Stop Britney-ing Ariana

A history lesson because we've apparently learned NOTHING.

I don’t really know how much clearer she can be at this point. I just watched Ariana’s new video for Petal, and I’d like to take a moment to break it down for the folks who are feigning incompetence at the messages she’s trying to convey.

First of all, it’s very clear to me that Ariana made this video because she can’t get through to her critics in any other way. No matter how much she pleads for peace, every “concerned citizen” online seems to think it's their right to “worry about her” by making criticism of her body completely inescapable online. The absurdity of people thinking that’s their god given right is still baffling to me.

Clearly this army of critics has never experienced any level of notoriety or they would understand what it’s like to have the completeness of your reality colored by the court of public opinion deliberately misunderstanding you and refusing to leave you alone.

I don’t know what that’s like either, but Britney Spears does.

In a now viral video of a CNN interview with Britney from 2003, she is asked what it would take for the paparazzi to leave her alone.

She tears up, “I don’t know…I don’t know.”

The interviewer asks, “is that one of your biggest wishes?”

She breaks down crying: “yeah.”

In the early 2000s we watched as Britney fell apart, mentally, physically, and financially due to inescapable scrutiny and lack of privacy. We watched as she was taken under a notoriously exploitative conservatorship by her father. As her story became more evident, her fans fought, she fought, and she ultimately regained her agency over her life and her money, but the damage was done.

Fame and its unrelenting microscope pushed Britney Spears past her breaking point, and we lapped it up in the tabloids just like they wanted us to. It was only many years later, after suffering in silence and emotional suffocation that Britney finally got some sense of justice in her life and in the court of public opinion. It’s absolutely insane to me watching “well meaning” fools do the same thing to Ariana Grande right now. We have truly learned nothing.

I’ll reiterate, after watching Petal, I am truly not sure how much clearer Ariana can be to her critics. Here are the big, screaming loud symbols that jumped out at me. I think she made them so blatant even a very, very stupid person could catch them, but just in case:

1. FAME INC: This isn’t a coincidence or a generic name. When her character, Pepper, arrives at her first audition at FAME INC, Ariana’s not even making a complex metaphor here, she’s showing up trying out to be famous. She is met with men who are pigs. She is among every sort of woman vying to be famous. Her application is stamped: NOT GOOD ENOUGH. So she tries again.

2. “I don’t need someone to save me.”: A line she sings in an intimate shot of her face on screen. Again, she can’t be clearer. The people who claim to be helping are just making everything worse.

3. Showing up as Sandy from Grease: Anyone who has watched Grease as many times as most millennials have knows that the moral of the story is, “if the boy you want doesn’t like who you are, change.” It’s an absolutely horrible message, and that’s exactly what she’s trying to communicate by invoking Sandy’s image.

4. The cow outfit: She tries “sexy” in her next audition, showing up in a revealing outfit printed in cow skin and an egregious prosthetic breastplate like a drag queen would wear. She is implying that women undergo huge changes, even having surgery to be more appealing, and reducing themselves to objects for male attention. It’s important to note, the men in the repeating scene never change.

5. The final waiting room scene: The women waiting to audition are now dancing in pure exhaustion, perhaps a reference to the criticism Ariana received for looking frail in public, or simply because the process is in itself exhausting. To constantly change to try to meet the ever changing requirements of FAME INC is a losing battle.

6. The spoken criticism from the old men: The music pauses, and the pigs who will never have to change their ways to keep their part in the machine start flinging familiar criticisms at Ariana, most notably that even though she was rejected in all her previous iterations, they wish she would go back to the “old” her. Ariana is clearly saying that no matter how concerned anyone is pretending to be, no phase of her fame has ever been good enough for the public. They only like the old her in hindsight. They cannot accept her being a human who changes, grows, and yes, has a hard time.

7. The kill scene: The frame backs out to a very clear reference to Kill Bill, a pulpy film by Quentin Tarantino. He has had many eras, but Kill Bill is about a woman who seeks revenge on the people she trusted who betrayed her and tried to kill her. Tarantino is more recently associated with fantastical rewritings of historic tragedies in the form of satisfying revenge porn, like Inglourious Basterds rewriting the fate of Adolf Hitler and Once Upon A Time In Hollywood rewriting the Manson Family’s Cielo Drive murders. Perhaps Ariana is combining references to seek her own revenge in a way that could rewrite history.
   

   

   It’s worth noting she looks like Stephen King’s Carrie after the prom queen scene when she has the blood all over her face.

8. The meta of it all: Even as the director calls cut on the final shot, tells her she did a great job and that’s a wrap, she exits the building, and she’s still working at FAME INC. She’s found a way to make it work, but she has to speak in code to get her message out, and it’s been a long, grueling process.

When I speak about Ariana Grande’s critics, I mean the self-appointed “concerned citizens” claiming the moral high ground in “wanting the best” for Ariana’s health. She has asked them to stop, pled for them to stop, now made a video asking them to stop, and the comments on YouTube are still just as intentionally obtuse:

“Whos gonna tell her we miss her being healthy looking and not the old music”

“She’s is surrounded by enablers, Eating disorders are not a joke”

“I can’t even enjoy the video without thinking she looks sickly every second she is on the screen.”

I think people like to forget that famous people are people. She’s still just one tiny human on the same internet as everyone else. The “concern,” no matter where it’s coming from in people’s minds or hearts, is not working. Do you think she hasn’t gotten the message yet? She’s replying, “I’m doing my best. Please let me be a human and make my art.” We all deserve that, no matter what our bodies look like.

The twisted cognitive dissonance is the worst part, though. It’s as if the people screaming online that she’s too thin don’t want her to hear them; they want other people to agree with them, to belong to a majority that is in the right. Ask Britney Spears how that felt.

Actually, don’t, we already know.

Is Ariana too thin? Yeah, and I think she puts the camera super close to her face to show you, “I’m sick because of you. Please, please stop.”

If what you really want is for Ariana to not die, for the love of god, let her live.