Despite the information being well-trodden at this juncture, we all know by now that everything old can be made new again. So it is that the revelation of an actual audition tape of Britney Spears reading for the role of Allie in The Notebook being put up for auction (for, naturally, one million dollars) has reminded people of the pop star’s kiboshed acting career post-Crossroads. Alas, an established connection—therefore “chemistry”—with Ryan Gosling thanks to their history together performing on The Mickey Mouse Club didn’t seem to give Spears the leg up over Rachel McAdams, clearly born to play the part and also be with Gosling forever (even though Eva Mendes eventually came along to cock that up).
For those who are, for whatever reason, not versed in the most valuable contribution Nicholas Sparks will ever make to society, The Notebook tells the story of star-crossed lovers Noah Calhoun (Gosling) and Allie Hamilton (McAdams). Except, unlike Romeo and Juliet, Noah and Allie are not from the same socioeconomic class. While Noah is a lumber mill worker, Allie is living the high life as an heiress from old Southern money. Nonetheless, Noah’s persistence and charm wear Allie down despite the fact that she already knows striking a relationship up with him (even if only a “summer romance”) will cause problems with her overbearing parents.
Set in 1940, the flashback to their past is told by a man in a nursing home named “Duke” (James Garner). Yes, Duke is actually Noah and the woman whose journal he’s reading is Allie’s (Gena Rowlands). She wrote the story of their love down in this format so that Noah could read it every day in the hope that she might flicker out of her state of dementia long enough to remember who he is. And when she does, it’s a wondrous thing for Noah, momentarily convinced until this instant that maybe he’s lost her forever yet again (considering the fraught history of how they came to finally be married, it seems like an unnecessarily cruel, PTSD-inducing fate for Noah).
It is here we come to the irony of Britney Spears auditioning for this part—a woman who ends up having dementia, therefore is relegated to a “home” where she has no control over what happens to her, and is essentially forced to put her life in other people’s hands. Even if a pair of those hands at least belong to someone she can trust (let us note here that Sam Asghari is no Noah Calhoun). Previously, however, we didn’t know just how “ironic” it might be… until the arrival of yet another one-hour documentary, called The Battle for Britney: Fans, Cash and a Conservatorship, about Spears and the conservatorship that has held her in a vise grip for the past thirteen years.
In some ways a notch above Framing Britney Spears for the more “let’s solve this mystery” approach taken by journalist Mobeen Azhar (who is perhaps more objective because he seems to have little beyond some cursory knowledge of Spears), the aim of the episode is to see things from as multi-faceted of a perspective as possible. Of course, like any documentary that has or will come out regarding Britney and “how she got here,” everything is merely a part of the speculative sleuthing that has spurred an entire sub-industry of #FreeBritney merchandise and rhetoric.
Fan or not, however, it’s difficult to look at the photos and videos Britney’s Instagram posts and think, “This is a well, sane woman.” Or even a “happy” one, as she says she is. For there is happy, and there is self-protectively numb (see: the Norman Bates defense mechanism). If the deadness in her eyes isn’t enough to indicate that, then surely the bouts with childlike regression are. Maybe Spears never had dementia until the meds she’s been hopped up on contributed to a certain “brain-fried” state. For, as one of the more “research-oriented” fans in the show insists, “They have her on medication for dementia.”
Azhar, too, does his own research, finding that “dementia for under sixty-fives accounts for less than five percent” of the cases. Could Spears be that extraordinary exception to the norm—as she has been in so many other arenas? The answer is twofold. Either she really does have some form of early-onset dementia (which, sorry to say, would actually make some kind of sense considering her erratic behavior) or her father, Jamie Spears, and those who also seek to gain monetarily from being on his side, have made it look like that’s a major aspect of the issue at hand (along with Spears’ history of financial mismanagement by entrusting others such as Sam Lufti with her funds).
The conservatorship has also long been theorized to be the brainchild of Lou M. Taylor, Britney’s former business manager, who, yes, gets a payout from it every year. In the documentary, that myth is semi-debunked, per a legal jargon-packed email sent from Taylor herself. Others interviewed include Lisa MacCarley, a probate and conservatorship attorney/#FreeBritney advocate, who states, “Clearly, something happened after she gave birth…” In this moment, another old chestnut in the “theories about Britney” oeuvre is broached anew: she had postpartum depression that was never properly handled, which only added to her already fragile mental state. McCarley further adds that this was the first chink in Britney’s armor that could assist in her being preyed upon as she remarks, “Her father finds an attorney, and they know ‘just what to do.’”
That lawyer would eventually turn out to be Sam Ingham, who reportedly receives $10,000 a week for his “services” in defending the conservatorship. That Britney’s own lawyer is a court-appointed one who likened her mental capacity to a comatose patient in terms of being capable of doing something like signing a written declaration of her true feelings doesn’t exactly make it seem like a fair playing field. As McCarley phrased it, “When they deprived her of her own attorney of choice, that is the day justice died for Britney.”
Others interviewed in the BBC special included an ex-backup dancer of Britney’s, one of her former makeup artists, Jordan Miller from BreatheHeavy.com and, of all people, Perez Hilton, who seemed more concerned with his own redemption rather than Britney’s. Regardless of the capitalizing “hooey” it might be written off as, the fact that this is the first documentary to shed a major spotlight on the prospect of Spears having dementia (or at least being accused of having it as a means to keep the conservatorship in place) is a rather momentous occasion. And not just because it might mean Spears got a little too into character during her ’02 audition for The Notebook, but also seeing as how it could be the one “extenuating circumstance” that might legitimize the need for Spears to remain under a court’s thumb.
