Psychoanalytical drive-by: Britney & MTV

I caught a bit of the opening of the VMAs tonight. These are the lengths I will go to avoid watching these fucking Giants.

Truthfully, I was watching with my parents, and my dad was flipping around, so I didn't get to see the whole thing. But I got the idea, I think, and the Giants joke still works, so I went with it.

Through the pre-show, everyone was making a big deal about Britney Spears' opening performance. It seemed like every red carpet interview had to contain the same two questions: Isn't it awesome that "we" (MTV) are in Las Vegas? and Isn't it awesome that Britney's BACK!? Everyone had nothing but goodwill for her, and everyone said that they were completely confident that Britney would be able to return to her former glory (even though it was completely obvious they were lying). But the point is, the official MTV point-of-view, as expressed by their whatever-they're-calleds (correspondents sounds way too official) on the red carpet was "Britney's back and she's gonna do great and I sure hope she does great because good for her this will be FUN!"

(As a side note, what a fucking train wreck John Norris has become. Serena Altschul is a regular contributer to CBS Sunday Morning and this guy is almost 50 and he looks like Fall Out Boy's roadie. That said, at least he's not doing disgustingly manipulative sentimental puff pieces on ESPN like Chris Connelly. If I ever see him crossing the street in Bristol, I don't care if he's giving that fucking autistic basketball player a piggyback ride, I will not brake.)

Anyway, Britney came out and did her thing, and for the most part it looked to my untrained eyes and ears like basically the same as any other Britney Spears performance. Clearly not singing, barely dancing, etc. She wasn't wearing very much, which was a little bit of a departure. When she first became famous, it was a big deal that she was--for the most part--fully-clothed (the whole creepy schoolgirl thing). And then, she took off her clothes at the VMAs (?) and that got everyone excited again, because now she's taking her clothes off! But a while ago, she reached that point where everyone's seen everything. That aforementioned time she took her clothes off would be impossible today; to try to pretend to be holding something back at this point would be laughable.

I'm no Britney fan, obviously, but it all made me feel a little sad, and very bad for her. Because she really can't sing, and most of the time she doesn't even try. I mean, she was clearly lip syncing--how can she make a triumphant return if she's just lip syncing? You're not going to win anyone over with some lazy dance moves and a loud vocal track blotting out your wheezing and panting. Someone with a voice could have pulled off the whole "silencing the critics" narrative with a bone-shaking vocal tour de force; Britney doing the same old tired routine only with no sexual tension anymore isn't winning anyone over. She had no idea, of course, which is what made it sad. It felt like Carrie. She was giving it all she's got (which, unfortunately, isn't much), and even while MTV is ostensibly "celebrating" it, at the same time they're making her the butt of this meta-joke. It was kinda like letting Paris out of prison early--the whole point all along was to throw her back in and make things even worse for her.

Britney's bucket of blood came in the person of Sarah Silverman, who came onstage right after--like, seconds after--no doubt coached to make jokes about the "triumphant return" we had just seen. Which is exactly what she did, right away. In addition to being powerfully unfunny in classic Silverman fashion like a splash of Listerine to the eyeballs, the routine was pretty poorly conceived--a classic example of not knowing your audience. The crowd was full of celebrities, of course, who were probably made a little uncomfortable by the spectacle. I don't want to read too much into it because maybe Britney just had a lot of friends in the room and, again, powerfully unfunny, but it's not hard to imagine that they saw how easily Britney's crash could happen to any of them. In trotting out Silverman to puncture Britney's performance probably before she even got back to the dressing room, MTV not only took the coward's way out of any trouble by refusing to take responsibility for their content (if/when Britney fails, they say "Look! We didn't like it either! That's why we got Edgy Comedienne Sarah Silverman to make fun of her!"). In using Silverman to cover their asses with the cool kids, MTV showed too much of its hand--the machinery of building these flimsy superstars to profit later from their collapse. I mean, Britney Spears can disappear from the face of the earth, for all I care, and we'd probably all be a lot better for it, but I infinitely prefer her misguided sincerity to MTV's empty, craven, destructive cynicism. I'm barely exaggerating when I say that this is the kind of shit that's running our generation into the ground.

Some poor sap will probably call Silverman's performance "ballsy" for going after someone who had just left the stage. But it was completely gutless. Britney is a worthy target for only the most hackneyed and pitiful, and that's what Silverman proved herself to be, if there was any question before this. But that is completely overshadowed by the utter cowardice of MTV, the "you didn't really enjoy that, did you?" bullshit they love to whip out at every opportunity. And the sad part is how perfectly it works either way. They're probably going to get away with it. If Britney's performance turned out to be an abject disaster (and make no mistake about it, this is what they wanted more than anything), that's why they have the "integrity" to invite Silverman to "call them out on it." And in the unlikely event that Britney succeeded, well then the cheery MTV pre-show has already told you how much they were hoping that she would do well (ha) so what could be better? And Silverman, she has integrity, she's gonna say what she's gonna say and we can't stop her, and she's a loose cannon anyway and we don't really like her anymore either. (do you?)

If there is one way this plan could have failed, that might be exactly what happened: Britney's uninspiring return (maybe I just don't have the ear for pop music, but I think "uninspiring" is being pretty generous) coupled with Silverman's bombing. The incongruity between what MTV thought we should have felt (LOL what a disaster) and what we actually felt (aw man, now I feel bad, don't kick a girl while she's down) doomed them. Silverman's chilly reception may well have been nothing more than the result of trashing a (kind of) struggling entertainer in front of a lot of entertainers, or the result of all the wrong jokes. But I'm hoping we've just become weary of MTV's parasitic game of set-em-up-and-knock-em-down. The last thing MTV wants to do is relinquish this ironic distance and actually take responsibility for the utter trash they put out there--they would have died out five times over by now if their "credibility" wasn't derived from pissing all over themselves every couple of years and pretending to be above it all.

Maybe MTV's gonna have to do something else to survive--like, actually enjoy things, God forbid, and without a hateful little wink before the curtain closes so they have to take responsibility for the utter trash they put out there. Probably not, but at least tonight, that conspicuous absence of laughs was a balm to my soul.