Britney: The Unauthorized Biography: How do you solve a problem named Britney?
The mind is a meat machine,” said Marvin Minsky, an artificial intelligence researcher. “The brain’s functions simply aren’t based on any small set of principles. Instead they’re based on hundreds or perhaps thousands of them,” he goes on to explain. “In other words, I’m saying that each part of the brain is what engineers call a kludge — that is, a jury-rigged solution to a problem, accomplished by adding bits of machinery whenever needed, without any general, overall plan.” His conclusion concurs with that of François Jacob, a Nobel laureate in physiology, and Steven Pinker, Harvard professor and named by Time as one of “The 100 Most Influential People in the World Today,” in asserting that the human mind is indeed an example of the aforementioned kludge. However, there are those who dispute this.
Dr. Leonid Perlovsky is one of them, claiming that the idea that our minds are kludges — or, in his own words, “a diverse collection of pre-existing faculties and functions inelegantly adapted by evolution to work together” — is merely a metaphor for the “complex nature of the mind-brain” and “have no scientific basis.” According to him, it’s a lazy approach that oversimplifies the problem and thus gives inadequate answers, i.e. a “quick fix” solution. He believes that “the mind is optimal, but not in any simple way” and “has had billions of years to evolve optimally to solve a wide set of unknown future problems.”
Whatever the case, the case study presented in Sean Smith’s Britney: The Unauthorized Biography will not perhaps further Perlovsky’s belief that the mind is “the optimal device we know.” The author, whose previous credits include books on Robbie Williams, Kylie Minogue, Jennifer Aniston and Victoria Beckham, traveled to Mississippi and Louisiana, talking to the locals and even former boyfriends to solve the problem named Britney Spears.
On that very first visit (to Britney’s hometown), I discovered there were two Britneys,” writes Smith in his introduction, comparing the bifurcated parts as “squaring up to each other like two boxers preparing for a big fight.” There was the nice “small-town girl” from the Deep South that would answer, “Yes, ma’am” after being told by her first agent Nancy Carson to stop doing something; and then there was “the Britney Spears” (italics being one of the author’s favorite stylistic tics) who he describes as “the world’s most successful singer, smoldering sexpot and multi-millionairess, and an iconic figure for a generation.” He also reiterates that his glimpse into Britney’s bifurcated personality didn’t take “a genius in psychoanalysis; it was obvious.”
Given that the book details her humble beginnings, her climb to stardom and the subsequent public meltdowns following the collapse of her relationship to Justin Timberlake and her marriage to dancer Kevin Federline, it does seem to suggest that the two “Britney” personas that Smith extensively maps out were the result of haphazard construction, thrown together not so much by talent and ambition as by circumstance and luck. By tracing both, the author is successful at teasing out the contradictions as well as highlighting the charisma of its subject. She’s not that innocent, but to what degree was she still clueless?
With no access to the star herself or her immediate family, and despite his exhaustive efforts, Smith doesn’t really serve up anything that we didn’t know about Britney. From her pronouncements of being a virgin while she was with Timberlake (now known to be as truthful as that other famous person from the South, Bill Clinton, with his refutations of an illicit affair with Monica Lewinsky) to her losing custody of her children because of her erratic behavior, it’s all been heard before — and very publiclly. The fact that Britney’s been through bad times is only remarkable because we all know about it. Too much, actually.
Considering that Minksy’s famous pronouncement was made to make a point about the possibility of developing A.I., it’s worth noting that Spears fame gets its impetus from technological advances, even more than her idol Madonna’s ever did. Perhaps in Spears, we have been witness to the ascendance of a truly cyborg celebrity, whose popularity was fed on her real life being consumed when there wasn’t any music left to devour. If it’s true, as Mallarmé once said, “Beliefs are ideas going bald,” then “the Britney,” the only one we really care about, was only right in following suit and in the process — oops — just doing it again.
