A few thoughts on this Miley Cyrus brouhaha:
Do you suppose all those photos last week were cleverly leaked to take some of the heat off of this picture? After all, I’m sure her “people” knew that the magazine was on the stands this week, and this photo at least has the “cred” of being an honest-to-goodness photo shoot by Annie Leibovitz.
It wouldn’t surprise me a bit. Billy Ray and his teen puppet superstar daughter have quite obviously learned a lesson from the media buzz that happened last year when a nude picture of Vanessa Hudgens appeared on the Internet. The lesson was that you could survive that sort of publicity if you could make the public believe you were appropriately remorseful but still basically a good person, and Disney might not fire your ass back to Tennessee if you got out in front of the bad press. By contrast, all the wall-to-wall coverage of Brittney, Paris and Lindsay made it clear that these young women were not the least bit sorry for their skank-ass behavior and were likely to keep doing it until the money ran out, the judge put them in jail, or they were found dead in a puddle of their own vomit.
Being associated with Disney may make you a star when you are 15, but it can be an extremely hard monkey to get off your back when you are 21. Or 35. Or 60. Consider Annette Funicello or Tommy Kirk. In fact, child stardom in general is so often a curse that hangs over the life of a person that one wonders why people will even allow their children to begin working in show business. Vanessa Hudgens can claim otherwise if she wants, but her naked photos for her “boyfriend” were a shot across the bow for Disney that she could have a career without them.
Billy Ray Cyrus might be a one-hit wonder as a musician, and he couldn’t dance his way out of a paper bag, but my guess is that he’s strategized his daughter’s career a few steps ahead. They are definitely at the stage where she needs to establish “Miley Cyrus” and start downplaying “Hannah Montana”. They also have to begin looking beyond the little girls who were the initial fanbase and start making overtures to the older teen audience, who won’t go for that cutesy crap. Show a little skin, leak a few pictures that promise a lot more than they deliver, hold a press conference where the star gets to be contrite and sincere, and you’ve officially crossed the threshhold.
The Disney people know that their target demo never changes, even though the specific people in that demo grow out of it, so they are already looking beyond Miley Cyrus. At the moment they have put some effort into a girl named Selena Gomez, who actually had a small recurring role on “Hannah Montana” as a rival teen singer before being given her own sitcom. In addition to the show, she’s also on her way to becoming yet another singing teen idol thanks to Radio Disney. In fact, this Conde Nast Portfolio article talks about how Disney has decided to use the “Hanna Montana” model to clone teen star after teen star. We watch a LOT of Disney Channel in our house, and there’s absolutely no subtlety in what the House Of Mouse is up to.
Personally I don’t think this particular picture of Miley Cyrus is all that flattering. She’s only pretty to an average degree in the first place, and this picture doesn’t suit her at all. I also don’t buy into the “OMG, it’s so OFFENSIVE!” outrage, because our culture LOVES this sort of thing. We go so far out of our way to oversexualize young children that there are even tales of mothers taking their 8-year-old daughters for bikini waxing. So I call bullshit and say that this is all just so much intentional manipulation on the part of Team Miley.
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