I like a movie adaptation that has been true to the original novel, and so a favourite film to watch is The Age of Innocence. It is legendary director Martin Scorsese’s adaptation of Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel set in the late 1800s. Wharton won the 1921 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, making her the first woman to win the prize.[i] I could talk about the book for a week; it’s so perfect in its portrayal of the Gilded Age and its social common values, unwritten rules and norms in society.
The plot describes Countess Ellen Olenska’s ostracism after she has left an abusive and unfaithful husband to return to her home town, New York. The scandal in New York society which will not have her back into its fold is not that she is pretty and bohemian, but that she dared leave the abusive scoundrel. She is tainted by the result of her association; her trauma has made her a pariah. Her only salvation is that the highest member of that society, The Greater Man, gives her the nod so that the rest of her critics will have no choice but to let her in. And so steps in Henry van der Luyden: the most powerful person in New York society. He and his wife only mingle with people when they are trying to save society. After New York society snubs Ellen, the Van der Luydens invite her to a very exclusive party to show society that they support her.[ii]
Scandal is a pesticide that enables a tribe to maintain their ownership of a false cultural structure. In modern times a fall from grace is streamed to the public eye on digital devices the world over, not confined to whispers in nineteenth century dining rooms.
Mia-Marie Hammarlin of Lund University in Sweden argues that despite the claims that a modern scandal is manifested mainly through traditional and digital media, a careful analysis of the lived experience of this phenomenon – using in-depth qualitative interviews with the subjects of scandal – demonstrates that to fully understand it, we must take into account other forms of direct human communication, such as gossip and rumours, which flourish among the audiences as a response to the transgressional acts that started the scandal.[iii] She goes on to explain the transgressive acts of women who are accused are were firmly in the ‘moral midrange’, for while they had challenged common values, unwritten rules and norms in society, they had not broken the law. In other words, even today our society does not like a woman who escapes from the abuse of the Great White Man, or whom falls from grace because of that abuse or because of her association with the villainous. Society, its structures and codes, is that Great Man.
Britney Spears was made mad, bad, and dangerous by the Great Man who ought to have been her safest haven, her own father, and she escaped only to find herself stranded on a hostile stage with no apparent possible comeback. It doesn’t help that Britney is brassy, a poster child for White Trash, and that she has been withheld from the public for the decade in which she could have made the transition from teenage sex kitten to mature chanteuse. She disappeared in a mini skirt, chewing gum and asking us to forgive her for Oops! I did it again. If she had committed suicide in the midst of her trauma she would in all likelihood have been made a saint by her previous critics and our timelines would be flooded by Elton John lamenting that she had lived her life Like a Candle in the Wind, but she emerged and everyone wondered if she could possibly take back her life and regain the management and growth of her own talent.
What has happened instead is that one of the highest members of her society stood up and showed society that he supports Britney. Elton John stood up and sang with her. Sir Elton is not only the Greater Man, he is also the Queen of the Scene, and a man who knows the challenges of re-entry into life after trauma.
In September 2021, the New York Times released the documentary Framing Britney Spears, detailing her fight with her father. John watched it. “You forget she was the biggest star in the whole world at that time. And to see what happened to her makes me so angry. What happened to her shouldn’t have happened to anybody.”[iv]
Trauma is an event that overwhelms the mind, body, and soul. Traumatic events can result from natural disasters, wars, accidents, sexual assaults, and abusive experiences, just to name a few. Character assassination after trauma occurs with increasing frequency in the arena of social media, where the victim is tainted by association with the perpetrator: ‘she must be bad for that to have happened to her’ is the gauntlet she must run. And there is no shortage of schadenfreude in the covert hope that she will not find her feet to begin that run.
The three stages survivors move through in the process of recovery from trauma are: establishing safety, remembrance and mourning, and reconnection or re-entry. While some people can shift from a traumatic event with moderate ease, there will be many who experience re-entry anxiety – where the adjustment to the new-normal causes anxiety, insecurity, depression, and perhaps even re-traumatization.[v] They suffer sleep disturbances, eating difficulties, intrusive thoughts, worries, preoccupation with safety, recurring fears about death, diminished performance, irritability, apathy, sadness flashbacks of memories or traumatic experiences. A more formal clinical mental health disorder may be operating. This is when stories often end sadly. This is where Britney could have found herself.
“She’s been away so long – there’s a lot of fear there because she’s been betrayed so many times and she hasn’t really been in the public eye officially for so long. We’ve been holding her hand through the whole process, reassuring her that everything’s gonna be alright.” Elton John on Britney Spears.
Elton John’s act of kindness is subject for debate about myriad subjects, not least of which is the power of the endorsement of a respected peer.
I hate the new song, personally, firstly because I don’t enjoy pop music or Britney’s voice, but mainly because Elton John’s Tiny Dancer is a magnificent song, one of the finest rock ballads and a massively relevant song for me – the lyrics were once delivered in a marriage proposal I declined to marry the music man. Still, I hope and pray that Hold Me Closer becomes one of the greatest hits of all time, and that people everywhere think deeply about what has happened here. It is still a man’s world, and Sir Elton John is camping it up over it all and calling the shots with kindness.
REFERENCES:
[I] Nelson, Randy F. The Almanac of American Letters. Los Altos, California: William Kaufmann, 1981: 9. ISBN 0-86576-008-X
[ii] Killoran, Hellen (2001). The Critical Reception of Edith Wharton. Rochester: Camden House
[iii] Hammarlin M-M. Media scandals, rumour and gossip: A study with an ear close to the ground. International Journal of Cultural Studies. 2021;24(1):90-106. doi:10.1177/1367877919872511
[iv] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2022/aug/26/britney-was-broken-ive-been-broken-and-its-horrible-elton-john-on-helping-britney-spears-sing-again
[v] https://www.medpagetoday.com/publichealthpolicy/generalprofessionalissues/91911
＼ Get the latest news ／
[…] Elton’s helping hand? Despite my optimism a while back, I somehow doubt it. Read my post about it here and let me know what you think. The internet is trailer trash behaving badly, Jerry Springer on […]