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
Maura's suggestion that a future Britney video
involve dolphins, along with the impressive crappiness of the "Gimme More" video, leads me to a modest proposal. If producers can seize upon Britney's image to make brilliant songs (as, critics tell us, they are doing), then why can't directors?
Therefore, I suggest we get
Richard Kelly to make a kind of sequel to GnR's
Use Your Illusion video trilogy, but with Britney's
Blackout. A brief outline:
1) "Gimme More" - Britney, pale and glassy-eyed, lies on a blanket in the desert, wearing a binkini. As she rises, we see that all around her lie corpses rotting in the blazing sun.
Quick cut to Britney in an SUV, driving down Sunset at night. A man lies in the backseat, be-stubbled, who could pass for either Justin or K-Fed; an empty baggie sticks to his fingers. He rouses himself and leans over the frontseat. When Britney looks in the rearview mirror, he appears to have fangs. And a cape. And some sort of medallion.
Cut to a dance sequence, filmed inside
the TWA terminal at JFK. Britney and a group of nearly identical-looking dancers all wear Donna Reed outfits (poofy dresses, pearls, heels, etc.). The choreography is a mix between tae-bo and a hoedown. This is intercut with Britney and Justin/K-Fed speeding toward a fault that's opened in the middle of LA. Justin/K-Fed tries to warn Britney, and gets increasinly desperate, screaming in her ear and grabbing her arm. At the same time, we see from above that an airplane has lost control and is tearing toward the exact spot where Britney is about to go into the bowels of the earth. The dancers all kick off the high-heeled shoe on their right foot directly at the camera, which swooshes down the line. Phantasmagoric toddlers float across Britney's field of vision. In the airplane, the pilots are eating Tofutti Cuties, seemingly unaware of their impending doom. The dancers fall to their knees, throw their heads back, and stick out their chests. Britney's car sails off the cliff and is hit by the nose of the plane. In slo-mo, we see the pilots waving jauntily to Britney. At the last possible moment, she and Justin/K-Fed launch out of the sunroof, with Britney growing wings and fluttering up into the now-peaceful night. As water floods the TWA terminal and the dancers form into something that looks like a cake in the overhead shots, Britney releases Justin/K-Fed, and he is caught by two cherubic angels, who ferry him gently to earth. Britney lands in the Hollywood Hills, where a tractor is on fire, for some reason. The dancers light sparklers. Maya Rudolph gives a thumbs-up.
2) "Piece of Me" - The video opens, sans music, with a shot of the Vegas Strip. As the song begins, all the lights blink on and off in unison with the beat of the song; when the lights are off, the people disappear. Britney walks into shot from behind the camera, wearing a wedding dress and carrying a bunch of roses in her swinging right arm. She walks confidently straight down the middle of the road as the camera cranes up. Now the lights are only on for one beat out of four, but when they are, the people are noticing Britney, pointing and taking pictures. The camera settles to a stop at a high angle and we can see that at the end of the strip, visible only when the rest of the lights are off but illuminated a brilliant neon white, is a small chapel. The camera crash-zooms in, and standing in front with his hands clasped piously is Rupert Murdoch, in a priest's outfit. Seeing Britney, he smiles a toothy smile. His teeth are buttons from a touch-tone telephone.
The dance sequence begins, taking place inside the main newsroom of the new New York Times building. The coed dancers are dressed in
His Girl Friday outfits; if possible, actual New York Times writers and editors are used. Up front and center, Britney pretends like she's operating a hand computer like in
Minority Report while, in the background, the dancers execute an acrobatic routine between the two levels of the newsroom, bouncing off trampolines that have been put in the cubicles, vaulting over the handrails on the upper level, and swiveling in and out of the conference rooms. When Britney turns, we see she has "KISS SLUT GIRL" written on her bare back in sharpie.
In the chapel, Britney walks agressively toward the altar but is spun around by something running past her and snatching the roses from her hand. She looks on with confusion as a leprecheun runs in slow motion out the chapel doors; Rupert Murdoch maintains his beatific smile, and once the leprechaun is past, he raises his right hand and gives Britney a fluttery wave. He is joined by all the nightly news anchors (except Jim Lehrer), who are also wearing religious clothes, and they perform a sort of Vaudeville kickline. Britney stomps her heel on the floor and the chapel rumbles. The anchors slink out, chagrined, and Rupert takes his place at the altar, adjusting his collar and regaining his composure.
