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Screenshot from "Framing Britney Spears"
It all supposedly started in February 2007, in a salon in Los Angeles: Britney Spears shaved her hair in front of the paparazzi cameras.
The hairdresser is said to have refused, so the singer took the electric trimmer into her own hands.
Bzzz-bzzz.
Only a few millimeters remained.
It was the loudest gesture imaginable to give up the image of America's sweetheart.
With blonde pigtails, the singer became world famous in the video for her debut single "… Baby One More Time" in 1998: A teenager, just 17 years old, lasciviously dances down the hallway of a high school to a poppy melody, in a mini skirt, cropped shirt, half a blouse open.
Right from the start she's just that: a schoolgirl,
innocent and at the same time an object of desire.
She filled the role with flying colors for a long time.
Until the scandals piled up almost ten years after their first album was released.
Custody fights, clashes with photographers, alleged drug abuse.
Spears, it seemed, had had enough of expectations of his own fictional character.
The old braids should come off.
How much this outbreak has harmed her in the long term is investigated by a new film that aired on Friday evening on the US broadcaster FX: The episode "Framing Britney" from the documentary series "The New York Times presents" tries to find out how it happened It could come that the singer was incapacitated by a court in 2008 in an urgent procedure and her father James Spears has been responsible for her finances since then.
A life designed for the stage
One can see this dramatic and public self-destruction as the beginning of a decline.
That is the simplest interpretation.
Perhaps it was more of a rare moment of empowerment for Britney Spears, who took dance lessons at the age of three and from then on arranged her life for the stage before her life itself became the stage.
"I was immediately impressed, she was so strong-willed, so focused," says Kim Kaiman of the Jive Records label about the moment she met the 15-year-old hopeful at an audition in New York.
The marketing expert in the documentary "Framing Britney" has no good word for her father: Kaiman just bragged about how rich his daughter would be one day.
Unfortunately, the film does not reveal any new information in the Spears vs. Spears case (last August, the singer's application to replace her father as guardian was rejected).
Rather, he skilfully puts her incredible rise to become a multimillionaire in context.
In around 70 minutes it is described what it was like to have been young, female and famous in America in the late 1990s.
At the time, MTV determined what was popular in popular culture.
With new formats, the station created an unusual closeness between bands and audiences, while the otherwise prudish USA suddenly developed a language in the course of the Lewinsky affair to talk about sex.
The archive footage of interviews in which childlike Spears is questioned out of nowhere about her breasts or virginity by significantly older men is indeed for tearing or shaving her hair.
And at the same time the scenes show how quickly an entire industry can turn the subject into an object.
In its inner unscrupulousness, it is a deeply American tale that one watches there: the eternal game of winning and losing.
If you want to swim up, you have to push someone else down.
"There was never any talk of her emotional well-being"
The question of guilt is therefore never asked directly among those questioned in the documentary, because everyone has earned money from Britney Spears.
Record company, managers, agents, magazines - and the family too.
"We needed each other, it was a great relationship!" Says a paparazzo from LA, to whom Spears once almost smashed the car window with an umbrella in his anger.
Then you realize again that the stars are shimmering brighter in the USA than elsewhere.
When it comes to a fall, the height of fall is all the more gigantic and the crash all the more exciting.
"There was never any talk of her emotional well-being, there was too much money to be made from her suffering," warns Wesley Morris, cultural critic of the New York Times, at one point.
Spears' breakup with Justin Timberlake, whom she knows as a child star from the Mickey Mouse Club, fills the tabloids and the evening news.
But only she is held responsible for the failed relationship.
"When it comes to taking a woman apart," says Morris, "there's a whole lot of machinery to get it started."
Crucial details in the guardianship procedure under lock and key
Britney Spears will be 40 years old in December.
She had her last number one hit in the USA in 2011. According to reports, she has left her problems behind, although fans have been discussing with the hashtag #freeBritney for a few years whether the singer has secret messages in her social Media post hidden to draw attention to the fact that her family is acting against her will.
It is no secret that the singer would like to end her guardianship and has been proven by legal proceedings.
Such a process is complicated, however, the crucial details are under lock and key according to the documentation.
The parties are silent about the ongoing proceedings.
And so it remains a mystery why she was recently trusted without any problems to give almost 250 concerts in Las Vegas within four years, at which $ 137 million were sold - and at the same time she has no more legal rights than a child .
"Framing Britney," Episode 6, "The New York Times Presents," FX
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