The Genius of the System

Maura's suggestion that a future Britney video involve dolphins, along with the impressive crappiness of the "Gimme More" video, leads me to a modest proposal. If producers can seize upon Britney's image to make brilliant songs (as, critics tell us, they are doing), then why can't directors?

Therefore, I suggest we get Richard Kelly to make a kind of sequel to GnR's Use Your Illusion video trilogy, but with Britney's Blackout. A brief outline:

1) "Gimme More" - Britney, pale and glassy-eyed, lies on a blanket in the desert, wearing a binkini. As she rises, we see that all around her lie corpses rotting in the blazing sun.

Quick cut to Britney in an SUV, driving down Sunset at night. A man lies in the backseat, be-stubbled, who could pass for either Justin or K-Fed; an empty baggie sticks to his fingers. He rouses himself and leans over the frontseat. When Britney looks in the rearview mirror, he appears to have fangs. And a cape. And some sort of medallion.

Cut to a dance sequence, filmed inside the TWA terminal at JFK. Britney and a group of nearly identical-looking dancers all wear Donna Reed outfits (poofy dresses, pearls, heels, etc.). The choreography is a mix between tae-bo and a hoedown. This is intercut with Britney and Justin/K-Fed speeding toward a fault that's opened in the middle of LA. Justin/K-Fed tries to warn Britney, and gets increasinly desperate, screaming in her ear and grabbing her arm. At the same time, we see from above that an airplane has lost control and is tearing toward the exact spot where Britney is about to go into the bowels of the earth. The dancers all kick off the high-heeled shoe on their right foot directly at the camera, which swooshes down the line. Phantasmagoric toddlers float across Britney's field of vision. In the airplane, the pilots are eating Tofutti Cuties, seemingly unaware of their impending doom. The dancers fall to their knees, throw their heads back, and stick out their chests. Britney's car sails off the cliff and is hit by the nose of the plane. In slo-mo, we see the pilots waving jauntily to Britney. At the last possible moment, she and Justin/K-Fed launch out of the sunroof, with Britney growing wings and fluttering up into the now-peaceful night. As water floods the TWA terminal and the dancers form into something that looks like a cake in the overhead shots, Britney releases Justin/K-Fed, and he is caught by two cherubic angels, who ferry him gently to earth. Britney lands in the Hollywood Hills, where a tractor is on fire, for some reason. The dancers light sparklers. Maya Rudolph gives a thumbs-up.

2) "Piece of Me" - The video opens, sans music, with a shot of the Vegas Strip. As the song begins, all the lights blink on and off in unison with the beat of the song; when the lights are off, the people disappear. Britney walks into shot from behind the camera, wearing a wedding dress and carrying a bunch of roses in her swinging right arm. She walks confidently straight down the middle of the road as the camera cranes up. Now the lights are only on for one beat out of four, but when they are, the people are noticing Britney, pointing and taking pictures. The camera settles to a stop at a high angle and we can see that at the end of the strip, visible only when the rest of the lights are off but illuminated a brilliant neon white, is a small chapel. The camera crash-zooms in, and standing in front with his hands clasped piously is Rupert Murdoch, in a priest's outfit. Seeing Britney, he smiles a toothy smile. His teeth are buttons from a touch-tone telephone.

The dance sequence begins, taking place inside the main newsroom of the new New York Times building. The coed dancers are dressed in His Girl Friday outfits; if possible, actual New York Times writers and editors are used. Up front and center, Britney pretends like she's operating a hand computer like in Minority Report while, in the background, the dancers execute an acrobatic routine between the two levels of the newsroom, bouncing off trampolines that have been put in the cubicles, vaulting over the handrails on the upper level, and swiveling in and out of the conference rooms. When Britney turns, we see she has "KISS SLUT GIRL" written on her bare back in sharpie.

In the chapel, Britney walks agressively toward the altar but is spun around by something running past her and snatching the roses from her hand. She looks on with confusion as a leprecheun runs in slow motion out the chapel doors; Rupert Murdoch maintains his beatific smile, and once the leprechaun is past, he raises his right hand and gives Britney a fluttery wave. He is joined by all the nightly news anchors (except Jim Lehrer), who are also wearing religious clothes, and they perform a sort of Vaudeville kickline. Britney stomps her heel on the floor and the chapel rumbles. The anchors slink out, chagrined, and Rupert takes his place at the altar, adjusting his collar and regaining his composure.

This begins to be intercut with two different sets of images. In one, Britney is dressed in her Mickey Mouse Club outfit, which is torn and dirty, and slumps in an alley as rain falls. In the other, Britney lies in a fancy kitchen in the middle of the night as lights flash outside, blood running down her throat. We see a pair of male hands shaking. The dancers all gather on the main floor and form a flying V, with some dancing on the cubicle walls and others perched on the bannisters. Britney is joined at the altar by a fat, ugly man wearing a pinstriped suit and a monacle. She looks at him with horror, but Rupert performs the ceremony, and with a grand gesture, opens the back wall of the chapel to reveal a concert stage and a screaming mob of fans. He holds out a headset mic and we watch from Britney's POV as she puts it on. From the crowd's perspective, we see that she's now wearing the bikini we saw at the beginning of the first video. The lights rise to a whiteout and we cut to the house, where the camera turns to reveal that the person standing over Britney is a giant baby, with manhands. Justin/K-Fed bursts through the door in his Dracula outift and does an absurdly exaggerated double-take.

3) "Get Naked (I Got a Plan)" - Britney, dressed in Flashdance regalia, stands alone on the deck of a whaling ship. She tries to do a dance to the music but keeps missing her steps and falling over herself when she's not ambling listlessly across the floor. In the clouds, Ally Sheedy appears and shakes her head sadly. A siren flashes and the deck opens up, plunging Britney into a giant cube of petroleum jelly. She falls through it and lands on the darkened streets of a Japanese city. No one recognizes her. She gestures desperately to the passers-by, but when she does, they go wide-eyed and seem to have seizures. The seizures resolve themselves into something like dance moves. As she proceeds down the street, the people who start dancing get more and more out-of-control until they finally clutch their eyes and scream in pain as their skin tears off, and they fall to the ground, smoking. The camera cuts to an overhead shot and zooms out to reveal that the people who started dancing caused the people near them to start dancing, who then infect the people near them, and from a shot above the buildings it appears as concentric circles of smoking bodies, with Britney's brilliant blonde hair as the center. She turns desperately, trying to deny the horror of what she's inadvertantly done. She closes her eyes, shakes her head, and sprouts wings again. She ascends into the sky, trailing the bodies of those she's killed like a flock of birds. As they cross the Pacific, she can see below her dolphins having really dirty sex. They smile and wave to her with their fins. A long shot shows Britney at the point of this cloud of corpses.

She reaches Los Angeles and flies over the whole city, now in ruins and cracked down the middle. Its denizens dance madly in the street until they, too, fall skinless to the ground. Their bodies float gently upwards to join the cloud. Britney stops at the edge of a desert, face-to-face with another winged Britney. Other-Britney gestures and the corpses fall to the ground, scattering themselves around the dry, cracked earth. They both look down to see Britney in a binkini from the first video. The two winged Britneys nod at each other and hold out their hands as if they were controlling puppets. All the corpses and bikini-Britney rise jerkily to their feet. In a shot of binkini-Brit, we see next to her the corpses of two small children. From above, we watch as winged Britneys choreograph a grand dance routine. As the song ends, we see a closeup of binkini-Brit, still glassy-eyed and pale, grinning a hideous grin.

Labels: blackout, britney, richard kelly, videos

posted by Mike B. @ 11:09 PM 6 Comments