Britney Spears is back on trend

The legal agreement banning Britney Spears from managing her own life and finances is already older than she was the pop star when she appeared as an energetic 12-year-old girl on Disney Channel and the controversy over who runs her returns. boiling.

Spears, 39, has lived under that strict arrangement since her infamous collapse, which in 2008 prompted a California court to place her under a single legal guardianship since it was run primarily by her father, Jamie. .

The guardianship, whose precise reasons and conditions are found in the court’s confidential documents, has been subject to increased scrutiny in recent years, especially after Spears canceled his second Las Vegas residence in 2019 and entered a hiatus. indefinite professional.

Now, an FX documentary produced in association with The New York Times is throwing itself into the popular legend about Spears, who rose to world fame as a teenager chaining hits, including “Baby One More Time”, before a wrong step was unleashed. paparazzi.

The film highlights the role of the gossip press and celebrities in the early 2000s in the unleashing of Spears, showing how the media was constantly watched.

The #FreeBritney movement, in which hundreds of thousands of ardent fans, who believe she is being held hostage, is active, gained traction last year, when the singer lobbied in court to remove her father from the role of guardian.

Her defenders, whom many – including Jamie Spears – consider simply conspiratorial, say the star is asking for help with encrypted messages, emoticons and even the color of her clothes on her eccentric Instagram account.

They claim that Spears gave enough signals to regain his own custody, especially after his court-appointed lawyer told a judge, “My client informed me that he was afraid of her father.”

The judge chose not to immediately remove Spears’ father as head of his property, but appointed the Bessemer Trust financial company as joint guardian.

Jamie Spears took a step back in 2019 in Britney custody, a role that gave him power even over his medical and mental health decisions after suffering a colon rupture.

For now, the pop icon does not seek to eliminate guardianship, a legal figure normally intended for the elderly or the disabled, but to give it to professionals.

She hopes that the guardian who now has temporary custody of her will continue to be so and would like a bank to manage its finances.

The next court hearing is scheduled for February 11.

The documentary “Framing Britney Spears” suggests that the pop superstar, once a global figure, was manipulated and led to the emotional ruin of an insatiable media environment, in which his images sold for more than a million dollars.

From her spunky preadolescent days to “Star Search” in 1992 until she appeared with her head shaved in 2007, the documentary describes a magnetic superstar whose image has become everyone’s but hers.

The documentary shows how important the anchor of the news, Diane Sawyer, presses her to explain why she “did something” to cause “so much pain” to her partner, no less the famous Justin Timberlake, in their breakup, a situation that left Spears as an interviewee. he said, as a “class whore.”

And Matt Lauer, the former morning TV figure, now dishonored, brings her to tears in a 2006 interview in which he throws himself on his physical condition while pregnant with his second child.

During her prolonged mental crisis following her 2006 divorce and custody battle, Spears was photographed at gas stations barefoot or driving with a baby in her lap.

In another scene, he grabs an umbrella and starts hitting a paparazzi car, an image that has become iconic.

Moya Luckett, a media historian at New York University whose research includes celebrity culture, says the “cruelty” Spears experienced today is blurred in a socializing landscape where stars can select their own images. .

“You become your own producer,” Luckett said, pointing to celebrities like Taylor Swift or Beyonce who took the conversation from Instagram or participated in their own documentaries.

As her legal battle intensifies, her fascination with Spears is likely to persist, especially since fans, many of them in their 30s and 40s, who adored her in their youth, take the singer’s situation for granted.

“Everything that goes through it resonates with the kind of frustrations that many of us have, in a neoliberal world where we are told we can do everything if we want to,” Luckett said.

“And then I found out we really can’t.”