-year-old woman, previously married and now divorced, has been forced to insert an IUD in her body by her father.
Armie Hammer’s news has suddenly disappeared from Twitter, and the tabloids have had their fun with the clickbait articles in the early months of 2021. However, even with the rumours of chopped body parts and branding of women’s groins, Hollywood cannibal Armie Hammer has retained absolute control over his movement, money, and mind. Britney Spears on the other hand, is paying her father to honour the court-ordered conservatorship. She cannot have any more kids, even though she said she now wants to. The spaces of trauma are gendered. Spears moves in spaces – including the virtual, public spaces of social media – with strict scripts, stripping her of her bodily autonomy – of the right to bear children, to have private romances, to rest, and perhaps most importantly, to even gain a little weight without being called a “fat whore” by Jamie Spears.
In 2007, when Britney had a very public breakdown ruthlessly documented by the American paparazzi, her admission into a mental health rehabilitation unit by her father was twisted to manipulate the reality of her success as necessary protection against herself. The curious case of Britney Spears will be made into a docuseries; some producers are already fighting for the rights to the story of her torture. And when the series is released – my money is on Netflix – more men will make money from her narrative.
The bottom-line remains that we cannot allow non-men to recover in solace. We are voyeurs. We love compelling stories. Britney Spears is a story, and because she is a famous woman with a history of mental breaks, we feel entitled to her life, her body, her money…