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Because my taste in entertainment can tend toward the awful, last night I spent 90 minutes watching "For the Record," a faux documentary starring Britney Spears as the fallen pop starlet trying to stage a wobbly comeback. In sum total, it was pretty sad. The tired-looking, droopy-eyed, beweaved Britney comes across like a horse that's been ridden to the brink of exhaustion, and yet her minders continue to drive her onward, regardless of the fact that she's a barely functioning zombie on the verge of collapse. (All in service of a new album, fittingly called Circus.) In a nice deconstruction of the spectacle, Choire Sicha deems Spears "sick," and she sure looks it. Shots of the girl in action reveal her staring dully out car windows as the paparazzi bum-rush her ride, spacing out in chairs as she gets dolled up by makeup artists and hairstylists again and again, seemingly grinding through one more day to score a comeback that she denies she needs to make to regain her Princess of Pop title. The only time she lights up is when she's looking in the mirror.
While Britney's personal "revelations" range from the mundane to the strange—"What was I thinking?" and "Everyone shaves their head" among them—what's really mind-boggling is the constant swarming of the cameras around her as she attempts to live her life. This time, we see the view from inside the feeding frenzy—and it's pretty tragic. As her caravan emerges from a subterranean parking lot, the mechanical door rolls up to reveal a crowd of onlookers that resemble the Earthlings encountering the space aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Without a doubt, what we're watching is a 21st-century freak show, and Britney is its star. Since the show aired, some bloggers have denounced Spears for courting the cameras that she claims she wishes would leave her alone, but the fact of the matter is that the slobbering media hounds work for us, the American public, and if Britney Spears is a monster, we're the Dr. Frankenstein who made her.