An Open Letter to Miley Cyrus

Dear Miley,

I know that this is a tough time for you and that you are at that critical stage in your career that requires you shuck off that Hanna Montana persona, which even being worth millions of dollars in licensing deals alone, was holding you back from your true calling of…

Well, to be honest, I’m not dead certain exactly what niche you’re going for these days, but the point is, its an incredibly difficult needle to thread when one attempts to transform their public persona from child star to adult professional. 

Case in point:

           

This poor child spent a mere three years in the Canadian Leagues and to this day spends her days hanging out with a sociopath who in seventeen short years will place his children under house arrest and torture them with stories of how he once had a threesome with Winnie Cooper and the blonde girl from White Chicks (Ep. 47, “The Third Wheel, Season 3, 2007). 

It goes to show you that there are a variety of challenges when a girl becomes a woman in the public eye, and you are now forced to showcase not only your abundance of femininity and power but also the fact that you have the libido of Wilt Chamberlain. If you truly wish to take a Cleveland Steamer on the legion of Hanna Montana fans out there (who, btw are the only people still defending your actions) and break out into a new and incredibly slutty mold, I’m just saying that there are ways to go about this better than hitting the world across the face with a mallet that screams, “I have a vagina!!!”

It’s a delicate balance to achieve, but luckily for you, young lady, it’s been done before and there are a few trailblazers out there who have conquered the very situation that you are loosing yourself to with every appearance and cover shoot you do. 

Author’s Note: I’m going to be cracking wise about this topic for a while, but I would like to say that this is starting to get more than a little bit ridiculous and at what time do we start the conversation about these young ladies’ management and handlers’ culpability in all this?  Doesn’t Disney have something to say about the alarming amount of young women who come out of their child-stardom machinery only to go bat-shit insane at the prospect of the rest of their lives? Isn’t it a wee bit telling that most of the young men that emerge from this same machinery seem to do just fine? And speaking solely about the Miley’s VMA performance, am I the only one who thinks that Robin Thicke owes some sort of explanation/apology for what went down?  Ok, soapbox over, on with the list!

Tiffany Amber Thiessen

Those were the days!

Known throughout the stratosphere as the impossibly angelic Kelly Kapowski on the hit Saturday morning television show Saved By The Bell, Thiessen was so pigeon-holed into that role that when she left the show in order to pursue a blossoming (?) film career, she was told by many casting agents that she couldn’t read for the part, simply because her notoriety would distract from the film (this is the flip side of the megastar coin, for example, watch anything with David Schwimmer in it and try not to see Ross).  Terrified of not having anywhere to go, Thiessen jumped at the chance to return to her iconic role in Saved By The Bell: The College Years, and gave herself a few more years to contemplate her next move.

How She Did It?

Thiessen joined the cast of Beverly Hills 90210 in it’s forth season as the femme fatale Valerie Mallone (Someone’s cousin, or twin, or something; that thing was a nighttime soap opera, nothing more), a sex obsessed evil turbo-slut.  How is that different than what you’re doing, Ms. Cyrus? Because Thiessen only acted the part while the camera was rolling.  Once the director yelled cut, she was never seen flashing her whoo-hah while getting out of a Bentley on Venice Blvd (and I know that’s not you, but we all know that we’re not too far away from that particular Kodak moment). There was also never a photo of her smoking out of a bong (that one was you), regardless of whatever was in it.  Perhaps that because Thiessen was willing to simply be an actress, and not a phenomenon, she was able to retain her dignity and let the fictional characters she played show-case her sexuality.

Sarah Michelle Gellar

I overcame a vampire phobia just to watch this show. Seriously.

People often forget in the wake of multiple Scooby Doo films (and whatever the hell is going on with this Robin Williams television show) that back in the late nineties, Buffy: the Vampire Slayer was absolutely huge and you couldn’t stroll through the check out aisle with out seeing Gellar’s face everywhere.  If you think I’m messing with you, ask anyone over thirty if they know that the word “wiggy” means, go ahead we’ll wait… Yeah, that’s the legacy of Buffy and Gellar was the face of it. 