This begins to be intercut with two different sets of images. In one, Britney is dressed in her Mickey Mouse Club outfit, which is torn and dirty, and slumps in an alley as rain falls. In the other, Britney lies in a fancy kitchen in the middle of the night as lights flash outside, blood running down her throat. We see a pair of male hands shaking. The dancers all gather on the main floor and form a flying V, with some dancing on the cubicle walls and others perched on the bannisters. Britney is joined at the altar by a fat, ugly man wearing a pinstriped suit and a monacle. She looks at him with horror, but Rupert performs the ceremony, and with a grand gesture, opens the back wall of the chapel to reveal a concert stage and a screaming mob of fans. He holds out a headset mic and we watch from Britney's POV as she puts it on. From the crowd's perspective, we see that she's now wearing the bikini we saw at the beginning of the first video. The lights rise to a whiteout and we cut to the house, where the camera turns to reveal that the person standing over Britney is a giant baby, with manhands. Justin/K-Fed bursts through the door in his Dracula outift and does an absurdly exaggerated double-take.
3) "Get Naked (I Got a Plan)" - Britney, dressed in Flashdance regalia, stands alone on the deck of a whaling ship. She tries to do a dance to the music but keeps missing her steps and falling over herself when she's not ambling listlessly across the floor. In the clouds, Ally Sheedy appears and shakes her head sadly. A siren flashes and the deck opens up, plunging Britney into a giant cube of petroleum jelly. She falls through it and lands on the darkened streets of a Japanese city. No one recognizes her. She gestures desperately to the passers-by, but when she does, they go wide-eyed and seem to have seizures. The seizures resolve themselves into something like dance moves. As she proceeds down the street, the people who start dancing get more and more out-of-control until they finally clutch their eyes and scream in pain as their skin tears off, and they fall to the ground, smoking. The camera cuts to an overhead shot and zooms out to reveal that the people who started dancing caused the people near them to start dancing, who then infect the people near them, and from a shot above the buildings it appears as concentric circles of smoking bodies, with Britney's brilliant blonde hair as the center. She turns desperately, trying to deny the horror of what she's inadvertantly done. She closes her eyes, shakes her head, and sprouts wings again. She ascends into the sky, trailing the bodies of those she's killed like a flock of birds. As they cross the Pacific, she can see below her dolphins having really dirty sex. They smile and wave to her with their fins. A long shot shows Britney at the point of this cloud of corpses.
She reaches Los Angeles and flies over the whole city, now in ruins and cracked down the middle. Its denizens dance madly in the street until they, too, fall skinless to the ground. Their bodies float gently upwards to join the cloud. Britney stops at the edge of a desert, face-to-face with another winged Britney. Other-Britney gestures and the corpses fall to the ground, scattering themselves around the dry, cracked earth. They both look down to see Britney in a binkini from the first video. The two winged Britneys nod at each other and hold out their hands as if they were controlling puppets. All the corpses and bikini-Britney rise jerkily to their feet. In a shot of binkini-Brit, we see next to her the corpses of two small children. From above, we watch as winged Britneys choreograph a grand dance routine. As the song ends, we see a closeup of binkini-Brit, still glassy-eyed and pale, grinning a hideous grin.
Labels: blackout, britney, richard kelly, videos
- Twoheadedboy
makes some great points about the Arcade Fire and their public reception:
And what of the Arcade Fire's purported sincerity? Their heart-on-sleeve
emotionalism? Should we be touched, moved? When every song recruits a gargantan church organ to swell Win Butler's high school poetry to apocalyptic proportions
(“mirror, mirror / on the wall / show me where the / bombs will fall”)? I say,
stop touching me.
Also, at the end (and more importantly): "taking the Arcade Fire to task for aestheticizing politics." This is really smart.
