As everyone continues to cry #FreeBritney on her thirty-ninth birthday, wondering how much agency this woman approaching forty really has, it bears noting that Britney Spears is clearly just doing the best she can to pretend it’s all being held together. Her “the lady doth protest too much, methinks” declarations of being the happiest she’s ever been in her life as she takes the same five million photos repeatedly and pretends to call it something official (Project Rose) smacks of a stay at the Bates Motel. And then there is her blithe “ignorance” regarding the “connection” between her and her 26-year-old boyfriend having everything to do with the fact that she has money and influence (just as her family uses her, who’s to say it would stop anyone else, let alone her romantic interest?). And perhaps her regressed mental state.
So Britney must go Bates. Has adopted that dissociative drive for quite some time now. Maybe it kicked into especially high gear when they propped her up for a Las Vegas residency. One thing for certain is that it most assuredly appeared in full form around 2007, reaching a visual culmination with the infamous head-shaving incident and her performance of “Gimme More” at the VMAs that year. “Mother” took hold in a big way, in other words. So much so that Spears was put on a 5150 hold (a.k.a. psychiatric lockdown) by the time January 2008 rolled around.
At this juncture, her toxic manager, Sam Lufti, was still very much in the mix. And his “gatekeeper” ways with ensuring he was always the one closest to Britney and her financial affairs (enticing her with the drugs that would keep her too numb to pay much attention) meant that when Britney’s psych hold occurred, it was Lufti who was calling the shots, not her parents. It would seem that Mama and Papa Spears took this as their unprecedented opportunity to regain control over their daughter’s life. Most importantly, financial control. And when do the vilest of acts tend to occur? Whenever there is a rare opportunity that can only be facilitated by underhanded means. Britney was “in need.” Couldn’t “think for herself.” Maybe that was true in the darkest days. But what about in the present, when she claims to be the happiest she’s ever been?
Except that Britney’s arrested development likely set in long before the epic breakdown that many felt the Justin Timberlake saga was a major catalyst for. This was a girl constantly flashing her ass for the cash while also being marketed as a virginal role model for tweens. The extreme dichotomy (as spurred by a patriarchal music industry that has always gotten off on a virgin/whore paradox), paraded for so long, would be enough to cause anyone a personality split. And a strong predilection for dissociating from what they were doing (rather, what they didn’t really want to do). The shedding of any final remains of the bubblegum pop princess of the …Baby One More Time to Britney era became complete with 2003’s In the Zone. With plenty of antics to keep her busy while on tour for the album in 2004 (lest you forget the Onyx Hotel Tour), Britney turned to Kevin Federline to keep her company, resulting in the underrated sociological study of celebrity culture in the 00s that was Britney and Kevin: Chaotic.
“Mother” was starting to take a stronger and stronger hold. Norman Bates–a.k.a. meek, sweet and innocent Britney–was finding it more and more difficult to stay alert at the control panels of her mind. Why not let “Mother” take over for a while? Norman was so tired, so exhausted from having to be perfect all the time, and yet still somehow being a disappointment to someone. There was always at least one person she could let down. So she finally decided to let it all hang out. Hotel Onyx Tour, fittingly, was cancelled toward the end, after Britney suffered another knee injury (almost a full five years after the 1999 one that delayed production on the “Sometimes” video).
This time, one might speculate, she “just happened” to “fall down” while filming “Outrageous.” The mind has a tendency of getting what it wants once it puts an intention out into the universe. And Britney’s was: I need a fuckin’ break. And a debauched one (not that “debauched” is really in her vocab). Why not turn to higher doses of meth? “Mother” wants to play. It was Norman who probably decided to shave her head so they couldn’t take any hair samples for a drug test (because the hair-based kind are used specifically for methamphetamine detection), thereby being able to revoke custody of her kids–which they did anyway.
Somewhere down the line, Norman reemerged fully, only it wasn’t quite the “old Norman.” But some tainted paste-eating version. The kind who talks a lot about rainbows and flowers and loving one another. A total reversion to a preadolescent sort of brain. After all, anyone’s frontal lobe would be fucking fried if they had to endure appealing to a coterie of different factions with according personalities that serviced each of them. If you mess with the mind, you get a deterioration. Britney might be “happy” now, as her tainted Norman self. But “Mother” is always lurking just beneath the surface.