How She Did It?

Gellar took an astonishing risk and signed on to play Kathryn, the diabolical, over-sexed, drug addicted, possibly incestuous (that part of the plot kinda gets fuzzy) step sister in the 1999 film Cruel Intentions.  Set in the hyper-realized, not to mention over-stylized, opulent world of wealthy Manhattan prep school love affairs, Gellar oozed sexuality into this character and made it look like it was the easiest thing in the world.  Granted, she got a lot of help from the writing’s complete lack of shame in using every innuendo in the book, but that was the point, she was having such a great time with the gratuitous sex-talk that she succeeded in making us forget all about a certain vampire slayer.  And when it was over, and the world was attempting to pick their collective jaw up off the ground, she showed right back up at work on Buffy and remained on the show for another four years.  She portrayed the whore one time, to prove to the world she could (and make the break between her teen fans and a film career) and because she was talented enough to pull it off so well, she never had to do it again. 

Jessica Simpson

           

It’s a good thing she’s hot… life was gonna be rough otherwise.

(Hold on a second, internet, let me explain!!)  This young lady spent the mid to late nineties playing a very distant third wheel amidst the great Britney/Christina War of 1999, and in fact there was a time when we didn’t know she was an idiot, because we didn’t know a damn thing about her!  Instead of whoring it up to compete in the battle of bare midriffs, she often stayed to the more conservative side of the street, citing a religious background and an over-protective father (yeah, that help up pretty well).  But still, as a teen sensation, she was stuck right in the middle of the same crisis you face, Ms. Cyrus.

How She Did It?

Simpson took the (at the time) novelty route into reality television with her former-boy-band-member ex-husband Nick Lachey on MTV’s Newlyweds.  And while most of the show was about their first year of marriage (lots of sex and leaving the seat up, I’m guessing? Who knows what you married people talk about?) what emerged is that the world learned that Simpson was a legitimate moron.  The most famous scene of the show was of them eating Chicken of the Sea brand tuna fish, whose actual name is, wait for it… Chicken of the Sea! And then they show her turning to her husband and asking, “So is this chicken or fish?” What an idiot, right?! Except, she turned that into a multi-million dollar ad campaign with Chicken of the Sea tuna.  In fact, they pulled this trick off again when she asked someone if buffaloes really had wings (Please tell me you known what she was eating at that particular moment), and showed up in a Buffalo’s Wild Wings commercial.  I’m guessing that as soon as someone explained to her what a bank was, she laughed all the way to it.  Sure, she was in The Dukes of Hazard portraying a hot bikini body and her subsequent music video for her version of “These Boots Were Made For Walkin’” was nothing more of an attempt to cash in on her sex appeal, but there is a difference between acting playfully sexy within a film role and out and out acting like a whore any time there is a camera around. And it’s this difference that I believe you are struggling with.

Mandy Moore

Beats the hell out of Dinty Moore any day.

In the same time frame as Jessica Simpson, Mandy Moore emerged right in the middle of the hot girl pop explosion of the late nineties.  Although, from the very beginning, she was always a little further out of the lime-light than the others, and certainly more conservative in her dress and actions (see above reference to battle of the midriffs).  Still, every teen sensation has a shelf-life and even Ms. Moore soon felt the ending of hers’ fast approaching.

How She Did It?

