What is Britney doing with her life?
SEC football and Britney Spears, the way we talk about women, and how the internet's greatest video gave me a new vocabulary for asking life's most important questions.
Frat boys anxiously tug at their Croakies. Sorority sisters chew at their nails. Moms in full crimson face paint pace the aisles. Dads clutch at rosaries, nurse nervous beers. The night is warm in late-2007 Tuscaloosa, and 90,000 sons and daughters and adjunct professors and students and senior citizens breathe the early fall air in anxious, gasping breaths. Their Alabama Crimson Tide football team has just kicked a field goal to take the lead over the Georgia Bulldogs in overtime. Sophomore Leigh Tiffin’s kick has briefly inspired joy in the Alabama crowd, but it’s joy with a catch – Georgia still has a chance. For a minute, as the Tide kicker trots off and the Bulldog offense straps on their helmets, the pro-Alabama assembly is tasked with facing this tension. Into the swirl of stress, Mike Patrick, broadcasting the game live on ESPN, speaks.
“I have an important question.”
“Go ahead,” Todd Blackledge, the color commentator on the broadcast, says.
The camera lingers on number 96, Georgia senior Brandon Coutu, who is kicking footballs into a net on the sideline for practice. His head is buzzed, and he’s missed two of his four kicks tonight.
“What is Britney doing with her life?”
ESPN airs a full two seconds of pulsing, nervous silence. Somewhere off in the distance, the University of Alabama’s marching band toots a rousing rendition of “Yea, Alabama,” the school’s fight song. Fans – you can’t see them, but you can imagine – in houndstooth garb wave crimson and cream pom poms and clap in time. The broadcast’s director doggedly stays with the shot of the Georgia kicker warming up, ratcheting up the stakes.
Blackledge finally gives in: “Who?”
“Britney!” Patrick doesn’t miss a beat.
Silence. Entire lives of children born to the agrarian world of Alabama sprout to old age. Dynasties rise and fall. Youngsters who learned the game from pappies who swore ain’t nobody ever seen nothing like those hogmollies on Bear Bryant’s d-line become the old timers on the front porch in straw hats spitting chaw and talking ball. On the sideline, first-year Alabama coach Nick Saban yawns. The cameraman – yeoman’s work, this guy – refuses to relinquish his watch on the kicker. Two seconds pass.
“Britney who?” Blackledge asks, incredulous now. His voice swoops up at the end like a cartoon owl.
“Spears!” Patrick delivers the surname of the singer with utmost glee. The pop star had recently negotiated a divorce, emerged from rehab, shaved her head, and performed a listless song at the VMAs. “What,” Patrick wonders, as the kicker sets up the ball for another go at it, “is she doing with her career?”
The television broadcast reverts to the standard horizontal view of the field, where Alabama’s defense has already lined up. The camera does not cut to the broadcast booth, where I can only assume Blackledge’s cheeks have flushed crimson and his eyes have grotesquely bulged, Blackledge contorting his face in all kinds of silent, unbroadcasted ways, vain attempts to get his 62 year-old play-by-play partner to make sense of all this.
Referees in striped shirts and white pants stand on the field and wait. An ambient cheer thrums through the crowd. Not a butt in the state of Alabama is seated. Two full seconds pass.
Patrick is the first to break, splitting into laughter. Georgia’s trundle of meaty offensive linemen trot onto the field. Blackledge’s entire universe has been turned upside down. He yearns to be re-tethered to this earthly plane. He practically begs, “Why do we care at this point?”
The referee blows his whistle. Saban frantically points out defensive assignments. The Heart of Dixie flutters like a hummingbird. Nearly five full seconds of silence. You can hear the fans, the hearts of dixie, the hummingbirds. Patrick seems to have taken a monastic vow. Hummingbird beats.
Blackledge’s voice warbles and cracks, a caricature of exasperation: “Is she here?”
Patrick’s dismissive laugh seems to misjudge who the crazy one here is. “Oh, I don’t think so.”
The Georgia offense gets into formation. If they don’t score, they lose the game. Sophomore quarterback Matthew Stafford gazes at the defensive alignment and adjusts his helmet. The throng begins to roar, a far-off and terrible rumbling. Blackledge hungers for gravity, the texture of the earth, the moist brush of grass. He can smell it. “Is she a football fan?” he asks.
