It’s been two decades since Britney Spears brought us the second single from Oops!… I Did It Again. That masterpiece being, of course, “Lucky,” a woeful tale about one of Hollywood’s most successful actresses (while Britney Spears was likely going for a Marilyn Monroe vibe, one can’t help but think of Joan Crawford in this narrative). A girl who seemingly has it all (as the guy leaving her a message on her answering machine during the interlude before the song starts puts it: “how she had all that fame, all that money–and she still wasn’t happy”). So it is that we segue into the immortal song, made more so by the Dave Meyers-directed video, in which Spears splits into two people (kind of like Sabrina Spellman in the third season of Chilling Adventures of Sabrina), the narrator observing Lucky from an objective standpoint and the sad, moody Lucky herself.
That Spears worked on the song at a time when her own career was launching into the stratosphere and she was “forced” to hole up in a studio in Sweden with hitmaker Max Martin to record the material for what would soon form her sophomore album (it sounds also vaguely like one of the plot points in Vox Lux) is also telling. It was during this whirlwind period of all work and no play that Spears seemed to inspire Martin, Rami Yacoub and Alexander Kronlund to pen the lyrics about someone not so unlike her. And also, in the present, not so unlike Taylor Swift, who comments in the recently released documentary, Miss Americana, “You get to the mountaintop and you look around and you’re like, ‘Oh God, what now?’ I didn’t have anyone I could talk to who could relate… I just wondered, ‘Shouldn’t I have someone that I could call right now?’” Alas, these “stars” have nothing but their career (and the stacks of money generated from it) to keep them warm at night.
Yet even Britney, during one of the interview segments of Making the Video admitted, “I hate it when celebrities talk about how depressing their lives are. I wouldn’t change my life for anything, I’m so happy with what I’m doing, but I’m human. And just like everybody else out there, I have depressing moments.” Depressing moments that are very specific to the “being a human specimen under a microscope” phenomenon that comes with the territory of fame. At the same time, however, what would a star be without their public? Would they cease to exist altogether without the accolades and the SAD lamp effect provided by basking in the glow of flashbulbs? The answer is, yes, absolutely. Just look at Norma Desmond. It is for this reason that not only is “Lucky” one of the most existential pop songs of all-time, but also tailor-made for providing the intro music to the Academy Awards ceremony. After all, isn’t Britney white and “old” enough to register on the Academy’s radar for such a responsibility? And, what’s more, Lucky herself is carrying an Oscar down the red carpet for fuck’s sake.
And she clutches to it almost as tightly as Joan Crawford once did. For like every major Hollywood star that’s been left with no choice other than to blur the lines between reality and celluloid fantasy, Lucky is, “lost in an image, in a dream/But there’s no one there to wake her up.” No one to wake any of them up and tell them they’re not actually as important as they think they are. And that an actor is only as good as their last most effective plastic surgery procedure. This is all part and parcel of why the entire culmination of ascending to the top ultimately feels so unsatisfying. As hollow as a Beverly Hills trophy wife’s head.
So yes, indeed, Lucky is a mascot for the entire industry and the general ironic sense of lack celebrities occasionally speak of as they sit among the trappings of their wealth like pharaohs. If only they could lift the veneer long enough to see that and embrace the Hollywood anthem as their theme song for the Oscars.