Moore was the first of this generation of pop superstars to make the jump into legitimate acting, first in the forgettable Dr. Dolittle 2, but then with her valley-girl performance as Lana in the comedy hit The Princess Diaries.  That film’s success led to her getting the lead in A Walk to Remember based of the hugely popular Nicholas Sparks’ book (am I the only one who thinks this guy is a genius? He wrote one story and has been re-editing it and releasing for the last fifteen years, and the world just keeps loving him for it.  Its like I’m taking crazy pills!!!).  Her time as a bit player allowed her to actually learn how to act, so by the time she was the leading lady (and granted, not everything she’s made has been a hit), she was a viable actress and not just a “lets put a singer in a movie” option (See: Crossroads, Romeo Must Die, Burlesque, etc…).  In 2010, she burst back onto the spotlight in her voice performance of Rapunzel in the hit film Tangled, in which she went back to her roots and performed the song “I See the Light”, earning a Grammy in the process (Best Song Written for Visual Media, which totally counts). Her basic strategy to deal with this crisis was to keep working hard and relying on her talent, not her fame, to carry her through.

Tiffany

Ehh.. Music television was just getting off the ground back then.

Tiffany (aka Tiffany Darwish) was half of the two-punch juggernaut of the eighties teenybopper phenomenon, along with fellow teenybopper Debbie Gibson, which actually created the term ‘teenybopper’. Along with the cultural invention of stonewashed jeans, crimped hair, and mall tours (yes, you actually went to a shopping mall to watch your favorite performer), the 1980’s gave us the birth of Pop Music, and the undisputed queens were Debbie Gibson and Tiffany.  The immense saturation of these girls’ faces on covers of magazine after magazine set a disturbing precedent in how we treated teen icons (and gave rise to more than a few legitimate stalking laws). 

In addition to the media blitzkrieg that surrounded her, Tiffany also had the added pressure of one of her first songs being her biggest hit.  She released a remake of “I Think We’re Alone Now” in 1987 as her second single (and if you’ve never held hands in a roller-skating rink to that song, then you’ve never freakin lived) and its place as number one on the Billboard charts was the best her career ever got.  But in the midst of being the opening act for “The New Kids On The Block” (who also shot to superstardom at this time), Tiffany was looking into the abyss of having the best years of her career behind her at the age of sixteen.

How She Did It?

She never did.  Tiffany went on to stay as NKOTB’s (I can’t believe I just used that acronym) opening act for a while, amidst speculation that she was a novelty act, owing her place more to her relationship with one of the New Kids, rather than her ability to draw a crowd.  After that, she faced a bitter financial battle between her family and her management that led to her suing her parents for legal emancipation and losing, only to be declared a ward of her grandmother in aftermath.  After several attempted career reboots, she posed for Playboy in 2002 in an attempt to separate herself from her former image (although it was reported that her decision had more to do with her financial situation than career strategy), and to this day Tiffany is performing at various shows and events, acting in B movies, and starring in reality television still trying get the lightning back in the bottle.  Perhaps hers is a sad story, but what I choose to highlight is that the entire time she has been fighting this battle; she’s done it with dignity and withheld her private life from the world.  Sure, people are going to say that the Playboy spread cancels my argument, but I submit that a thirty-one year old mother choosing to pose for a men’s magazine is an entirely different entity than a twenty year old starlet twerking on a thirty-six year old married man on national television.  Tiffany may be desperate for one more crack at fever-pitch fame, but never showed up at the Kids Choice Awards dry humping David Hasselhoff in order to create the inevitable media circus that type of behavior incites, and that is the difference I am trying to explain.

You see Ms. Cyrus, the mistake that you are making (or being advised to make) is that you’re chasing the ability to be provocative so intently in an effort to bury the public’s memory of Hanna Montana, that you’re allowing yourself to be pigeon-holed as that former child star who is willing to do anything for attention (specifically anything slutty to attract that kind of attention) and this willingness has you poised to go right over the edge and into severe emotional/psychological distress.  There’s just such a small margin of error in your business, and the pressure to strike the right chord between provocative and slutty is so monumental, that often times you’re going to be in a room with a bunch of people that are going to tell you whatever they can in order to keep cashing checks off of your notoriety.  And all I’m saying is that at some point you’re going to want to learn how to think for yourself, because the cliff that you’re tip-toeing up to is very, very steep.

I guess I wasn’t done with the soapbox after all. 

-Brando