This is what happens when you take a 15-year-old girl and try to turn her into Mickey Mouse.
Just days after trying to do damage control about candid Internet photos of Disney superstar Miley Cyrus showing her bra and generally vamping for the camera, the Cyrus family and Disney executives are screaming bloody murder about photos accompanying a piece about Cyrus in the May issue of Vanity Fair.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Saturday, May 03, 2008 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 1 inches; 33 words Type of Material: Correction
Miley Cyrus: An article in Tuesday's Calendar section about controversy surrounding photos of Miley Cyrus in Vanity Fair said they appeared in the magazine's May issue. They are in the June issue.
Taken by Annie Leibovitz (who else?), they are standard VF pouty pictures of an ingenue -- in one, Cyrus is draped over her father's lap, holding his hand while her hips are canted suggestively toward the camera; in the other she appears naked, holding up a requisite bed sheet and looking over her shoulder out of a tangle of hair.
The only thing that separates these shots from the millions of sexualized portraits the magazine has run of starlets are the visible goose bumps on Cyrus' arm in the bed sheet shot, and that she is the 15-year-old star of the Disney Channel's runaway hit "Hannah Montana." Meanwhile, the story that runs with it (story? Is anyone really going to read the story?) dutifully follows the template of every article about Cyrus (including one last summer by me). Which is: Like her alter ego, Miley Stewart (who is also rock star Hannah Montana), Miley Cyrus is a surprisingly normal teenager who just happens to be a multimillion-dollar industry. The photos, the story acknowledges, are just a "baby step" toward the next stage in her career.
Which clearly will involve stripping.
OK, sorry, couldn't resist. They are hard photos to look at, so humor comes in handy. Hard not because they are so sexual -- she's 15, she's entitled to a little sexuality -- but because the whole package, story and photos, was so inevitable. Disney is blaming Vanity Fair and Leibovitz for manipulating a 15-year-old into agreeing to poses that were not appropriate. As if no one in the Disney infrastructure or the Cyrus family had ever picked up Vanity Fair before. They should just be thanking their lucky stars Cyrus wasn't wearing fish nets or splayed on top of a car.
Though Cyrus and her family have certainly been willing and hard-working participants in the creation of the "Hannah Montana" juggernaut, isn't it a little late to be talking about manipulating, or at least marketing, a 15-year-old? And at that age -- or younger, since Cyrus was 13 when she signed on to be Hannah -- is there a difference between the two?
