This article is taken from the August/September 2022 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Right now we’re offering five issues for just £10.

Britney Spears doesn’t want your pity. Since November last year, the pop star has been a free woman — released from the conservatorship through which her father had governed her life since 2008, when a California court deemed her incompetent. Abruptly, at the age of 39, she was given the right to have an adult life: to control her own money, go where she wished, see who she wanted, to marry her fiancé (which she did, this year).

She spoke of her body as something wholly apart from herself, a separate human entity who has worked so hard

The narrative demands that this be a splendid, celebratory year for Britney. She has suffered so much for the sake of enriching her family and entertaining the world. In her statement to the court that terminated the conservatorship, she described herself as “traumatised” by the years she spent as a “slave” to her father. But more than that, she sounded traumatised.

There’s one part of her testimony I feel especially haunted by. “But my precious body, who has worked for my dad for the past fucking 13 years, trying to be so good and pretty,” she said at one point. “So perfect. When he works me so hard.” She spoke of her body as something wholly apart from herself, a separate human entity who has worked so hard.

This sounds like depersonalisation, and it’s something I’ve only heard so vividly described otherwise by women who have been in prostitution or otherwise sexually abused. Confronted with an unbearable assault on the body, the mind pulls itself away in a desperate flail at safety. It’s illusory of course — the self is a physical thing — but it’s a way to survive.

That’s what Britney’s experience of stardom has been. When I saw her perform in 2018, that’s what she was: this precious body, working so hard for someone else’s benefit. Even more bleakly, so much of her music and image has played around those ideas of power, surrender, labour. “I’m a Slave 4 U”, “Work Bitch”.

At the 2011 Billboard awards, she duetted with Rihanna on a performance of “S&M”, wearing handcuffs. On stage, she smiled radiantly, like someone delighting in the performance of subjection. This was three years into the conservatorship, when the story was that she had been returned from the abyss — shaving her head, assaulting paparazzi with an umbrella, being carted to a psychiatric unit in restraints — by her father’s tender oversight.

We now know definitively how false that account was thanks, largely, to a documentary from the New York Times that came out in 2021, called Framing Britney Spears, which recounted her brutal media treatment in the noughties and summarised the concerns about her conservatorship. (In short: if she was well enough to perform, how could she be too sick to run her life?)

They exposed what had happened to her, but they also exposed her, turning her suffering into entertainment

Before Framing Britney Spears, the #FreeBritney movement of fans campaigning for her emancipation had been largely a mix of amateur legal analysis and Instagram rune-reading. After, it had mainstream credibility. There was, undoubtedly, something rotten here.

More documentaries followed: from the BBC, Netflix and another from the NYT. The attention helped push Britney’s case towards a sympathetic hearing, and her painfully overdue freedom. They exposed what had happened to her, but they also exposed her, turning her suffering into entertainment. I say this not because I think these films shouldn’t exist (though the BBC and Netflix ones could be pinged into oblivion at no great cost), but because it’s worth acknowledging that they helped Britney, and they hurt her too.

In July, she posted to Instagram — and then deleted — a broadside against the coverage claiming to “help” her: “I feel like America has done a wonderful job of humiliating me … and come on seriously is it honestly legal to do that many documentaries about someone without their blessing at all??!” she wrote.

The anguish for Britney is, most obviously, that these films revisit the painful events up to and surrounding the conservatorship: a time when she went through rehab, lost custody of her children and was on the cover of every gossip magazine being called a crack-up. But there’s also a problem for her here, to do with the very nature of her celebrity.

If she wants to go on being famous, despite how much that fame has harmed her — and the fact that she’s on Instagram and so eager to communicate with her fans suggests she very much does — then she can only be famous as Britney.

If she wants to go on being famous, then she can only be famous as Britney

That means being either Britney the victim, the woman who spoke in court about “my precious body”; or being Britney the globe-straddling superstar who dances in handcuffs and sings huskily about being a slave. Each version contradicts the other. The absurdity of being both is part of what makes her so compelling.

There’s not much sign that Britney feels the ambivalence I do about the conflict between her music and her life. She’s used “Work Bitch” as the backing music to Instagram posts and recently posted a video of herself singing a slow (and rather mangled) version of her breakout song “… Baby One More Time”. It’s as though she wants to establish a version of her success without the horrors that became integral to it. And after everything, who could blame her for that impossible wish?