The Apotheosis of U.S. Televisual Culture: Miley Ray (Destiny Hope) “Hannah Montana” Cyrus

I was still in high school when the Best of Both Worlds Tour controversy erupted. Tickets were being resold for as much as $20,000. Children and teens countrywide were clamoring for the opportunity to crowd into a stadium to hear one body embody two or four personae, to hear one voice sing two sets of songs, probably neither written by her, Miley Cyrus. Fitting that "Miley Cyrus" is not her birth name (it's Destiny Hope Cyrus), because it's hard to guess at the precise degree of multiplicity of her identities or whether there's any meaningful difference between them.

For those who don't know, Miley Cyrus, merely 16 at the time of this writing, stars in the Disney Channel show Hannah Montana, which is about a high school student who moonlights as a country music star. The character's name is Miley, and she dons a wig while at school so that her classmates don't recognize her as Hannah Montana, beloved country music icon. Miley's best friends know her double identity but struggle to maintain her secret at all costs. That's approximately the sum of my knowledge about the show. I didn't know anything about it until recently, because I had erroneously assumed that Hannah Montana was simply a stupid Disney t(w)een show. The show's content is stupid, but that's utterly beside the point. Miley Cyrus wasn't named Time's 29th most influential person in 2009 for nothing. (She should have been ranked higher, in this writer's opinion.) Even a brief summarization is fully sufficient to see that Hannah Montana is one of the most important U.S. cultural projects to date.

While Miley is the daughter of a country music singer, she wasn't one herself until after the TV show became popular. That is, the order of inception of the various Mileys (if there is one) is: Destiny Hope Cyrus, daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus; Miley Ray Cyrus, lead actress of Hannah Montana; Miley Stewart, main character of Hannah Montana; Hannah Montana, alter ego of Miley Stewart; Hannah Montana, alter ego of Miley Ray Cyrus. From the child marked by celebrity arose an entire taxonomy. Truly, “the medium is the message” (McLuhan), and, moreover, “you no longer watch TV, TV watches you” (Baudrillard). Destiny Hope Cyrus was born to a celebrity to become a celebrity. Gary Marsh, president of entertainment for Disney Channel Worldwide, said of her, “She has the everyday relatability (sic) of Hilary Duff and the stage presence of Shania Twain, and that's an explosive (sic) combination.” She was an “average” U.S. teen with the self-confidence and -assurance of a veteran entertainer, precisely the combination Disney thought would best exploit current consumption trends in the most important U.S. marketing demographic: children. And Disney was right, because some parents regarded the satisfaction of their child's profound and consuming desire to see Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana perform live as so important that they paid over, and some well over, $1000 per ticket.

I won't be able to speak to every facet and nuance of the demand for Hannah Montana, because I'm already too old to understand, too old to factor in the creation of the U.S. culture-at-large – I'm not where the money's at – but I'll try to account for some of it. The obvious appeal of the show is wish-fulfillment. Increasingly – no, not increasingly but now unanimously, U.S. children desire to be represented, mirrored on the screen they spend so many hours watching. This is perhaps the deepest desire of children who value television above all: to be immortalized in the grid; to enrapture the captive audience of which they are still a member, sitting and watching; to infinitely entertain. Children watch a show about a schoolgirl the “same” as any of them but more charismatic, more entertaining, who “happens” to sing on the side. This is the manifestation of their longing to hide, to be hidden by the objects in whom they can confide, their friends, and to be objectified, ossified. Children fantasize about hiding. They hide even when there's nothing to hide, in the hopes that their deceit will produce its object, that their simulation will metamorphose into dissimulation. They long to pretend that they don't have what they do: they wish to, like Miley Cyrus with Hannah Montana, separate their celebrity and encapsulate it, squirrel it away to protect it from what they know to be necessary transience, necessary because of their own fickle desires and insatiable appetite for new entertainment.

This describes a demand for the show Hannah Montana, but its greatness obtains through the total dissolution of the distinction between reality and television. “Reality TV,” so-called, beginning with the Loud family (An American Family) and passing through Jon and Kate and their eight children (Jon & Kate Plus 8), is almost “classically postmodern,” as David Foster Wallace would say. TV precedes reality; the presence of cameras alters the lived reality of its subjects and from the moment of broadcast nullifies their own reality, appropriates their lives and likenesses irreversibly. We know this. When you watch TV you are bombarded with the now-ancient structures perpetuated by the determinism of their inception: there are half-hour or one-hour shows with predictable content, interspersed with three-or-so-minute-long commercial interludes. This is so because it has been so: the U.S. consumer expects to see precisely the format she has always seen when she turns on the TV. She mocks it and needs to mock it, and still she watches, because TV has trained her, feeds on her, and tells her that without her there is still TV, whereas without TV, what is she? We know this, too.

What is fascinating and difficult to comprehend about Hannah Montana is that TV no longer seems to be a separate entity. Not only does it anticipate our lives, it has seemingly become life itself. Television has been born into a real U.S. body. When children watch Hannah Montana, who exactly are they watching (or rather, who exactly is watching them, besides marketing agencies)? They would normally be laughing at the carefully scripted antics of a girl on the screen who exists there but not elsewhere. That Miley the character shares the first name of Miley the actress is a demonstration of the purposive confounding of character and actress. And then again there's the fact that Miley Cyrus didn't release an album until she sang on the Hannah Montana soundtrack as Hannah Montana the character. Then she released Hannah Montana 2: Meet Miley Cyrus, which marked the introduction of the actress as a celebrity in her own right and Hannah Montana as not only a fictional pop singer but a singer who toured the extant U.S. landmass, who you had to pay exorbitant amounts of real U.S. currency to see.

Who, then, is Miley Cyrus? She is a system, a convoluted interaction between Disney board meetings and ravenous children. She plays herself, she plays a singer, she is a singer… is she also herself? No, I think it would be too much to say that Miley Cyrus exists anywhere outside of television, but then again, who does? I await with great excitement and mounting glee the end of the fourth and final season of Hannah Montana, which termination I suspect will coincide with another's – Miley's (although she has anticipated this end with the release of her purportedly franchise-independent album, Breakout, a true breakout from the matrix of Hannah Montana is impossible), the world's, my own?

As you can tell, I have only begun to investigate the mechanism and consequences of the cultural phenomenon that orbits the binary star Miley Cyrus/Hannah Montana, but I hope this article communicates some of the awe that I have experienced contemplating the gravity of these events. This present is the most captivating and absurd in history, and I have come to believe that one of the most entertaining and worthwhile activities is to take it in and to try to see it, which is harder than to merely watch it. For what she has become, I think we all owe a debt of gratitude to Hannah Montana, to Miley Cyrus, to Destiny Hope Cyrus, to Billy Ray Cyrus, to TV, and to ourselves.

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