The Great Pretender (Arena 119 01/02)
Kevin Smith, the brilliant writer/director of Clerks, Mallrats, Chasing Amy, Dogma and Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back joins Arena, and in the first of his new regular columns asks: Am I the only person who hates Britney Spears?
So last night, I'm flipping through the multiple channel vista that is digital cable, and I see something that suddenly makes me feel very old and very prudish: a Britney Spears concert on HBO.
Now, until this point, I hadn't paid much attention to that veritable force of nature, Hurricane Britney - much like I don't pay attention when an earthquake ravages some foreign nation that isn't Red Bank, New Jersey. Like that earthquake, Britney Spears was just some @#%$ that happened over there - even though there, in this case, wasn't abroad, and was instead on the pop cultural landscape that's supposed to be within my purview. However, as I sat there, captivated by what I saw (or rather, the lack of what I saw), Britney Spears finally heaved those enormous cans she's so proud of onto my radar, and I immediately set about analyzing and over-analyzing what it is that draws people to her.
Mind you, I'm only going from the five to ten minutes I watched before changing channels (and, as we all know, five to ten minutes is generally the amount of time any passerby can stare at a car wreck before they've gotta get on with their own, vital lives), but from that brief glimpse into the Spears-o-scope, I quickly discovered something kind of horrifying: Britney wasn't singing.
Yes, I realize that at some point, Britney (or however many Britneys studio technicians can generate) had to have warbled the songs that made it onto whatever album she's currently pimping (or should that be whoring?). However, in concert, Britney wasn't singing. She simply lip-synchs - and badly, at that. She jumped the gun on some lyrics, and missed the beat on a few others. It was like watching karaoke, to some degree - like when the person doing karaoke loses their place mid-song, and they stand there, staring at the screen, reading the lyrics silently, trying to catch up. But @#%$, Britney wasn't even on the level of a karaoke caroler, as even people doing karaoke actually sing.
And this didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out, either. @#%$, it wouldn't have even taken Watson. Even someone deprived of sight from birth could tell there was no live singing going on, as the songs sounded exactly as they do on the radio, with zero impromptu deviation. But I was nonetheless astounded to see the audacity of this song-bird who stands on stage without, apparently, intoning a single note. Now granted, she was gyrating up a storm, and its difficult to sing and dance at the same time (hell, with my girth, it's difficult to talk and walk at the same time). But it can be done. There are those who've made a comfortable living performing elaborate dance routines while singing at the same time. Honorary Brit Madonna does it, and she's almost 50, right?
So why the @#%$ would anyone want to watch someone pretending to do their job? Since there are those of you out there who are no doubt posing the question right back at me ('Why would anyone want to watch the films of someone who pretends to be a director, Kevin?), I'll use myself as an example of how, in some cases, the artist (a term I'm not comfortable applying to either Ms Spears or myself) transcends the art they make.
In some cases, I can say, without a hint of shame, that there are folks who like to watch my stuff because they like me. My mother's an example of that. But beyond my mom, there's a whole portion of the audience who aren't fans of the flicks as much as they are supporters of me, personally. How does that happen? Well, I spend inordinate amounts of time at my company's website, interacting with people who like the flicks, and beyond that, I do panels at three or four big comic book conventions and numerous college Q&As each year. This gives anyone who's even remotely interested in my @#%$ ample opportunity to get to know the real me (or, at least the 'me' I present). And if the performer puts enough of his or herself out there that the audience can identify with, the work - and the quality of the work - sometimes takes a back seat. It can sag a little, so long as they like you.
So, if it works for me, I figured that's what draws folks to Britney: the identity factor. They feel close to Britney because they feel they know Britney. Perhaps she, too, puts herself out there for her fans, and I just haven't heard about it. And thankfully, I was given an opportunity to gauge this when Britney took time out from pretending to be a live singer to have a heart-to-heart with the audience.
She sat at a piano and, microphone in hand, told the audience how she's living her dream everyday - by which, I can only assume, she meant that she can't believe she makes so much money showing off her belly button a lot and pretending to croon on stage. She followed that with a bit of homespun advice that people should never stop dreaming. Nothing too deep there, but nothing dishonest either. It's a simple message, yes, but sometimes, simple messages bear repeating for the masses - especially if they come from the heart. However, as she was so obviously reading the entire speech from a teleprompter, that wasn't the case.
It was less like a heart-to-heart, than a pre-programmed, double-checked, and cleared through the BritneyCo collection of quasi-positive propaganda. The girl very visibly read her sentiments in a fashion that only a child could ignore - which then led me to surmise that, perhaps, Britney is just kid's stuff. Maybe she's nothing more than a harmless, bubblegum popster, with a predominantly pre-teen audience. With that, all my dissection of Brit-ania suddenly seemed like it was for naught, as, apparently, the Phenomenon du Spears is meant solely for a demographic I'm no longer a part of. Let the young 'uns have her, I figured - as it's the province of children to adhere blindly and loyally to figments of imagination. Like Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny before her, They'll grow out of Britney eventually.
But a few camera pans of the audience later, revealed that this wasn't the case either. The audience wasn't made up of little girls and boys barely out of diapers at all. It was made up of people like me (though much thinner) - folks who are supposed to be older and wiser. And they weren't just women folk, either. There were tons of guys, my age, holding up makeshift signs, declaring their allegiance to the non-singing product on stage. And since these folks aren't really interested in seeing Britney sing live (because she doesn't, apparently), I came to my ultimate conclusion on the subject: people are into Britney Spears because they want to @#%$ Britney Spears.
OK, that I get. She wears very little clothing, and plays up the barely legal, come-hither thing with more aplomb than Sue Lyon in Kubrick's Lolita. She purrs, 'not a girl, not yet a woman' as if she's daring the listener to be the first on the block to make a grab for her panties. She hurls her are-they-or-aren't-they boobs around like 'blodgers', trying to knock the Harry Potter of our libido off his Nimbus 2000 and into her engorged labia. She maintains she's a virgin still in the same winking fashion that Bush said he wanted Bin Laden dead 'or ...alive'. And to top it all off, she's a blonde, southern gal - that legendary farmer's daughter, who beckons us out to the barn for a roll in the hay... or at least a sloppy blow-job behind the pig-pen.
And this is when I started feeling old. Because, I'm sorry, but I just don't get turned on by a high-schooler who's just figuring out her feminine wiles (well, not anymore, at least). Those days are long-gone. I can't fetishise a teen girl at my age, all I can do is wonder why more of them didn't turn out to see Jay & Silent Bob Strike Back. Anyone over the age of consent who's ogling this nymphet needs to be prohibited from driving by Day Care Centres, because if they're getting stiff for Britney, sooner or later, they're going to want them even younger. These pederasts-in-waiting need to be jailed and re-educated now, before they start menacing our sons and daughters.
And Britney? Well, she's harmless. She's a marketing ploy. She's a fad with legs, and as soon as some even chestier 11-year-old with a halfway decent voice figures out how to work some simulated felatio onstage into her act without getting arrested and sent to Juvenile Hall, Britney will seem quaint.
I'm sure some of you are saying, 'I can't believe this potty-mouthed cretin who's made a living out of @#%$ and fart jokes dares to get all prudish about Titney Spears?' Rest assured, I'm no prude, OK - anyone who's seen my flicks can attest to that. But when I want to see someone sing, I want to see someone sing. When I want something to masturbate to... I'll just ask my wife to bust out her vibrator and show me how she really wants to get @#%$, while she fingers her ass and tells me in really vulgar terms what a lousy lover I am.
What can I say? I'm a conservative guy at heart.