Music Video Analysis - Hit me baby one more time (Brittney Spears)

This music video for Brittney Spears’ ‘hit me baby one more time’ presents Brittney in many ways using different videography and media techniques like different shots, locations, costume and camera movements. This is done to represent the fact that she is a schoolgirl looking for teenage love, she depicts this by shooting this music video, which is a visual representation of her, this is embedded by the lyrics to the song.

In this opening in scene, Brittney is situated in class, using body language like tapping her pen and having her head in her hand to highlight the fact that she is very bored waiting for her lesson to finish. We get the idea that there is a clear difference between her and the teacher as she wears her hair in a stylish plat with bright colored hair ties which is used in contrast when the camera is turned to the teacher who has a different hair style (bangs) and is also wearing glasses which stereotypically means she is a ‘geek’ or boring while Brittney is seen as the ‘popular girl’ which many teens aspire to be like, therefor successfully representing her self in a very positive way and also selling herself to her target audience.

In this scene of the music video, there is a change in the mis en scene: change of location, change of clothing and a change in people in the background. Brittney is represented as young and attractive girl, which is why there seems to be many boys interested in what she is doing and trying to dance with her, she is represented as this due to the male gaze. Van Zoonen, a famous media theorist, argues that woman is heavily objectified and sexualized in the media (feminist theory), which is clearly seen in this scene and throughout the whole music video. She’s highly sexualized and again wearing bright colors to highlight the fact that she is a female. This is often used in the media and is argued by media theorist- Barthes (semiology theory) and it states that media producers will use signifiers to communicate meanings through signs (pink clothing in this case) depending on the connotations of these signs, in this case being that pink is deemed to be a ‘girly’ color.