Britney Spears, pop wonder and tabloid target

NEW YORK •The legal agreement barring Britney Spears from managing her own life and finances is now older than the pop star was when the public met her as an effervescent 12-year-old on Disney Channel - and controversy over who steers her life is starting to boil.

Spears, 39, has lived under the strict arrangement since her infamous unravelling, which in 2008 led a California court to place her under a unique legal guardianship largely governed by her father Jamie.

Now, a feature-length documentary on FX produced in partnership with The New York Times probes the popular narrative on Spears, who soared to global fame as a teenager on a burst of hits - including her breakout ...Baby One More Time (1998) - before a dramatic downfall saw her become a paparazzi punching bag.

The film emphasises the role of the early-2000s celebrity journalism machine in her collapse, depicting Spears as a relentlessly pursued media target - the blonde, bubbly, wildly successful American princess whose dirty laundry triggered the schadenfreude of a nation.

The documentary, Framing Britney Spears, suggests the performer who once ruled global pop was used by some of her handlers and pummelled to the point of emotional ruin by an exploitative media environment, in which images of her went for upwards of US$1 million (S$1.3 million).

The film employs the extensive cache of footage of the star who came of age as mediatised consumption of celebrity, including gossip blogs and reality television, exploded - and when mental health was taken far less seriously.

From her days as a spunky pre-teen on television show Star Search in 1992 to her infamous head shaving in 2007, the documentary traces a path that suggests a magnetic superstar who became voiceless in her own life, and whose image became everyone's but her own.

Prominent prime-time newscaster Diane Sawyer pushed her to explain why she "did something" to cause fellow pop celebrity Justin Timberlake "so much pain" in their high-profile break-up, a situation that saw Spears cast, as one interviewee put it, as "the school sl**".

During her prolonged mental breakdown that followed her 2006 divorce and custody battle, Spears was captured in petrol stations barefoot and driving with one son in her lap.

In another infamous scene, as her cousin begged photographers to leave, Spears took an umbrella and began bashing a paparazzo's vehicle.

"It was a money shot," that photographer says of the spectacle in the documentary.

Dr Moya Luckett, a media historian at New York University whose research includes celebrity culture, says the "cruelty" Spears experienced today is diffused across a social media landscape in which stars can curate their own images.

"You become your own producer," Dr Luckett said, pointing to stars like Taylor Swift and Beyonce who have seized the conversation on Instagram or by airing their own documentaries.

As Spears' legal battle picks up fascination, her fans - many of them in their 30s and 40s, who adored her in their youth - take her plight as their own.

"Everything that she goes through resonates with the kind of frustrations a lot of us have, in a neo-liberal world, where we're told you can do it all if you want to," Dr Luckett said. "And then find out that we really can't."

AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE