I Wanna Go (Chris Maars Piliero, 2011)

Britney's new video, I Wanna Go, continues in the vein of Hold It Against Me -- taking a song that hints little if at all to her ongoing love/hate relationship with fame, notoriety, the press, her old image -- and meshes it with a video overloading on those elements. Here she and director Piliero craft a pastiche of Old Brit references: skull Mickey Mouse shirt, makeup, hair styling and close-ups reminiscent of Lucky video, a Got Milk? parody, a reference to Crossroads, and likely others that I missed, in an attempt to recontextualize her media breakdowns and burn outs as a combination of pseudo-fuck you rebellion and the pent-up dissonance between the person she feels she is and the person the media/world perceives her as. Somehow the whole thing never quite comes together. As with many pop stars, her acting abilities are relegated mostly to facial expression and anytime she's required to emote with spoken lines, a certain flatness appears inescapable. The oddly literal reference to Half-Baked at the end of the press conference does nothing to enliven the situation.

Her coy stroll through fan groping, indecent exposure and cop seduction is better-handled, but still lacks a certain oomph -- neither filled with the manic, albeit reprehensible, energy of Avril Lavigne being a dick to some dude's girlfriend (whose terrible videos were clearly something of an inspiration for this one) nor an actually sleazy coat of grime that might add character to Britney's well-traveled road of public misperception. This is, I think, the biggest reason the video never quite gets off the ground. Unlike her first video for Femme Fatale, Hold It Against Me, she has retreated back into the mindset of blameless victim, forever at the mercy of a media attempting to twist her words and actions around, rather than the more ambivalent truth of the subject.

The physicality of Britney vs Britney in Hold It Against Me is replaced here with a much tamer fight sequence (full of bad, weightless CGI). If you're going to do a Terminator reference, I suppose paparazzi as unstoppable, bloodthirsty machines is as good a way to do it as any, but there's no real sense of dread or terror that the idea of Terminators are intended to instill. Like most of the other references, it feels like the director is nudging you in the ribs and winking really hard before moving on to the next bit. The Thriller reference is similarly unearned, which is a shame because, upon reflection (and with a little knowledge of Britney's real-life history) it suggests a somewhat tragic parallel with her own brief relationship with paparazzi photographer Adnan Ghalib. If I Wanna Go had stripped down some of the ideas and focused on this push-and-pull relationship, it could have been something darkly confessional and interesting. Instead, like almost everything else, it's a one-off that simplifies, rather than complicates, Britney's ongoing struggle with being Britney Spears -- and trying to figure out who that person even is.