Britney Spears Dreams

I find that whenever my dreams come true, bad things end up happening. When it comes to the things that I want more than anything in life - fame, fortune, power, but also smaller things, like a new computer, or a Nintendo Wii, or a particular girl - I tend to think of them in end-of-the-movie terms. Me, walking out of the Apple store, new MacBook Pro in Hand, suddenly shifting into Wes Anderson slow motion while the Kinks play in the background; me and that particular girl, kissing for the first time in the middle of a thunderstorm, or on a beach with fireworks, or in the airport terminal; me, waving to the people of New York City, riding in the back of a convertible with the President of the United States, who in my imagination always looks like Clint Eastwood.

Everybody's got dreams, stuff we want to own or experience. On some base level of our soul, we always think that, when the dream comes true, our life is going to be better. More money will make us more comfortable. An attractive husband or wife will end loneliness, or make sex easier, or stroke our ego, or one of the thousand other reasons why people fall in love.

I'm 22 now - old enough to have had enough naive little dreams come true (and to have stumbled for a moment just now over whether I was 22 or 23), young enough to know that the best and worst hasn't come close to happening yet. So maybe I'm off base here. But whenever one of my real true-life dreams has come true, I always get the strange sensation that it's not enough, or that it's all wrong, that it wasn't supposed to come true this way, or worse, that it wasn't supposed to come true at all - that it was a silly thing to hope for, and a worse thing to happen.

I was in love with a girl for two and a half years and I never knew how to tell her that. Then it all happened, one night at a club - the perfect mix of alcohol and 3 am dancefloor confidence. We made out - inside, outside, on the bus. Everything was, I thought, perfect. It was a peculiar feeling, like history was all over. The life I'd always imagined for myself was starting. It was the Grey Havens, the credits sequence, the happily ever after. It ended a couple months later.

There are very few things I can think of to compare ratio-wise the level and length of expectation to the severe banality of the event itself. There's "Star Wars Episode One," I suppose - it took three viewings, on the big screen, at 1999 prices, to realize that the movie wasn't awesome, wasn't just okay, was bad, so bad that it made me rethink 14 years of watching "Star Wars" and reading "Star Wars" and playing "Star Wars."

Or there's Britney Spears. I was in eighth grade, and one of my friends mentioned her name. It sounded exotic then. I had never even watched MTV before. "Turn it on when you get home," my friend said. "She'll be on there."

You can try to analyze the gender politics of "Hit Me Baby One More Time" - the song, which basically says, "I'll do anything if you'll come back to me" (I read somewhere that the title of the song means either "hit me with your love" or "hit me with the truth," neither of which make the lyric less troubling or less catchy - has any song with such weird subject matter, besides maybe "Semi-Charmed Life," ever gotten so popular among six-year-olds?); the music video, slut-empowerment masquerading as adolescent feminism, or feminism reclaiming teenaged sexuality with exultant authority, or just good old-fashioned Lolita voyeurism (those pigtails! the bare midriff!) Spears was 17 at the time, on the cover of Rolling Stone, laying back on her bed. She's holding a phone (on a cord - how ancient does that already look?), but the way she's staring up at the camera - a bit of surprise, the ghost of a smile curving into her mouth - like she's telling the person on the other line, "I'll call you back":

Don't forget these:

And that's the GAY teletubby.

Almost everyone in my eighth grade class loved Britney. The girls could sing along to the songs, do her dance moves (some of their parents got angry when the school wouldn't let them wear strapless gowns to the graduation party, and I think there was a PTA argument over two piece swimsuits, too.) The guys all loved Britney because we desperately wanted to fuck her before we knew what sex was. I'm reminded of the part in "Total Recall" when Arnold orders his ideal woman: Athletic, Sleazy, and Demure. She's empowered, but she's also sex crazy, but she's also a nice girl - the kind of woman you can take home to mother, after she's worked all day at a high-salaried corporate job, before she does all kinds of pussycat things to you in bed.

You could map the next eight years of Britney's in any number of ways - the steady breakdown of her glamour girl exterior, from Judy Garland-in-Oz to Judy-Garland-in-rehab; the slow burn of insanity, from the rumored tryst with Fred Durst through the weekend marriage through K-Fed, the Irish twins, the baldness; the friends she kept, from her teeny-bop Mouseketeers (Justin and Christina, who both turned out to be far more talented) to Paris Hilton's Slutketeer cabal; her declining album sales; her weight gain.

Yet I think it' s best, and most honest, to look at what happened to Britney as a failed love affair - her first, and hopefully her last - with America. Like Humbert Humbert, we wanted her before we were allowed to want her. If you think about all the truly iconic pictures of Spears - that jailbait Rolling Stone cover, her skin-colored VMA outfit (that she stripped off a suit to reveal), and finally, her cover shoot in late 2003 (right as I was starting college), you can see the slow, almost casual undressing - of the girl, of the personality, of our own leering desire to see more, more, more.

Look at that picture though, man. She's not just hot - she's an absolute vision of beauty. Not a girl, not a woman; the moment before the lovers kiss, before the innocence is gone forever. Everything about the picture is airbrushed all to hell - the hair, the skin, the eyes all bear signs of make-up, analog and digital. She was always manufactured - never a good singer, supplied with the finest producers and songwriters and dancers and costumers. She couldn't do anything. She could just be - and no matter how much work went into capturing this one picture, that is Britney Spears, gorgeous flesh and beautiful blood. It's like what Klosterman writes about Pam Anderson - she was completely fake, except that she was real.

This picture was the end, though we didn't realize it then. A couple months later, she kissed Madonna at the VMAs - incredibly hot, true, but did Madonna ever look less interested in a kiss? "Toxic" was a huge hit, but her last. Then came marriages, children, everything.

In eighth grade, we used to joke about how we couldn't wait for Britney to flop, because then she'd have to do porn to get by (there were always rumors that that's what happened to Alicia Silverstone, before the internet made it easy to just check). Really, though, we just wanted to see Britney, naked. She was practically nude already - just a few little inches of cloth separating us from the holiest of holies in that last picture.

Well, we all finally got to see it. Many times. If Britney were a little bit smarter, you can almost imagine her staring America down - "What? Isn't this what you wanted? Haven't I just always done everything you wanted, all the time?"

But Britney's not smart. To read about her actions before, during, and after her horrific "comeback" performance, she's already, at 26, a shell of her former self - wearing clothes that would've looked good on her 4 years, two kids, and a couple dozen white trash pounds ago; acting the diva without the talent to back it up; drinking from lunchtime till the late early morning.

What can you say to a girl that your love, and your lust, ruined? Sorry, Britney. I hope you find some peace in something. We all got it coming.