The first time I watched Crossroads, I was sitting on the living room floor of my childhood home. I was a self-professed Britney Spears superfan, and I had collected her CDs, her dolls, and seemingly every magazine she had ever been featured in. But I’d missed catching Crossroads in theaters for reasons I can’t recall. Maybe I couldn’t convince anyone to drive me to the Cineplex when it was showing. Maybe it was the PG-13 rating, since I was a few months short of that age when it was released. Maybe my parents didn’t think it was “appropriate,” or whatever they told tweens back then.
What I do remember is that I had finally acquired a copy of the VHS tape, most likely from Blockbuster. My aunt was in town, visiting for the very first time, and in an early-aughts awkward moment right out of PEN15, she happened to walk into the room during the love scene between Spears’s character, Lucy Wagner, and Ben, played by Anson Mount.
I froze and kept quiet, hoping my silence would signal that I had zero interest in chatting about what was happening on the screen with an adult relative. But my aunt, much to my embarrassment, broke the ice, asking something to the effect of: “Why is she taking off all her clothes? She could still kiss the guy without getting naked.” She also argued, “You don’t have to give it all up right away.” It was more than just a suggestion to consider—it was a rule to live by.
Such was the case growing up in the late ’90s and early ’00s, a time when young women in the public eye, like Spears, were expected to be both sexually alluring and totally innocent. Spears’s 1999 Rolling Stone cover embodies this paradox: The 17-year-old lies on pink silk sheets with a phone to her ear, cradling a purple Teletubby (a reminder of her youth) while wearing lingerie (a signifier of her nearing adulthood). The cover can be identified as a clear turning point in Spears’s career. Her image became something that everyone had an opinion about—and would continue to have an opinion about, even to this day.
©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Young women were encouraged to show more skin, more cleavage, more everything. This was, after all, when low-rise jeans and boob jobs were as ubiquitous as flip phones and chat rooms. But at the same time, we were also encouraged not to, as my aunt phrased it, give it all up right away. The pop star industrial complex of the era shaped Spears into someone who could toe that line. “Britney describes herself as a churchgoing young woman with good family values and that … explains her success: the girl next door with just a small touch of the devil mixed in,” an Inside Edition segment that aired after the Rolling Stone cover hit newsstands proclaimed. In other words: You can be a tease, but don’t be a slut.
It’s no wonder that Crossroads proved to be somewhat of a lightning rod. Not only was the movie Spears’s acting debut—a high-stakes moment on its own—but it also mirrored where her career was at musically. This was three years after …Baby One More Time and two years after Oops!… I Did It Again. Her third album, Britney, leaned a bit sexier, pushing the envelope in terms of her public image. It came out in 2001, a year before Crossroads, and both the album and the movie’s soundtrack shared many singles, including “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” and “Overprotected,” two songs that spell out how she felt constrained by the image she was expected to maintain.
The plot of the film—which turns 20 today—is essentially a loose retelling of Spears’s own journey from small-town Southern girl to global superstar. In the movie (written by Shonda Rhimes), Lucy wants to reconnect with the mother who abandoned her, so she hitches a cross-country ride from her hometown in Georgia to Los Angeles with two childhood friends, Kit (Zoe Saldaña) and Mimi (Taryn Manning), and Ben, a brooding but handsome stranger. The plan is to stop off in Tucson, so that Lucy can find her mom, Caroline (Kim Cattrall, at the height of Sex and the City fame).
©Columbia Pictures/Courtesy Everett Collection
Along the way, the women discover secrets about each other and about themselves. They’re pushed out of their comfort zones—Lucy, an aspiring singer, belts out “I Love Rock ’n’ Roll” at a bar in New Orleans to raise money for repairs when their car breaks down. They’re also forced to confront the uncomfortable realities of adulthood for the first time: Kit’s fiancé isn’t who he seems; Mimi’s pregnancy ends tragically; Lucy’s mom has started a new life without her. They were all at various crossroads in their lives, which made the film especially resonant for Spears’s fans, who were growing up, too, trying to navigate girlhood into womanhood right alongside her.
While Crossroads holds a special place in the hearts of many Britney fans, critics largely panned the film, suggesting that it was nothing more than a vanity project for the pop star, and, therefore, she couldn’t be considered a serious actress. The Washington Post reporter Ann Hornaday called Crossroads “not a music video, not yet a movie, but more like an extended-play advertisement for the Product that is Britney,” writing it off as merely a ploy for Spears to make more money. “Because, really, after all the platinum albums and Super Bowl commercials and HBO specials have come and gone, every girl knows that it’s all about ancillary markets,” Hornaday wrote in her February 15, 2002, review.
Never mind that Spears’s ex Justin Timberlake didn’t experience nearly the mockery or pushback when he tried to embark on a similar pop star-to-actor path, starring in several film and TV projects. In 2009, he even took home an Emmy for Outstanding Guest Actor in a Comedy Series for an appearance on Saturday Night Live in which he throws shade at Spears during a skit. Playing his great-great-grandfather, who’s making predictions about what his descendent’s life in America will be like, Timberlake addresses the question of whether or not he and Britney had slept together while they were dating—a topic that weirdly dominated the tabloids of the early aughts. “I’d like to think that at first, he’ll date a popular female singer,” Timberlake said. “Publicly, they’ll claim to be virgins. But privately, he hit it.” Again: He won an award for this.
Frank TrapperGetty Images
The juxtaposition between the way the former couple’s acting careers were received illustrates the extent of the limitations Spears faced, both in terms of her ability to chart a new artistic course for herself and to simply make her own decisions. Some critics saw the potential in Spears’s acting skills at the time: Lisa Schwarzbaum of Entertainment Weekly gave the movie one of its few positive reviews, applauding Spears’s “sweetly coltish acting abilities” and announcing that she had “been delivered to the big screen safe and sound.” But it wasn’t until Spears’s cameo on the third season of How I Met Your Mother in March 2008 that she finally received some flowers for her comedic talents; though, she still struggled to be taken seriously by critics and peers alike.
Twenty years after Crossroads, Spears is just as prevalent in pop culture as she was then, with the conversation today more about Britney the person than Britney the pop star. The Free Britney movement is finally attempting to undo the decades of damage unfairly inflicted upon Spears, whose only crime was being young and beautiful in the spotlight. Now 40 and newly released from the confines of a restrictive conservatorship, she finds herself, yet again, at an intersection in life. And I’m so relieved that she’s in the driver’s seat.
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Rethinking Crossroads, 20 Years Later
Source: Filipino Journal Articles
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