I Can't Wait to See You Again

Adults are confused by Hannah Montana. Why were her concert tickets going for hundreds of dollars? Why does she have a 3-D movie? Who is this Miley person? Is she really the daughter of the "Achey Breaky Heart" guy? And he's her dad on the show? How does that all work, exactly?

It is true that the Hannah Montana gestalt encompasses an odd number of identity issues. On a normal TV show, there would be the character, Hannah, and the actress, Miley Cyus. The character would not appear outside the show, and the actress' real life would not be reflected on the show itself. But from the beginning, that line was blurred. The character named Hannah Montana is the secret identity of a character named Miley Stewart. Miley Stewart's dad, who knows her secret, is a character named Robbie. Robbie is played by former country star Billy Ray Cyrus, and his daughter on the show is played by his daughter in real life, Miley Cyrus. (Who isn't actually named Miley, but let's not even get into that.)

So far, so good; it's really just one step removed from Jerry Seinfeld playing a character named Jerry Seinfeld, right? What makes it confusing is that there are also albums associated with this particular gestalt. The first album, Hannah Montana, was credited to the character Hannah but one song was sung by Miley Cyrus as herself and her dad as Billy Ray Cyrus. The second album, Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus is a double album, with the first disc being credited to Hannah and referring to the show's world and the second disc being credited to Miley and referring to the actress as a real person. There is then a concert movie, in which Miley performs songs as herself and as Hannah Montana.

To sum up: the character Hannah Montana has released an album and toured. The actress who plays Hannah has also released an album and toured, but always in combination with the character she plays. She has also sung a song as herself with the actor who plays her dad on the show, who is actually her dad. And who also sang "Achey Breaky Heart."

The reason I go through all this rigamarole is to show that, when you try and lay it all out, it is a fairly tangled web of connections that can be confusing if you're not immersed in it. And yet, for all its structural complexities (!!!), children have no trouble grasping how the Hannah Montana universe works. There's a good reason for this: for all that Hannah Montana might seem like a fantastically complicated postmodern art experiment (think Nikki S. Lee), she fits seamlessly into the current media/entertainment environment. And this is especially true for children. Adults are too tied to their formative experiences with straightforward entertainment television to really grasp what's going on. But for those people growing up in the reality show era, Hannah Montana makes total intuitive sense.

John Ellis' essay "Stars as a Cinematic Phenomenon" is a useful touchpoint for explaining all of this, though I don't want to get totally behind its occasionally overwrought "OMG postmodernism" tendencies. His take, basically, is that an individual performer had a a "star image" made up partially of their actual performances and partially through entering into "subsidiary forms of circulation" (see?), which is his way of saying "publicity." By giving interviews and being written about in the press and having your picture taken, a performer creates an image (tough, sexy, stoner, slutty, whatever) that then works as a way of informing the public's understanding and anticipation of their performances in films. To simplify: Brad breaks up with Jen and starts dating Angelina, so let's go see Mr. and Mrs. Smith.

That may be true from the perspective of, say, a film studio interested in making money. But from the perspective of everyone else, the really interesting thing about all this, the thing we followed and remembered, wasn't the movie. It was the actual story of Brad breaking up with Jen and dating Angelina, and why, and what would happen next. Ellis would consider this to be a failure--that the system has failed in its intended purpose if the movie in question is less memorable than the story surrounding it. Indeed, you would be hard-pressed to find anyone that would speak kindly of our "obsession with celebrity," as it is generally put. But that, to me, seems unproductive. This system that has evolved is intensely fascinating--that's why, after all, we're all "obsessed" with it. And that's interesting. So rather than (just) criticizing this, we should recognize it as a new form of entertainment. Or, rather, a new incarnation of a very old form.

Mass media did not invent entertainment, though previous forms of entertainment might not seem very, er, entertaining to a modern audience. The Reign of Terror, for instance, was a form of popular entertainment. So were the Lincoln-Douglas debates, which is why they lasted for three hours. (More bang for the buck!) These are momentous events that represent practices (public executions, public speaking) that reach far back into human history. Perhaps we should think of another ancient human behavior as entertainment: gossip. I'm not alone in suggesting this by any means, but I have a slightly different take on it. Whereas others think of it in terms of its effect on the people doing the gossiping (display of social status, strengthening bonds, enforcing norms, etc.), I'd like to discuss the things that gossip collectively creates. In other words, I'd like to talk about gossip as narrative.

Humans seem to have an inherent tendency toward narrative. We form stories out of the bits and pieces of our lives in order to make some sense of them--to figure out what caused us to get where we are, or to at least feel like we know what made us get here. This urge extends to other people. We get pleasure out of learning other people's stories because to have a glimpse into others' lives helps us make further sense of the world. This is clear in our consumption of pop culture, especially TV, but is also clear in longstanding traditions of oral history and folk stories and even, arguably, news reporting. These are all stories about lives lived.

The great advantage of gossip is that it structures true stories about others in a way most advantageous to pleasure. Because bits of gossip are things we're not supposed to know, they give us the thrill of the illicit as well as the clarity of a secret revealed. Moreover, because the story is being revealed in pieces, we get the sort of tension and release dynamic that structures most great narrative works. At first, we don't really know what's going on. A problem is introduced. Then, we get more information. Tension builds. What is going on? What is she going to do? Is he going to find out? And then, finally, there's a break and things are resolved--or, they're not, and we get to speculate endlessly about what happened in the perpetual glow of limitless possibility. The slow drip of information keeps us coming back for more, keeps us interested in these stories, keeps us engaged with those around us. I can't wait to see you again, we say to our informant, and our informant can't wait to see us, either.

