What are we to make of this latest flap over a teen icon revealing herself as a potentially sexual being?
I was only dimly aware of Hannah Montana till the Vanity Fair scandal (if scandal is the word). Now it seems I can’t get away from her, which is, of course, the goal of marketing—to make something inescapable for the general public. There are elements of the incident that require less froth and more examination. The accusations of “whose idea was it in the first place and how was Mylie Cyrus manipulated?” are loud and in many ways naive.
First off, Hannah Montana is a Disney product. I don’t think we’re yet quite comfortable with the idea of a person—even a fictional one—being a “product” like a box of soap or a car, but this is indeed what the character is. Designed, engineered, and road tested, Hannah Montana is a money-making machine for Disney and the various participants in the show and franchise.
Pause for a moment and consider: Disney.
It is difficult to imagine a marketing machine that is better at what it does. Which means the chances of something being done with one of its properties that it (a) doesn’t know about and (b) doesn’t approve are next to zero. Especially when you add to that:
Vanity Fair.
Big magazine, famous magazine, a magazine people in show business lust to get into. In the vernacular, Lot A Bank there.
So we’re talking about two major corporate entities, huge public presence, who are involved—without a doubt contractually—in a presentation of a property. Again, the oddness of talking about a person as property is unsettling, but this is a show business idiom quite common. Agencies discuss “properties” all the time and they’re talking about musicians, actors, artists.
Throw into the mix Annie Liebowitz, who is arguably iconic herself. From the early days at Rolling Stone up through the present, Annie is a public figure. Meaning that, especially “in the business”, everyone knows what she does. She would also have been involved in the arrangements between Disney and Vanity Fair.
So far so good. Everyone knew what was going on.
Now, the photoshoot was crowded. Lots of people there. Including Mylie Cyrus’s parents. Not sure who mom is, but dad—Billie Ray—is an entertainment industry insider. He’s been around a long time. He has survived quite well. He knows the ropes. He is not a “stage dad” in the sense of not knowing what’s going on.
I’ve laid this out at some length to show how utterly unlikely it is that the photographs of 15-year-old Mylie in a pose more appropriate to a 20-something were an accident. That no one knew what was happening. It’s not like this was done in a basement studio, digitally, and the shots immediately posted to the web. Disney would have had to clear the shots. I cannot imagine it wasn’t in the contract that someone at Disney would get to look at them and say, one way or the other, whether they could be published. Of the two, Disney is by far the bigger gorilla—Vanity Fair was not likely to hold them over a barrel.
So what then is the Big Deal? And, if this is so inappropriate, why was it allowed?
Control over a teen-age superstar is doable. Look at Leann Rimes. Her burgeoning sexuality, while certain present and eminently marketable, was not “unleashed” till she was over 18. Her parents kept a handle on it. We can doubtless find other examples. Reese Witherspoon. Jody Foster. Helen Hunt. Even earlier, Annette Funicello.
(Though Annette is a curiosity—she never really stopped being a Mousketeer. Her emergent sexuality—blatant and impossible to get around—somehow failed to take her into “adult” consideration. Management may have been too tight and she remained—popularly—the girl on the beach who never went past the first kiss. This happens—actresses who have the audacity to “grow up” and find themselves trapped in an adolescent image. Sally Fields is a case in point. She went from Gidget to The Flying Nun, completely bypassing a mature sexual phase, and nearly remained stuck with it. She made a minor film—I forget the title—in which she appeared nude. In an interview, she admitted that the decision to do so was calculated to shatter the Gidget/Flying Nun image so she could then be taken seriously as an adult actress. The tactic might be questionable to some, but the result was a critically-successful career.)
Managing the property is the whole game here. And Hollywood (and Nashville, etc) have a problem with starlets like Mylie. Once they establish them as an icon for preteens to teens—what is called “tweens”—what do you do when they grow up and start acting like women?
Age here isn’t the issue. Let’s face it, sexuality strikes in the teen years, some sooner than others, and the limelight of a successful career seems somehow to advance the timetable. We are all-too-familiar with the meltdowns in instances where the transition is, well, bungled—Lindsey Lohan and Britney Speers are the poster girls of crash and burn.
What happens here is when the studios have a young woman shoved into a role who either rebels or outgrows it and starts doing things to escape the constraints, consciously or unconsciously. The ravening hounds of media parasites (yes, the metaphor is a bit mixed, but so are these predators) do all they can to capitalize on the disparities between public image and private reality.
And at 15, playing the woman is both natural (role playing, which we ALL do when we’re growing up) and attractive when it is clear that there is a certain amount of power in the pretense.
The thing that is missing—and this may not be Disney’s fault, or any studio’s or management companie’s fault—is that we do not have a viable transition phase for this. By that I mean, when you look around at the culture, we go from Kids to Adults overnight. The tipping point for young girls like Lindsey Lohan and Mylie Cyrus is precipitous and total. One day it’s 12 years old and all that that entails, then the next it’s thongs and late evenings at night clubs. (Not actually, but imagistically). The awkwardness of adolescence has no viable media presence unless it’s as The Nerd, which does no one any good when it comes to this. Between the ages of 13 and 18, kids are acquiring all this Stuff—hormones and hair and peer groups (rather than just friends)—and we have to learn what to do with it. But that is rarely ever discussed in the media.
Disney—through a character like Hannah Montana—can’t talk about emergent sexuality in a meaningful way because they have latched onto a demographic that is seen as protected. Hannah Montana appeals to 5 to 11 year olds. Hannah can’t meaningfully address the 14 to 18 year olds about dating, fashion, masturbation, birth control, drinking, peer pressure without either talking over the heads of her demographic or offending the parents of that demographic and losing her audience. By the time she can talk about those things, she will have been moved into adult roles as a mature woman, and by then her influence among those who might just need a positive role model for what they’re going through will be over because she’ll be pg-13.
And what about Mylie? Reports on her confused reactions make perfect sense from the perspective of a 15-year-old. Upon seeing the photograph initially, she thought it was really cool. She looked to the adults around her for validation of this assessment and apparently—at least from initial reports—got it. They were all in a brief bubble wherein the beauty of the subject and the treatment could be considered entirely on their own merits.
But then came the publication and the reaction of the fans. Not the same. So Mylie feels embarrassed. Anyone who has ever been a teen-ager or who knows them well can see exactly what happened. At that age, so much of what we are is dependent on the opinion of others—because we’re changing, because we haven’t figured it out yet—that what seems perfectly great in one circumstances becomes personally suspect in another. Mylie may well not know how to feel about it because her initial reaction seems to run counter to Everyone Else’s. And she doesn’t know yet how to ignore, how to filter, how to assess. The lines blur.
Instead of figuring out a way to create a character that can address this phase meaningfully, for now we seem stuck with these awkward and often scandalous transitions where the actress and the icon begin to part company. I do, however, find Disney’s reaction laughable. In my opinion, they knew very well what the shoot looked like and approved. The controversy may well allow them to “position” Mylie for a transition into a more adult role later, something they’ve tried to do with Lindsey Lohan. Scandal sells.
The problem is, in all this marketing and talk of product and property, everyone forgets that there is a real person involved, one who is really not as cynical and sophisticated as the image being created.
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