Actually Sean Young would probably kill for the attention BS gets- she could walk to rehab nude and no one would care, poor thing.
No thanks, my connection is running at a snail’s pace and I don’t want to search for confirmation. It’s been brought up numerous times before, I think someone that worked for her confirmed it. If you don’t want to believe it, fine, but you can’t ignore that she makes a point to talk to the paparazzi, gets in their cars, ask them to get in her car, dates one, goes outside to cry when she’s upset so they can see her, talks to them in fake British accents, etc. because that is all on tape. I can’t turn on the TV without seeing it over and over again. On the other hand the celebrities that come off as more normal actually avoid the paps, hide their faces, don’t talk to them and/or tell them to fuck off and leave them alone.
Man, you must not be familiar with Sean Young. She is a cooter flashin’ nutball from WAAAY back. Do you remember her appearance on Letterman in the Catwoman costume, demanding she be cast in the role? yow. I’m actually glad to hear she made her way towards rehab. I think her behavior was a detriment to her career.
I think it’s because I am also a ‘mental health consumer’ and someone who’s struggled with addiction that I am able to look at this Brit debacle from a different angle than some. Saying she doesn’t want to get better is a little harsh. THe whole time i was messed up I was hating myself, I didn’t think I was WORTH help. And even when you do get help, the worst thing ever is a relapse. She. is. broken.
I had a reputable doctor, a strong, smart husband, great family and the gift of being able to hide away from everyone while I suffered. She doesn’t have ANY OF THAT.
I think Sean Young is better OFF going silently into rehab.
Not the best of cites, but my daughter was watching TMZ one night, and this is what they said on the show - that she has a paparazzi entourage because she tells them where and when she is going anyplace. I was in the other room, so I could not tell if this was being said tongue-in-cheek or not.
While that may be true, you cannot honestly believe that if she STOPPED telling them that they’d all magically disperse. God, that guy who runs the TMZ show…makes me sort of…shaky in anger.
I didn’t mean that I think she doesn’t want to get better. What I was trying to say was that she doesn’t seem to have recognized that her current coping techniques and strategies are not working, and that she needs to try something different. And probably drastically different.
There’s a suburban legend about ‘how to trap raccoons.’ Normally the critter is considered so clever than most traditional traps are not going to work on it. So, the folk wisdom was that you put something shiny behind some barrier, so that it cannot be removed, but so that the raccoon’s forepaw can grip it. The raccoon isn’t trapped in any traditional sense, but it can’t leave, because it won’t give up the shiny.
In the same way, Britney appears to be stuck in a very bad situation, but because she will not or cannot consider the major changes that seem obvious to those of us on the outside, it appears that she will continue to repeat her bad experiences. This isn’t saying she doesn’t want to be better - it’s saying she doesn’t want to make the changes that might allow her to learn to get better.
IOW, she can’t give up the shiny.
You point about the supports you had and that she doesn’t is quite valid. More than that, I will go so far as to say that I believe that there are a number of people around her who have a direct interest in making sure she doesn’t become what most people would call healthy.
No argument there. Living in a fishbowl isn’t something I’d wish on my worst enemy.
It has been widely reported that Britney is or was dating this fellow. I also would not find it surprising in the slightest to find out that the rumors regarding her informing the paparazzi about her plans is true. She’s a very, very troubled person, and it’s totally believable that she’d bring this sort of thing down on herself.
I am sick to death of the coverage but I don’t blame Britney at all. Sacrificing virgins has a long tradition in celebrity culture and we feed into it all the time by paying attention. Even more sickening than her treatment by the media, to me, is the hostility with which she is treated by people around me.
Britney was a superstar before she was even 20, wasn’t she? And she wasn’t a Paris Hilton, being raised with big bucks and media attention and all that. She grew up poor and overnight became the celebrity mags’ wank material. The moment her star lost a bit of its shine, the media turned into the vultures they are and turned against her. She never learned to be a woman in the media spotlight: she was a working class kid, then a world-famous teenage virgin, then suddenly she’s a young adult and it’s all gone wrong. At what point and by what means was she supposed to learn how to be an upstanding young mother in the centre of a media spotlight?
I can’t get out of my mind the time she smashed up K-fed’s car. If you look at her face in those pictures, that is not the face of a woman who’s irrational. That is the face of a woman who is very very angry and upset because they just took her children away.
