It was a Sunday night and nothing else was on. That’s my reason for tuning into the Britney Spears doc For the Record. But once I started watching, I was mesmerized. The girl is more in touch with reality in this authorized documentary special than she seems to have been in the past year or two. I actually had a hard time connecting the girl quite coherently and contemplatively answering the questions about her troubled past with the gal that was splashed all over celebrity magazines shaving her own hair and spontaneously running into the ocean in her underwear. The dazed look is gone these days, perhaps due to her father running a tight ship–as he has legal permission to control her financial and personal affairs–and the doctors she says she checks in with frequently. At the same time, these are the same people Spears blames for making her feel locked in and are too in control of her life. Sometimes a gal just wants to be able to drive down the freeway with her baby son on her lap.
For more on the demystification of Britney Spears, see the October 2008 article in Esquire where writer Chuck Klosterman tries to determine whether Spears is incredibly self-aware or the savviest person he knows (be warned, the accompanying images to the Britney article are not suitable for work).