I personally found Framing Britney Spears, the documentary charting the arc of Britney Spears’ conservatorship, to be intrusive, incurious, and often baffling. People close to Spears might disagree, as it opened the floodgates for them to spin their own redemptive tales to anyone ready to lap up any new details in the sordid life of the world’s once most famous pop star. With the buzz from its premiere in February still lingering, I guess it’s not surprising its filmmakers have reportedly jumped at another pop culture fixation: Justin Timberlake’s humiliation of Janet Jackson at the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show.
Page Six reports that the production company behind Framing Britney Spears is working on a new doc about the 2004 Super Bowl half-time show performance, according to sources close to the matter. “It’s going to be all about the fallout and the suits who fucked over Janet [at] Viacom,” said one tipster. “They did the Britney doc without [Spears], and there’s been more interest in the Super Bowl since that documentary premiered and Justin apologized.”
Here was that apology, for the record. It left much to be desired:
If the source is to be believed, and producers are willing to move forward without Jackson as they were with Spears, then I expect something less than a comprehensive historical analysis of the fallout, but maybe they’ll be more rigorous this time around. Good luck with their endeavors!
DISCUSSION
If their business is producing documentaries that sell themselves as exposing “the truth” behind public wrongs done to celebrities, but the nominal victims of those wrongs (and central subjects of the docs,) don’t want to participate, isn’t that still just exploitation? Even if the documentaries reach conclusions supported by whatever viewpoint you or I may hold on any given controversy, the documentarians are still basically just enriching themselves from these other people’s stories—seemingly without regard for those people’s desires.