This is precisely what's going on with modern-day celebrities. For all that paying attention to news about Britney feels illicit and wrong, we are ultimately doing nothing more than following someone's story, doled out teasingly in daily doses. Rather than sitting and passively having a story told to us, we are expected to figure it out for ourselves from fragments of news, from photos we have to decipher, from actions the main character didn't want us to know about. We process these and judge these and try and decide what kind of character we're dealing with. The phrase "soap opera" is intended as a kind of pejorative when applied to such cases, but it's entirely accurate. The fact that the story is about a non-fictional person ultimately matters little to the end-of-the line consumer who's following the gossip. All it does is make the whole thing less predictable, since real people don't always follow stock storylines, and give the events an extra charge of verisimilitude. And let's not moralize around the bush here about people being exploited. If you are a celebrity and don't want to be the subject of gossip, there is a simple solution: move out of LA. There aren't paparazzi in Ohio. Britney in particular is an interesting test case for this, since for all her problems, she seems to have a collaborative relationship with the media.

All reality shows did was serve as a factory floor for generating these sorts of stories about people's lives. The thing that makes something like America's Next Top Model a reality show, of course, isn't the competition aspect of it--that's just any old talent show. What makes it a reality show is the Real World element. By putting all the girls into a house and filming their interactions under the always-fraught conditions of communal living, producers are able to generate stories that they can then edit skillfully into compact narrative chunks. The gossip that would normally have to come from a secondary source is here related directly by the cameras that film the offending behavior. And each week, good reality shows are able to edit their material in order to make clear in viewers' minds what kind of character each contestant is.

But from the beginning, reality shows never limited themselves to the show itself. The first American reality show of the post-MTV era, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire, was successful in no small part because of the "controversy" that erupted in the media after the show aired. The idea of the program (on Fox, natch) is that a bunch of women would compete to marry, sight unseen, a multi-millionaire who was watching on monitors in a hidden room. At the end of the show, he would pick one, and they would get married then and there. This is indeed what happened, but because of the setup, we ended up with very little information about the multi-millionaire in question, Rick Rockwell (whose name makes him sound like a character in a Marvel comic). Afterwards, however, we found out a number of things about Rockwell that were textbook examples of gossip, because they complicated the simplistic public image he'd tried to construct for himself. He had multiple restraining orders placed on him, and was probably an abuser. He was not actually a multi-millionaire, but just some guy that dabbled in real estate. And theirs was not a fairy-tale marriage, but one that was quickly annulled.

At the time, this seemed like a disaster for Fox, and commentators predicted that this would be the end of reality shows. In hindsight, we can see that it demonstrated just how potent reality shows can be. By promoting an unknown into the public eye, we're able to find out their story from scratch. Reality show participants are, in essence, each their own little novel (or maybe just short story), a new character whose life story we now get to hear. They might not be very good novels, but the best selling ones rarely are.

This, then, became the model for reality shows. Bad ones stayed self-contained, because no one cared enough about them to unearth dirt on the contestants. But good ones generated coverage simply as a result of being interesting. Since what was happening on the shows was essentially gossip to begin with, these external pieces of information just became part of the overall narrative. Again, this is a violation of Ellis' idea of the star system. The gossip wasn't working as contextual information to enhance our viewing of major motion pictures, but creating its own gestalt, its own story told in bits and pieces. But this is what the modern media is built on. Political campaigns work this way as surely as American Idol does. And, to be honest, I think it's pretty awesome. If we were more willing to be honest about what we found entertaining and to embrace this as a source of pleasure rather than a source of shame, we might be willing to endorse strategies that took pleasure as a positive force rather than a debased one.

Anyway, point being, if this is all second nature to you--if the construction of character through multiple streams that duplicate and build on existing information just seems like the way the media works--then Hannah Montana fits right in. Taking the show on its own, we have essentially a superhero narrative; taken in context with the identity issued detailed above, it's basically Keeping Up With the Kardashians, except less soul-destroying. There's a family on a show that's like a family in real life, and sometimes the family on the show/in real life does stuff like make albums or release, uh, movies. This isn't confusing, but elevating. Instead of sealing all these things off from each other behind characters and fourth walls, they're able to mix and mingle as they would in real life. This is ultimately the real power of gossip-based narrative: it tells a story like we would get it in real life. Each episode is a phone conversation, the gossip is what you hear from other people or see at the grocery store. We rarely find out life stories all in one gulp (except when we're drinking with strangers), but slowly, as they're lived. We have to get through a lot of banality to reach the dramatic high points. Not coincidentally, this is how the best fictional shows on TV construct their narratives as well (think Ugly Betty, or even more appropriately, Gossip Girl). Hannah Montana's real strength is that it does all this without ever calling attention to its constructedness or to its radical collapsing of information streams. It comes off as easy as breathing, as the most natural thing in the world, and to its young audience, it most assuredly is.

ADDENDUM: Two related things that I couldn't figure out how to work into the actual entry: this quote from Rebecca West, via Marc, and of course the whole microfame thing. There's more to be said about YouTube as a medium, but that's another post.

Labels: britney, gossip girl, hannah montana, narrative, reality tv, theory, TV

posted by Mike B. @ 9:08 PM