I'm still trying to figure out why musicians' clumsy attempts at political gestures bug me so much, beyond, you know, "they're stupid." I hadn't really considered this one, though, and I think it's getting close to the heart of the matter, although I would phrase it more like "imposing lame indie aesthetics on politics, which already has its own aesthetics." The lyrics quoted above are a 1:1 equivalency of John Ashcroft
singing "Let The Eagle Soar." Just because you're singing something over a piano part doesn't mean it's a good song, and just because you say something about bombs doesn't make it a meaningful political statement, and when people think otherwise, that just indicates that they don't really know what they're talking about when it comes to songs or politics. Oh sure, sure; everyone's entitled to their opinion, and god forbid we "supress dissent" by telling someone they're being shallow, but if you think Ashcroft's song is lame, well. Aesthetics matter.
- As
suspected, the
House episode this week was practically a religious experience. I think I might be mentioning it again in the near future, so I won't say too much now, but seriously, episode of the year or something.
- As Frank
pointed out and Dave
responded to, there's been surprisingly little chatter in pop-nerd circles about Britney shaving her head, aside from the requisite "OMG she's bald" reactions. There's been a quote going around attributed to Courtney Love that I can't find an original source for (it might be on a google-proofed page like a message board), but it certainly
sounds like her:
she?s insane! I love it! I?m sad about what she?s ingesting, and the bad man who got her started on that shit.But she?s made herself a true outsider under the influence or not- which in itself is not a crime, she?s expressed what she?s feeling inside on the outside an dyes its the result of a psychotic break due to uh?ingestion of a very very very evil substance. and i know what I know because I know, the people who know- she cried for a long tome before she did it and her bodyguards were all that was with herhow the ultimate insider the person whose almost directly responsible for ruining guitar rock ended up shaving her head is an ultimate irony and the fact that she shaved her head hell if i did it no one would blink butt hats cos I?ve always been an outsider even when I?m an insider- but ths is breaking news due to that fact that this was the lolita fuck up fantasy doll jonbenet nightmare- i remember the first time i saw a little thing on her in spin I seriously very seriously thought it was a parody like an snl skit and when it became real I worried and it affected everyone, in my world in the world of rock n roll and this may as well be death in some ways- she wasn?t sober when she did it - i wish she had been because then id be able to really kind of get behind it and just say- fuck yeah express yourself- do it= you don?t feel pretty on ths inside anymore show it man, but it s happened and its legendary, this is going to be legendary.Is she going to join mercury rev? Start hanging at space land?i doubts he even understands that world but no decent punk at heart can begrudge the once totally self an dmommy sexualised ?virgin? for shaving g her dammed head, i love it and I?m sad for her at he same time.I?m sure she?s clueless to how brilliant this was, how in some ways anarchic an feminist it was- but she still needs to go back to rehab.That my two cents.
I like this, but I would. Maybe another productive avenue to go down would be comparing it with the "makeover" episode on
America's Next Top Model. It's at, what, the seventh time around now? Eighth? And every "cycle" (ugh, sorry) there's the makeover episode, and every makeover episode, they chop off a bunch of the girls' hair. And there's always lots of crying. It doesn't make sense--the contestants have clearly watched the show before, they know this is coming, and yet, every time, "OMG I can't believe they cut off my hair!" Really? Well, yeah. It's notable in comparison to another ANTM pattern: the nude shoot. Every season, usually after the makeover episode, there's a shoot where the girls have to be either nude, near-nude, or looking as if they are nude, and for the first few seasons, this would always knock at least one contestant out, because they would refuse on moral grounds to be nude and my body is a temple etc. etc. OH MY GOD GIRL YOU'RE TRYING TO BE A MODEL TAKE YOUR DAMN CLOTHES OFF ALREADY.
Um. Anyway, point is that this happened for the first few seasons, but then it stopped; there's still always a nude shoot, but people seem to have finally learned not to apply to the show if they don't want to get nudies. But they do still apply to the show even though they don't want to get their hair cut. It's still that unbelievable that someone would do that to them, I think, that you go ahead anyway.
So compare that to Britney: this is seen as a form of self-mutilation, evidenced by the fact that a few days later, people thought it credible that she
attempted suicide. And so, hair: it's an unacknowledged but potent symbol in pop, and maybe the seemingly superficial things we see female popstars do with their hair are worthy of a closer look: P!nk, Ashlee going brunette, etc. I don't really know what this would yield, but if I did, it would be a post rather than a note.
Labels: aesthetics, arcade fire, britney, courtney love, House, john ashcroft, notes, politics, pop, teenpop
