2006. It was a strange period in American history. TMZ had just started to go full steam ahead after being founded in ’05, Lindsay accordingly felt obliged to start doing drugs much more liberally just in time and George W. Bush had recently been reelected president because we seem to give every incumbent except Jimmy Carter a second chance (so you know what’s coming even with the Orange One). That being said, in the same year, Justin Timberlake, pathetic motherfucker that he is (yet was for quite some time able to fly under the radar on that front because it was the long-established norm for women to let themselves be brainwashed into coveting fuckboys), could not let go of his spurning by one, the legendary Miss Britney Spears.
And it all began in 2002, with the media blitzkrieg required to promote his first solo album, Justified (a very original title indeed). Perhaps wanting to pander to the “pretentiousness” of being interviewed by Barbara Walters, Timberlake explained, “Looking back on it, it definitely had this Great Expectations vibe to it,” in reference to how the two first met while starring on the The Mickey Mouse Club and then kept “coalescing” together as one over the rest of the 90s, culminating in a synergistic relationship that worked well for touring with one another. Cut to four years later, the year aforementioned, when Justin is still throwing shade at Britney with one of the singles from FutureSex/LoveSounds, “What Goes Around…Comes Around.” Expounding even more graphically on his desire for a karmic balance in the form most satisfying of all to the sadistic male mind–watching her die–Timberlake even went so far as to get Nick Cassavetes to write “select dialogue” (though any asshole from the street could have come with it when you hear such lines from Scarlett Johansson as, “You don’t fucking know me!”).
That Cassavetes and Timberlake “chose” Johansson as the actress designed to emulate yet another Britney doppelgänger (as was the case in the Francis Lawrence-directed “Cry Me A River”) further accented the already very apparent point that Justin wanted to make (and had done so previously): Britney must be punished. Even if Justin was to be the one to act in that role by constantly reminding her of her faux pas in cheating on him with someone like Wade Robson (added salt in Justin’s gaping wound in that it was someone who choreographed for both of them and Justin probably felt that Wade’s frosted tips were inferior). So it goes that almost every year, like clockwork, Timberlake finds some way to reference Britney’s mistake, one of the most glaring times being when he performed at a “pre-Super Bowl show” in 2013, “quipping” before going into “Cry Me A River,” “Sometimes in life you think you found the one. But then one day you find out that she’s just some bitch.” Overtones of misogyny aside, it’s fairly overt that Justin is still talking about Britney despite denying this to be the case when her fans came to her defense (as the Britney Army will do). While he had numerous girlfriends in between his breakup with Britney and marriage to automaton Jessica Biel, including Alyssa Milano and Cameron Diaz, it has consistently been Britney that has maintained his attraction…to vitriol.
With Samuel Bayer (who famously directed “Smells Like Teen Spirit”) behind the camera to help Justin create his ultimate revenge fantasy in “What Goes Around…Comes Around,” it’s clear that he does not truly believe in karma, as the music video version of himself suddenly does by the end, but rather, digging in the knife so hard that it would be impossible for Britney to ever speak (as a result of gasping in shock) on her own feelings regarding the matter, being that they’ve all been felt and publicized so intently by Justin, who went so far as to improv on the piano in that same Barbara Walters interview mentioned, “At least you gave me another song about a horrible woman.” Just simply wow. So tasteful. And while there are some of us that would be (and have been) easily tempted into using a public platform to make the one who jilted us suffer, there should be, at the very least a stopping point. A statute of limitations. Justin has profited more off this breakup than Britney, that’s certainly true–so where’s the karmic balance in that?
What’s more, Justin’s ceaseless reminders to Britney of her indiscretion may very well have been what sent her off the deep end just a year after Justin released the video for “What Goes Around…Comes Around,” featuring the way harsh Tai lyrics, “Let me paint this picture for you, baby [nice go-to condescension epithet]/You spend your nights alone/And he never comes home/And every time you call him/All you get is a busy tone/I heard you found out/That he’s doing to you what you did to me/Ain’t that the way it goes/You cheated, girl/My heart bleeded, girl/So it goes without saying that you left me feeling hurt/Just a classic case scenario/Tale as old as time girl, you got what you deserved.” Considering this is likely Timberlake’s assessment of both Robson and, that year, Kevin Federline, there can be no mistaking the splooge one hears as he gets out these words “painting” Britney’s sad little life without him. If continuing to get much younger dick and sporting free Kenzo attire is, in any universe, deemed sad.
Once again in 2013, Timberlake had to shame Spears for her retrospectively (and even in the moment) laughable claim of maintaining her virginity until marriage by appearing on an SNL sketch called “Immigrant’s Tale,” the premise of which finds “Cornelius Timberlake,” played by Justin, imagining life for his great-great-great grandson, who he envisions will make millions singing songs. He will also have “his pick of the ladies,” as he explains that first he’ll date a fellow pop star, adding, “Publicly, they’ll claim to be virgins, but privately, he hit it.” The class can’t stop, won’t stop with Justin.
By his karmic definitions, on the one hand, maybe Britney has gotten what she “deserved” by being (self-)relegated to doing Las Vegas residencies, which he only just this year “subtly” called out as being great as a “retirement option.” On the other, is it really any kind of punishment to be awarded $500,000 a show as your ex still finds ways to talk about you sixteen years after you caused the demise of the relationship?
Britney, always one for diplomacy and, unlike Justin, letting karma take its natural course, remarked to Diane Sawyer in ’04, “It’s fine. I don’t wanna judge him. That’s the way he had to deal with what happened.” His karma for so crudely discussing how it ended is, in turn, being obsessed with Britney in his work for the rest of his ever-fading, faux relevant career. And, at the very least, Britney is no longer young enough by Hollywood standards to be decried as a whore. But just because her youth has waned does not mean, sorry to inform Justin, that he will get his fantasy Great Expectations ending–his wet dream likely being Britney to tell him that “misfortune has opened her heart.” But so long as she has the literal fortune to keep her up to her neck in distractions both carnal and material, he’s never gonna get it. So, can it be said, then, that karma wins?
