A photographic collision of stars, in living color
What happened when Miley Cyrus met Annie Leibovitz is really no surprise
The whole Miley Cyrus/Annie Leibovitz business - and business is the right word - comes down to a simple misunderstanding. Leibovitz took a photograph for Vanity Fair of a famous person. What the people who got so upset by it saw was something else: a photograph of a famous brand name.
People change their looks all the time. Madonna (another Vanity Fair favorite) has made a career out of it. And people especially change their looks when they're 15, as Cyrus is. Even if they don't want to, they have to; biology sees to that.
Brand names rarely change their looks, however, and when it's a brand name as popular as Hannah Montana, the character Cyrus plays, incremental change is a matter of great and tortuous deliberation. And this is a brand name that's earned the right to deliberation: The
If the accompanying VF article is to be believed, the pose was Leibovitz's idea. "That's what she wanted me to do," Cyrus tells reporter Bruce Handy, "and you can't say no to Annie." (Cyrus may be only 15, but she already has a firm grasp of the workings of celestial mechanics.)
Hannah Montana is the pop-star alter ego of high school student Miley Stewart. Both are played by Cyrus. Hannah is just as much a brand as Coke or Pepsi - and, so far as pre-teen and young-teen girls are concerned, apparently no less addictive (if far better for their teeth). Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm she's not, but neither is she a younger Lindsay or Britney or any other current Girl Behaving Badly.
The photograph itself, which shows Cyrus in minor league odalisque mode - bare back, sheet clutched to her chest - is rather trite and undistinguished looking. Is it racy, though? Surely, Cyrus exposes far more flesh any time she goes to the beach, and the only person likely to get upset from Cyrus's tan time is her dermatologist.
If Leibovitz's photograph is one part Angelina Jolie, it's also four parts slumber party. Those aren't bedroom eyes staring out from that puffy face under that snarled hair. They're the eyes of a schoolgirl who's overslept and is about to jump in the shower, hoping - really, really hoping - that if she hurries she can still make it to homeroom before the first bell rings.
Still, there is a long and quite rancid tradition of high-profile exploitation of young females' sexuality. The Calvin Klein Jeans ads of the early '80s that featured a 15-year-old Brooke Shields are a kind of locus classicus of the genre, but other examples abound. Leibovitz's photo really doesn't fall under that heading. She's well aware of the tradition, though; and, however tamely, the picture trades on it.
Context is all in popular culture. An individual person or object or event can't be understood outside of the persons, objects, or events it forms a constellation with. And Cyrus's context is much of the problem. Disney has built a global institution out of relentless wholesomeness. If Hannah Montana were a Fox franchise, would we have heard a peep? By the same token, Cyrus's father is country-and-western singer Billy Ray Cyrus. (Further complicating matters, he plays her television father - take that, Pirandello!) The distance between C&W and VF vastly exceeds the merely alphabetical. Ozzy Osbourne's daughter, Bobby Brown's daughter, that would be a different story.
Lying as it does at the crossroads of a prurient tradition it faintly partakes of and a wholesome context it seems eager to reject, the Leibovitz portrait was, in its bland way, a minor scandal waiting to happen. That it will blow over, there should be no doubt. Disney's other current cash cow is the "High School Musical" juggernaut. Last year there was (short-lived) outrage when a photograph circulated of one of its stars, Vanessa Hudgens, wearing a lot less and showing a lot more than Cyrus does in the Leibovitz photo.
So? IMDb informs us that Hudgens is currently filming "High School Musical 3: Senior Year." Life goes on. Before you know it we may be seeing Cyrus in "High School Musical 4: Hannah Montana Auditions."
Mark Feeney can be reached at mfeeney@globe.com.