I have seen this happen so often to women,* and not just the celeb ones. They start out in a position where they do not have total control over their situation (such as being a girl from a working class background, suddenly an international sensation because of her good looks and catchy tune and titillating lyrics, working for record-company executives who have great power over her and are interested in her profitability, not her health and well-being). Something somewhere goes awry for whatever reason; soon she is in a situation totally beyond her control (such as tabloids and respectable newspapers and online prognosticators slobbering over her and gleefully narrating her downfall using the ugliest possible terms). Combine it with the schadenfreude of people really loving to see attractive and talented people fuck up, and the eagerness with which we already demonize sexually provocative women (at the same time as we masturbate to their images).
The pressure mounts, her every move is scrutinized, she’s got a deadbeat husband and two little kids and unrelenting attention on everything she does. She acts a tiny bit crazy (which we all have; fortunately, paparazzi usually isn’t there to catch it when I do it), and as she is already objectified, it is blown all out of proportion, and whatever her response, it is characterized and reported as “hysterical.” Rinse and repeat. There is no way out of this cycle except to simply disappear, which is not always good for the woman, and not always possible, such as when you have photographers camped on your doorstep to catch pictures of you being hauled away to rehab.
(Remember that shot of Princess Diana at the Taj Mahal? where all the photographers were waiting for her, and she was on a bench a little way away, looking over her shoulder at them? I’m not comparing Britney to Diana, by any stretch, but that picture of Diana really drove home to me how awful that unrelenting fishbowl feeling would be.)
Then they take her kids away. Any woman, in any circumstance, no matter how crazy or stupid or slutty or otherwise unworthy, is going to lose it to some extent or another if her kids are taken away. Most of them manage to refrain from smashing up their exes cars, but I guarantee that a dramatic and emotional and possibly violent reaction would not be particularly unusual in such a situation.
Combine all of this with what appears to be an undiagnosed mental health disorder. Just what could she do about it at this point? Honestly, this is not a rhetorical question. I do not think that women should have to disappear when they become distasteful to us, but that’s what a lot of people seem to want (and in this case, disappearing would be a significant imposition on her life, as it would probably require her to abandon her remaining family as well). If you were her, what would YOU do, given the unrelenting paparazzi attention, the fact that your kids have been taken away, the fact that you have a mental illness, the fact that the last 5-10 years of your life have been about as far from a stable and comfortable existence as possible?
- I’m not saying it doesn’t happen to men, just that I’ve noticed it over and over again with women.
I wouldn’t know. When I enter room, I make my daughter change the channel. I tell her I have too few brain cells left to lose any more on celebrity gossip. I was only overhearing from kitchen.
You are too kind to your enemies.
The reason I know anything about her ambulance trip today is that this morning, right after a report about the Republican debate in California, and speculation that Schwarzenegger will endorse McCain we saw video of Brittney’s ambulance…surrounded by about 20 motorcycle cops. In almost the same breath the same reporter segued into the Senate Finance Committee and hearings about the economic stimulus package.
So I can’t turn the TV off if I want to know about the Senate…
I understand that she’s wildly popular with a lot of people who care what happens to her, but I don’t feel like it belongs in the news news.
I don’t think Walter Cronkite reported on some activity of President Eisenhower’s, then Eddie Fisher’s marriage to Debbie Reynolds ending, and then the Cuban revolution. It’s the blurring of those lines that bothers me. Brittney Spears’
trip to the hospital does not have the same impact or importance that the Fed lowering the interest rate twice in two weeks does.
Also, if Ben Bernanke were rushed to the hospital would there be a motorcade surrounding his ambulance? Were those municipal officers or a “private security team”?
cowgirl, that was a well-thought-out post and you bring up some interesting points. I just can’t go for it. You keep bringing up how “they took her children away” - she had plenty of warning that her children were going to be given to their father if she didn’t clean up her act. She didn’t seem to be overly concerned about her children when she was skipping the parenting classes she was ordered by the court to attend, or out partying and then blowing off the piss tests she was ordered to take. The courts don’t care if she is OMG Britney, they are going to look after the best interests of the children. I can’t say I have much respect for Federline, but he apparently was passing the tests and taking the classes and I haven’t heard reports of him flashing his package for the media to photograph.
