Last week, amid the unrelenting media blitz surrounding her film debut, Britney Spears stepped into the world of motion pictures with the bland, clich‚d star-vehicle Crossroads. Spears joins the ranks of other crossover cohorts, including Mandy Moore, who starred in the excruciating melodrama A Walk to Remember last month, and Mariah Carey, who starred in last year's train wreck Glitter. What gives? Are these popular musicians treading a road less traveled? Hardly. The presence of popular music stars in film is nothing new, especially now, as the lines distinguishing different genres of popular media become increasingly blurred.
Popular music is undoubtedly interconnected with commercial culture, being routinely mass-marketed through CDs, dance mixes, radio airplay, MTV, live concerts, Web sites, advertising, press interviews and assorted paraphernalia. A pop star is a manufactured product, commodified by record labels, with an emphasis on commerce rather than creativity, and then sold to the unsuspecting adolescent. Thus when the manufactured pop star makes the transition to film, producers have a built-in audience, which equals built-in revenue. At the core, both popular music and film have become commercialized, and their stars interchangeable, merely well-packaged products.
This brings us quite nicely to Britney Spears. Spears is nothing short of a phenomenon and well on her way to becoming an American icon. At the age of 20, she has sold millions of records, graced the covers of countless magazines, appeared endlessly on television and toured the world promoting each of her three albums. Quite simply, Britney Spears is an empire unto herself (and the countless older businessmen and record producers who construct and exploit her "talent"). And now the empire is set to conquer the big screen.
Spears' new film Crossroads is about three young women who travel in different social circles: the nerdy valedictorian (Spears), the engaged homecoming queen (Zoe Saldana) and the pregnant girl from a trailer park who is called "trash" (Taryn Manning). They are childhood best friends, who, upon digging up a box of forgotten memories, come together and embark on a cross-country road trip with an ex-convict named Ben at the wheel. The film is teeming with shots of Spears in her underwear, songs from her latest album (Britney) and blatant product placements, (namely Pepsi and Herbal Essences shampoo). Britney described Crossroads to MTV Latin America by saying, "It's just really heartfelt. I saw it for the first time [the other day and] I was really, really excited. I was watching it like, 'Oh, my gosh!' I cried in it. It was so weird when I was watching it... I'm not me. I'm not Britney Spears. I'm this dorky girl named Lucy."
Britney has expressed concern over conflating the identity of her character, Lucy, with herself. She told Rolling Stone, "When I watched it, I was like, 'She's kind of mean sometimes. And boring.' I was like, 'Am I like that in real life? Ew!'" The fact that Britney (with her ninth grade education in tow) has trouble distinguishing herself from the character she plays does not bode well for her target audience of adolescent and pre-adolescent girls. Despite a PG-13 rating, I spotted many an eight-year-old girl and even a few toddlers in the audience of Crossroads. As their idol Britney is on screen getting drunk, pole-dancing and losing her virginity, all in the name of "acting," huge questions are raised about becoming a "woman" -- however, answers are few and far between.
Britney is, however, currently in the midst of talks with Hollywood executives regarding her second film, American Girl, which will tell the story of a young singer from Manhattan who embarks on a trip to London to find her long-lost father and reunite her estranged parents. Yet another groundbreaking plot line thrust into the forefront of American cinema and into the minds of young, nubile movie-goers. Good thing she snapped that one up before Christina Aguilera, or whatever pop-star pill they're having us swallow next.
