The Pop Machine: Children of the mouse contradict
What Miley Cyrus might tell us about Britney Spears and Disney
by Tom Beedham
Ever since I read the account Chuck Klosterman gave of his Esquire interview with Britney Spears, I’ve been pretty wary of the kids Disney’s churned out. The cloying nature of the Mickey Mouse Club was scary before, but just the notion that their training could have any hold on a person’s self-awareness meant a new level of scary.
When Klosterman went into that interview, he was primarily concerned with whether Britney was the least self-aware commercial product that music producers could dress down and sell like Barbie dolls, or if her apparent inability to process the idea that she might just be that kind of sexed-up marketing device was actually an über-savvy projection Spears used to frame her own innocence. To be fair to Disney, Klosterman never explicitly brought up their company, but when he talked about selling Britney, I couldn’t get Disney out of my head. So this column kind of rests on that assumption.
Klosterman’s account manages to freak me out mostly because he isn’t able to reach a conclusion, even after asking questions that you’d think would give him some answers. But in her interview, Britney responds to questions like “why do you think magazines like Esquire use half-naked pictures of women on their covers?” with answers like “Maybe to inspire other people.”
Fast-forward a few years, and another child of the Disney incubator, Miley Cyrus has had to grow up in the public eye, but for Miley’s public image, there was no gestation period. While the final season of Hannah Montana was still fresh and airing new episodes, Cyrus dropped Can’t Be Tamed, an album with a title that might be pretty scary for a parent to read when their kid’s watching a sugared up show about an innocent Disney pop princess.
“I feel I was so trained in my interviews to be All-American or whatever. I just got so set in the way of saying the same things I did when I was 12-years-old… I guess I kind of realized that my whole life isn’t one giant press junket. I don’t have to be smiling all the time and always have the perfect answer,” she said on a recent episode of Lifetime’s The Conversation with Amanda de Cadenet.
In comparison to Britney’s interview, Miley’s gushes with self-awareness. The two instances are pretty contradicting, but maybe it’s a reflection of the times. The only reasonable explanation I can offer is social media explosion. Over the last couple of years, our culture has become obsessed with sharing the self and the individual, and with that has come the requirement of self-awareness. These days, it’s almost impossible to imagine a naïve character like pre-buzzcut Britney, so maybe the popstar assembly line has toned down the marks it leaves on the minds of its protégés. I mean, you have to make a product realistic in order to sell it, don’t you?
(Source: theontarion.com)
