1 A Certain Sacrifice: What Was Britney Telling Us When She Cut Her Own Hair? You do have to sacrifice your freedom when you're in this business, but it's a small price to pay for all the good. -BRITNEY AND LYNNE SPEARS Britney Spears Heart to Heart (2000) And shall my life, my single life, Obstruct all this? -IPHIGENIA IN EURIPIDES' Iphigenia at Aulis i. Hey, Britney, I hear you want to lose control At 7 P.M., Tarzana, California, was getting dark.* It was that sinister time the French call entre chien et loup, when the world turns onto its wilder side. Esther's Hair Salon had shut for the night. That didn't stop Britney Spears.
She strode up to the door and demanded admission. When Esther Tognozzi recognized the singer, she opened the shop. Britney Spears entered, trailing long, mucky, black locks and, behind them, a couple of tall bodyguards. In Tognozzi's account, Britney comes across as solemn. She asked the hairdresser to shave her head. The hairdresser said that she would rather not, and proposed what she later called "less drastic solutions." She was concerned about being sued, but seems unintimidated nonetheless, and said, "Please, let's not have a hormonal moment." Still, "She was on a mission," said Tognozzi.
"She had made up her mind that she was shaving her head before she came in." So what happened next was completely up to Britney Spears. Tognozzi even tried good-cop interrogation techniques to make her reconsider, such as talking about babies; but babies have always been a tricky subject for Britney. According to J. T. Tognozzi, Esther's husband, "She grabbed the shears and just started shaving her head." As she did so, a crowd gathered outside to watch. When she was halfway through, like a monk with a mullet, she turned to her audience, some of whom had cameras ready, and beamed a sustained smile.
It is that smile that has convinced so many, including Esther Tognozzi, that the whole thing was a per for mance, a publicity stunt. If so, was Britney seeking publicity for its own sake, or trying to tell us something? It led others to speculate on the cultural history of women with shaven heads. One journalist, Patrick Barkham, invoked Joan of Arc's spirit, and another, Lisa Appignanesi, recalled Théroigne de Méricourt, the courtesan who became a symbol of French revolutionary fervor but who ended up in an asylum, bald as a victim on the guillotine's scaffold. Barkham offers the precedent of Greek slaves. Does any of this explain why Britney Spears did what she did that night? Was it something apparently spontaneous, and yet for public consumption, along the lines of the sex tapes that are leaked with the connivance of those having the sex? Britney has been capable of similarly desperate ploys, and, according to Vanessa Grigoriadis, went so far as to conceal the existence of her second child, Jayden; as the journalist put it, she was "hoping for a big payday."* (So no wonder she wasn't going to talk to a hairdresser about babies.) It might well have been a performance. But did it really mean that much? Maybe she really needed a haircut.
Esther Tognozzi thought so, and pointed out that Britney had "about four inches" of real hair beneath her extensions: "Maybe she just got sick and tired of all the extensions and chemicals in her hair, and maybe she just want[ed] a new beginning," she said. "It's only hair. It grows back." This sounds pretty convincing (if inconsistent with the other Tognozzi theory). But was it so urgent that Britney needed to batten on Esther's locked door when she was sweeping up clippings or counting change? It's worth seeing if there's anything in those comparisons with the tonsures of the past. She might not have said, "I want to go with a Théroigne de Méricourt look for a bit," nor have had Joan of Arc much in mind. But the urgency of it, and the openness of it, does suggest something subconscious and irrational-Britney losing control. So either her head needed a fresh start, or else she really was trying to tell us something.
To suggest that Britney's gesture was an attempt to communicate with her audience is to make stalkers out of all of us. By this definition, fans and detractors alike would be looking at celebrities' actions and constructing intimate messages. He's wearing that tie. It's the tie I like best on him. He loves me back. But is this so silly in Britney's case? What if we could, collectively, be stalkers? In so many ways, society can and does act as a faceless beast. It is how we come to call ourselves a society. Émile Durkheim, the French thinker often considered to be a founding father of sociology, wrote, "It is through common action that society becomes self-aware.
