{"version": "1.0", "type": "rich", "title": "sad that Britney Spears lives in a world where\u00a0\u201cBritney Spears\u201d does not exist.", "author_name": "kontextmaschine", "author_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "provider_name": "kontextmaschine", "provider_url": "https://kontextmaschine.com", "url": "https://kontextmaschine.com/post/161917760213/", "html": "

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sad that Britney Spears lives in a world where\u00a0\u201cBritney Spears\u201d does not exist.

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anyone else can say\u00a0\u2018it\u2019s Britney, bitch\u2019 and achieve a certain effect on the listener that Britney herself cannot; she remains isolated, aloof.

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in the scenario depicted by \u2026Baby One More Time in which Britney Spears plays a besotted schoolgirl,\u00a0\u201cBritney Spears\u201d does not exist, otherwise her classmates would immediately stop their synchronised backup dancing and say holy shit, that\u2019s Britney Spears.

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this is in stark contrast to I Want It That Way, in which the Backstreet Boys appear to their fans\u00a0\u201cin character\u201d, trying to collapse the distinction between reality and musical fantasy.

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Ocean\u2019s Twelve attempted to have it both ways by having a character played by Julia Roberts pretend to be Julia Roberts, implying that \u201cJulia Roberts\u201d exists in the world portrayed by Ocean\u2019s Twelve. However the movie\u00a0\u201cOcean\u2019s Twelve\u201d does not exist in this world, otherwise the characters would say wait, isn\u2019t this just what happened in Ocean\u2019s Twelve?

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Mel Brooks went one step further and took advantage of temporal anomalies to place a VHS copy of the movie \u201cSpaceballs\u201d within the movie Spaceballs itself, allowing the characters in the movie to gain insight into their own future, though they remained curiously incurious about the revelation that they were merely figments of the script writer\u2019s imagination.

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all of our minds contain a reference to \u201ccelebrity performer Britney Spears\u201d, but the mind of Britney Spears does not; we can never be her, and indeed to be her would be to lose her.

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