BRITNEY SPEARS FOR THE RECORD VIDEO MTV DOCUMENTARY

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The MTV Britney Spears For the Record Documentary aired on November 30th. The special was an attempt to clean up Britney's tarnished image after her very public nervous breakdown which culminated in trips to rehab and mental facilities. Britney looks better physically but her jittery mannerisms and  awkward explanations for crazy moments like her head shaving debacle show that Brit is still not 100% okay. UPDATED.

Britney Comes Clean in Tearful Account of Bizarre Behavior

Here's my documentary, and I worked really hard on it," said Britney Spears last night on MTV, introducing their exclusive, barely hour-long documentary-style teaser—Britney: For the Record—for her new album.

This raised the first red flag—it is unusual that a documentary's subject would have worked on it at all, much less "really hard.” But this wasn’t so much a “documentary” as it was an extended commercial spot for Britney’s new image, handcrafted by her manager, Larry Rudolph. Less than one minute into the special, a magazine editor emailed me: "Oh my God, it's just like The Hills,” referring to MTV’s glossy, vapid reality show that follows around blonde L.A. proto-celebrities. Britney’s special was, indeed like every other plastic, deceitful reality shock product, just with more weaves and wigs than a drag queen pageant. One might argue it was actually destructive to the very idea of documentary filmmaking itself.

But was it good for Britney? The pop princess, who has had more tabloid than commercial success in the last five years—short version: she married and divorced, had two children and lost custody of them, shaved her head and had a public meltdown, and is now under a permanent conservatorship by her father—really needed a hit right now. The MTV special was just one part of a new PR campaign designed to revamp her image, including a new album and a round of magazine cover profiles. If the MTV documentary was her team’s attempt to prove that Britney as rehabbed and ready to take on the world. It not only failed, but it did the worst—it showed a broken down person who needs a PR campaign and a new tour much less than she needs parental figures. Like other overproduced MTV fare, it felt fake to the eye, but underneath, the reality burned through. Britney isn’t back. She is sick.source

 

Britney will continue the stressful media blitz to promote her upcoming album Circus which drops December 2nd on her 27th birthday. Watch the documentary video if you missed it.

Calculated as a comeback strategy, glossy as a music video, "Britney Spears: For the Record," the documentary issued with considerable fanfare Sunday on MTV, was pretty much an infomercial about rehabilitating the image of Britney Spears. Please do not think of her as the lost soul who drove with babies on her lap, shaved her head or sleepwalked through an MTV Video Awards number in a career crash and burn that had the carrion of paparazzi savoring every lurid drop. Yes she had a tough time, she says. She's adjusting to life now, tough as it is since she's become imprisoned by paparazzi. But essentially, she maintains, she's just like you. Or so the message went in the documentary presented as real, but of course was anything but. Though it had the MTV imprimatur, the 70 minute film was produced by Britney's managers, aired without commercial interruption because of complete sponsorship by Britney's two fragrance companies, and was missing a lot of information. "No topic was off limits," insisted a title at the beginning of the film, which explained that MTV cameras got to follow her for 60 days this fall. "No question went unanswered." But of course not every question was asked in the first place. "I think I wanted to make the film because I started to feel like I wasn't seen in the light that I wanted to be seen in. I'm not sure what light that was," she goes on. "But there were things out there said about me that weren't completely true. And not that I care about the tabloids and all of that said about me. But there's a lot that people don't know about me that I want them to know." source