“Oh,” Patrick says, his tone cool and professional, “I’m sure she is.”
Seconds later, Stafford hurls. A teammate catches. Georgia wins. The question lingers.
What is Britney doing with her life?
I was twenty years old, fully alive in the world, when Mike Patrick uttered his goofy non sequitur. I was oblivious to pop culture, or culture, or just the world, spending my time reading Donald Miller books on Starbucks patios, as I fail now to remember even a hint of the frantic Britney Spears urgency panting through everyday 2007 American life. But I’ve looked it up, refreshed my memory, and while Patrick’s question smacked of condescension (and incoherence!), the larger cultural conversation carried something more sinister.
It isn’t difficult to find articles from the era eviscerating Britney Spears, splashing our own failings and hatreds, disappointments and shames, upon her. Watching her suffer and insisting she deserves it – the scapegoat for our sins and the cause of them too. It’s easy to blame the burgeoning gossip blogs, the soul-bereft TMZ, or conservatives getting their Focus on the Family-emblazoned panties in a wad over Britney Spears, but everyone was in on it. Rolling Stone published an unreadably nasty cover story. The New York Times practically called her to the principal’s office, paddle reared back. It wasn’t the moral majority with their torches high on a witch hunt, it was all of us – rejoicing in the comeuppance of a woman we longed to see suffer.
We can call the vicious Britney schadenfreude our country’s standard hatred of women. Misogyny. Perhaps the reason that 2007’s seething Britney Spears bloodlust is difficult to recall is that as a culture we’ve learned – our loathing glazed and gauzed over by almost two decades of progress, feminist movement and #MeToo – to believe women, to listen to them, to witness the ways patriarchy has mistreated even (especially) our biggest stars. Or perhaps it’s just that, as Katie Heindl wrote last week in her superb newsletter, “we’ve created informal ways to hate women.” (“It’s fine to hate women for becoming too successful,” she notes, “because these things offer buffers, make women ‘fair game.’”) Our hatred today is coded, slippery. It’s difficult to conceive that when I was in college a journalist called Britney an “inbred swamp thing.”
What is Britney doing with her life?
Today we can ask – and answer – the question with a bit more care. We can re-remember the entirety of the Britney experience, what it must have been like to be her. We can talk about her cemented legacy as an artist (writer Meaghan Garvey’s retrospective review of Spears’s 2007 Blackout from earlier this year is stunning), a true musical and taste-making forerunner of Charli XCX (what was 2007 if not the brattiest summer of all?), Chappell Roan, and others. We can talk about how she’s a much-deserved gay icon.
We can ponder Patrick’s question, sure, and we can consider all the ways we’re asking it still, all the lives of the women we’re asking it of. We can ask the question, and better still, we could listen.
What is Britney doing with her life?
The video of this moment is one of the pillars of my personal life and joy. Playing it for friends who’ve never seen it before brings pure effervescent gladness. Todd Blackledge’s baffled, hooty shriek – Who?! – sustains me in moments of despair. But it’s the question that lives on. The oddly-phrased expanse of it. Her life!
My friends and I have played and played and played the video over the years, memorized it, discovered and rediscovered all our favorite parts again and again (“Spears!”), such that the oddball largesse of the question has become canon, repurposed and reimagined.
What is Britney doing with her life? now means How are you doing? When I ask my friend Josh, What is Britney doing with her life? I mean I wanna hear about you. It means Let’s talk and If you shaved your head that’s okay and Together let’s enter the incongruous, pom-pom-rattling cacophony of life.
It’s a cousin of Mary Oliver’s:
“What is it you plan to do / with your one wild and precious life?”
A teammate of Annie Dillard (The Writing Life):
“How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”
A backup dancer to the question Dillard poses in her memoir (An American Childhood):
“Have you noticed yet that you will die?”
Among my friends, What is Britney doing with her life? is love, encouragement, dream, liturgy.
On the broadcast, the game ends suddenly, and the telecast returns to football normalcy. No one ever answers Mike Patrick’s important question. It lingers, lives1. Which is great news for us, as we all may continue to wonder: What is Britney doing with her life — and we with ours?
One day, years later, Blackledge himself tipped his cap and called back to Mike Patrick’s eternal Britney curiosity.