Britney Spears once dwelt on high. It was before her public meltdown of and Before TMZ launched, before she fired her manager, when her team still had an iron grip on her image. The only things we knew about Britney Spears were what she wanted us to know.
That was precious littleβshe rarely gave interviews, and when she did, she never said anything memorable. Her image was everywhere, but she had no opinions or convictions. She said little and stood for nothing. And I was fascinated. At the time, I was negotiating the end of my faith in God.
I was raised Southern Baptist, just like Britney, and I was a true believer. I was secure and right with the Lord. I heard His voice speak to me. At age 18, however, I had a mental breakdown of my own, and what were ecstatic visions became unwelcome hallucinations.
With medication, the hallucinations disappeared as well, and I was empty. I saw that emptiness in Britney Spears, too. Given an icon without meaning, we pour in our own souls, making gods in our own image. I saw a writhing mass of contradictions: a visual promiscuity but a verbal purity, a public persona but an unknown person, a Hollywood starlet but a Louisiana girl.
I imagined her as a saint, one of the highly sexualized Catholic ones with a baroque mixture of pain, ecstasy, and physicality. It is an object of reverence, an excess of ideals, a thing against which we measure ourselves and are found constantly lacking. The stories of early Christian saints involve horrifying violence, and often with female saints, titillating sexual escapades.