How much of her headline grabbing behavior is planned? At least some of it. The last performance I heard about - at some music awards show I think - was widely panned. In her career field, you can - and will - be dropped like a hot potato if you don’t produce. When was the last time she put out an album that sold? Music industry execs do not have much of a memory. I think at least some of her behavior is trying to keep herself in the public eye - and like some neglected children, even negative attention is better than nothing at all.
I don’t watch TV, and I wouldn’t know one of Brithney’s songs if you played it for me. I do know that being admitted for psych reasons doesn’t mean shit if you don’t try to make use of the help being offered. I do feel sorry for her; I think she is in over her head and probably feels no one is on her side. But the media loves her!
Once again I refuse to take the responsibility for keeping this crap on TV. From October through April, I watch the news in the morning to see if it’s going to 70º or -10º at the end of the work day. I have searched for some morning news program that will not tell me about Britney Spears. If anyone knows of one, I’d like to hear it.
The last few years of her life may not have been stable, but they have certainly been comfortable. She’s been the toast of the town, going to the best parties, living in luxury, and doing all the best drugs money can buy. She made $8 million dollars last year by putting out a shitty album. I’d love that kind of instability and discomfort.
When I was her age, I was self-destructive and made a lot of bad choices. I learned a lot of hard lessons and (pretty much) grew out of it. The difference was I was living in squalor and got no rehab or private doctors. Hell, I was uninsured! I couldn’t have seen a doctor if I wanted to.
Fuck Britany. The only reason she’s still in the news is to distract us from the awful things that are currently happening and are about to happen.
gwendeeFor every news story everyone brings up that THEY feel should be the most important, I guarantee someone else will find a story fifty times more dire. If Ben Bernanke were rushed to the hospital, you’ve got to be CRAZY if you think the public wouldn’t know about it IN A SECOND. Our free $600 depends on it.
Yes, the ice caps are melting, yes the economy is collapsing, MRSA is devouring our school children, people are being murdered, the war rages on…but the fact is that I, at least, can not bring myself to focus on only the 100% serious all day long.
I’m reminded of a coworker who admonished me for reading the comics in teh daily paper saying, “there’s a war in Iraq and they’re printing comics.” Listen, if I didn’t have the comics, or stupid E! shows like The Soup to clear my palate from the increasing decline of western civilization, I’d be in the straightjacket right next to Britney right now.
I’d still do her.
Yeah, but with the comics or The Soup, you can see them or skip them. You aren’t watching some other show and blam, The Soup takes over for 5-10 minutes and then lets your other show come back on. The comics are in their own entertainment-related section of the newspaper, and a couple serious one-panels are on the editorial page, not pulling a pop-up routine in the middle of the business section.
That’s how I feel about the celebrity updates being stuck in with regular news shows. I can be watching the local network affiliates’ news shows at any hour of the day (and I do typically watch an hour and a half in the morning and 2 hours at night) or the major networks’ national news shows, and suddenly “zomg Britney’s craaaaaazy!” gets stuck in there. If they’d keep that stuff to Access Hollywood and Entertainment Tonight and shows like that, I’d be fine. Let me have my international news and election coverage and analysis on the national news, the “whoa, City Hall is really screwing up this time” and weather/traffic on the local news, and that’s it. I haven’t found a news show that agrees with my perspective, though.
I’m guessing at some point she relished the constant attention, but now, not so much.
Really? Man, can’t wait to get home now… I can’t really do a Google image search for “Sean Young” and “cooter” here at work. :eek:
THis is kinda what I thought I was saying. I’m not a fan of hers but I get that she’s got a lot of them and so stuff she does is news. I don’t even definitely wish for it not to be on the same show…but the economy and the election should be together and then someone should say “In entertainment news today…” before telling me about Brittney Spears, or Tom Cruise, et al. I am used to a sort of news heirarchy. Start with huge international stories, then national, then local “serious” news, then weather, then sports, then wacky local or human interest. Then Jeopardy.
One thing I’ve heard repeated often is that if I ran a 24 hour news station my definition of news would loosen up quickly.
Also, I missed mentioning in my first post that I was watching CNN, not Good Morning America or some other morning show where entertainers are routinely part of the show.
Let me know if you find one. All I get on the local news (where I want to hear weather and commute updates) is the biggest, ‘prettiest’ fire, the latest sex-related scandal, the latest one-sided RO, or the greatest single violent episode in the past 24 hours. Plus celebrity news. I agree with you, keep them to their own programs - Heath Ledger’s death should not “Breaking News” on CNN and should never be a lead story.