The collective feelings and ideas that determine its unity and character must be maintained and confirmed at regular intervals." If this weren't true, fame wouldn't work. People are famous when lots of people know about them. It helps if the famous people wanted the fame in the first place; but once they're in our hands, we decide just how famous, and for how long. Certainly this was true when the word was invented. In Latin, fama has a spectrum of meanings, not many of them polite.* It is closest to the idea of Rumor. The word itself comes from the Greek word pheme, meaning speech; and the Greek word for fame is kleos, meaning something heard.
This allows for a whole game of telephone, and of misunderstandings; but ultimately, the result is some kind of consensus. "Gossip" is one English equivalent for fama, although there's also a sense that this is the kind of gossip crowds agree to be true. In Virgil's Aeneid, when the African queen Dido begins her affair with Aeneas, up pops Fame to spread the news. Her techniques are as lethal as TMZ: No other malice goes faster than fame; growing with movement, strengthening as it goes, first little, fearful, soon striding the winds, it treads the earth, but hides its head in clouds . the horrid huge monster has many wings beneath which, strange to say, are vigilant eyes, and each eye has a pricked ear, tongue and voice. Before long, a story coheres, and Fame has done her work: "Foul fame spreads this to people's mouths passim." This creature was doing its work as it spotted the happenings in Tarzana and strode about the globe; the only difference these days is that it doesn't start off little and fearful. Once a tale has been uploaded or bought by a network, Fame has all the confidence it needs.
And then, even quicker than before, the same talk is on mouths everywhere. Before long, we reach a kindred feeling about Britney; we feel like society as Durkheim defined it. We can feel as one, and we feel as convinced as a stalker that what we feel is true. We could do this with the guidance of the media, who have been apt to link her action with suicide attempts. We could do it by consulting bloggers who believe these reports. We could do it by blogging for ourselves. And we could end up agreeing with whoever it is on YouTube, calling him or herself saobsidian, whose comment on the footage of Britney's number-one cut is, "Don't you love seeing someone self-destruct in the fast lane? muaHAHAHA!" So we think (don't we?) that Britney Spears is telling us something. She might be; she might not be.
The matter seems to be out of her control. We pick up the signals emitted by luminaries, and do what we want with them. What great ones do, the less will prattle of. The result is myth. But we have to ask ourselves what myth is. Myths, after all, tell us little about anything that really happened in the universe ever, and yet they do tell us almost everything about ourselves. They tell us the grim truths about humanity that we would struggle to express otherwise-those desires so unspeakable that we have to evolve a kind of code. And if we link Britney's haircut to her self-destruction, what are we learning about our own needs? Our needs might not always be like those of the ancient Greeks, those shavers of slaves; but they knew a lot about control and the irrational.
They were at once sophisticated thinkers and prey to primitive urges. They managed to analyze the disturbing rituals and actions of the past, and to preserve vestiges of them. And in common with other societies, they placed enormous importance on hair. ii. Like a virgin In the age of legends and heroes, there was a young mortal man called Hippolytus, who hated the idea of sex. He poured all his energies into hunting. Aphrodite, the goddess of love, took such offense at this that she accused him of "consorting with Artemis," the goddess of hunting, and of not having sex, and quickly resolved to kill him. Artemis could do nothing to stop this; but when the hero's body lay heaving its last, having been gored by a bull from the sea-a symbol of bottomless, surging energy-she offered him a lasting fame.
That fame was to take the form of a cult: To you, poor man, instead of these travails, I give great honors in the Trozen town: throughout deep time, before their wedding days unyoked maidens will cut their hair for you; the great grief of their tears shall be your tribute. In his play Hippolytus, the tragedian Euripides slips in this passage to explain an ancient custom his audience would have known about, and he is linking the practice to.