Britney Spears got her start in this decade, but she and her generational peers- Lindsay, Paris, Jessica-were truly forged during the brief and out-of-control explosion of the online gossip blogs at the turn of the next century. The ’90s were home to a new age of celebrity where, absent the studio-controlled spigot of gossip columnists of yore like Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons, wild packs of paparazzi roamed the streets to capture the unflattering and invasive candid images that populated supermarket check-out stands. What is the purpose of this? I wonder if living in this weird time of prosperity created almost a sense of superstition in people.” “There’s so many punchlines, at least in the early seasons, : someone’s gay, someone’s fat, Joey’s dumb. “ Friends is a very mean show, and I say that as someone who grew up watching it and loves it,” Marshall said. We were given insufficient tools and we were asked to pillory someone and we either consented to do it, or just, you know, assumed that this was just a frivolous tabloid story.”įor all the obsession with political correctness that dominated the ’90s, it was, in retrospect, a mean-spirited era, from the tabloid media to its most enduring cultural artifacts. There were no countervailing voices, no forum for discussion that brings you perspective the way that you get it now. You were lied to overtly over and over again. Marshall has found that extending empathy toward people we might have misjudged in the past means extending empathy to our younger selves. In her work on You’re Wrong About, Marshall often talks about these public figures, usually women, being the only visible target we can lash out at when, really, it’s the larger capitalistic structures of power that deserve our scorn. They call these subjects “the maligned women of the ’90s.” Marshall tells Vanity Fair: “That’s kind of our bread and butter.” But their most-requested topic by far? Britney Spears. They’ve lately dedicated more episodes to women including Marcia Clark, Courtney Love, and Jessica Simpson, and their most popular episodes, Marshall says, are the five they recently devoted to Princess Diana that just happened to coincide with the latest Diana–centric season of The Crown. In 2014 journalist Sarah Marshall wrote a blockbuster article for The Believer magazine about Harding and Nancy Kerrigan titled “ Remote Control: Tonya Harding, Nancy Kerrigan, and the Spectacles of Female Power and Pain.” Five years later Marshall and cohost Michael Hobbes revisited the story on their popular podcast You’re Wrong About, in which the duo switch off debunking big media stories and celebrity narratives we have mistakenly come to accept as truths. The following year brought the Oscar-winning I, Tonya, which along with two other documentaries had reframed the story of Tonya Harding. Everyone, from Justin Timberlake to Diane Sawyer, bears some blame for the media frenzy that surrounded her public 2007 breakdown, and the conservatorship that was established in the aftermath. We started watching all this stuff from the early 2000s and it was very shocking now post–Me Too and post this mental health revolution.” Though the documentary is bookended by the #FreeBritney movement, Stark’s reassessment of Spears’s career involves taking a closer look at the media, friends, and family who let her down time and again. “We wanted to look back at the media coverage of her,” Framing Britney Spears director Samantha Stark told Vanity Fair, “realizing how differently we think of women, sexuality, and mental health. But Framing Britney Spears suggests there is also a reckoning due for the rest of us, anyone who passively watched these media circuses play out and is only now realizing what we could have known and done better. The ’90s chewed up Britney, Diana, Monica, Tonya, Marcia, and more first-name only female celebrities who were terrorized by a misogynistic, hungry gossip industry. There was also the phrase “We Are Sorry Britney” signaling a lingering sense of guilt and complicity. After the FX documentary Framing Britney Spears first aired last Friday, it wasn’t just the familiar hashtag #FreeBritney-favored by the fans who want to free her from her binding legal conservatorship-that started trending.
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