When Miley Cyrus appeared on the Alan Carr ChattyMan show (13th September, 2013), the narrative and representational markers that define her as a particular star were in obvious play. Miley is immediately sexualised and (playfully, knowingly) comments on her sexualisation. Carr greats Miley with ‘my God, you look fabulous!” and their opening discussion begins with a question on how long it takes her to put on her tight latex pants. Miley responds with ‘it is not the time but the amount of people, there is a lot of people doing a lot of this on your thigh (she rubs them up and down and the camera cuts to a close-up of the action). Miley thus becomes the sum of her sexual parts, the latex a fetish for her sexual being, complicit if not in control of the gaze that falls upon her. That Carr is camp, queer, sanitises or masks the exchange as one that is firmly built on patriarchal, heterosexual norms and desires.
Later in the interview, we return to the story of Miley’s ‘vagina’ (the term Carr uses, a telling ‘naming’ in itself), with Carr getting her to talk about the ‘rubber finger’ she pointed at, and caressed it with, at the VMA awards. This narrativisation of Miley’s vagina, her sexualised body, is further extended with questions about her nude video shoot for her latest single Wrecking Ball. We learn that the video director Terry Richardson called on Miley to do more sexual stuff, to ‘take it further’, confirming that a male gaze and sexist logic shaped its operations and perversions.
The questions and exchanges between Carr and Miley are accompanied with insert shots from both events/texts, so that we see Miley caressing her own crotch, fellating a sledge hammer, and straddling a wrecking ball without any clothes on. For large parts of the interview, then, Miley’s star image is reduced to body parts and sexualised acts and while she articulates active agency and a postfeminist sense of control over, and empowerment through, her body, she is being shaped by the excesses of contemporary patriarchy and the cultural industries which sell young female stars through their made-available, accessible bodies.
There is a current obsession with celebrity vulvas, particularly with the on-the-fly, up-skirt ‘glimpse’ that reveals exactly what a female celebrity looks like in terms of her sex organs, and also how they groom themselves ‘down there’. The power of this glimpse in part resides in its momentary quality – the celebrity is out on the town, in movement, exiting or entering the limo to escape the media, or from the fans that surround their car. The paparazzi are jostling for position, in frenzied movement, hoping to get that one shot, the celebrity glimpse, that they can then sell to news providers. The celebrity vulva glimpse has sizeable economic value not just for the photographer who snatches the shot but also for the newspaper or news outlet that prints or screens it because such revelatory pictures increase sales and viewing figures. And even though the shot disenchants or vulgarises the female celebrity, the vulva glimpse may increase their economic potential too. Put simply, female sex sells.
In terms of (female) fan identification, the desire to witness the vulva shot, to glimpse the sex of the female celebrity, satisfies a desire to supposedly know the real person in the most private of places, and which then cannot be read as ‘inauthentic’ or manufactured by the media in this context. Given these up skirt celebrities – Britney Spears and Paris Hilton are two how have been caught by its glare – are often represented as sexual and sexualized, the celebrity glimpse may confirm their status as ultimate sexual beings. What is also being represented is what the right vulva looks like, with wider consequences for female personal grooming practices.
Through the celebrity vulva glimpse, the female celebrity is being reduced to her biology, to pure sex, in the basest of ways. In this heterosexist, patriarchal glimpse, the knickerless celebrity with her perfectly waxed vulva, who is too drunk to enter or exit her limo properly, looses her right to privacy as her private parts are revealed. The idea of personal grooming, however, takes us to the idea of self- surveillance, since this shot invites a concentrated and invasive stare at the most intimate of places. As it does so, it continues and confirms a regime of self-reflective looking practices that all girls, women are meant to undertake. Finally, the glimpse of the celebrity’s shaven vulva reveals something else: the contemporary trend of the juvenilisation of the female body, and the simultaneous fear of the unshaven vagina as something which might devour the glimpse as soon it is given.
Of course Miley is the perfect embodiment of this juvenilisation of the sexual body; in fact her star trajectory is built out its foundations. Miley was a Disney Princess, a committed Southern Baptist, from a loving Christian family, whose star image perfectly matched Hannah Montana. She was purity, chastity, and innocence personified. Now Miley can’t be tamed, her still young, fit and manicured body is drawn into a regime of explicitness, and yet the traces of Hannah remain (Carr actually makes the connection in the interview) and so Miley exists in a precarious, pedophiliac state and it is this of course which makes her so contentious, troubling.
There is another dimension of her star image drawn attention to in the interview. When Carr offers Miley a drink from his kitsch drinks cabinet, she chooses one on the basis of the colour and design of the bottle. Carr jokingly refers to this as ‘shallow’. In discursive terms, of course, Miley is considered to be shallow, empty-headed, driven by consumption logic and a possessive individualism. Her appearance on the Carr show is of course cross-promotional – she is selling her latest single, album, and all the ancillary products she is connected too – and during the interview she draws attention to the fact that being ‘out there’ gets her public attention. Miley and her vulva then are turned or transformed into a commodity fetish with her relationship to ‘it’ both complicit and alienated: ultimately Miley cannot see that her labour creates a system of sexual exploitation, one of which she is part of and (self) promoting.
Or perhaps she can see or feel some of this, a possibility that the Carr interview never gives airing too. The Carr interview sets Miley up as a sexualised, commodity intertext, reinforcing this as the only possible reading of her performances. There is a moment though when the ‘script’ that is being constructed tears a little: when Miley is asked about the video shoot for The Wrecking Ball, she talks about it being a very emotional day. Carr, of course, skips over this to concentrate on her vulva.
The Wrecking Ball video is comprised of two incongruous frames and settings: Miley shot in close-up, shedding affective tears – a direct allusion to Sinead O’Connor’s video for Nothing Compares to You (1989); and the sequences of the foreplay with the sledgehammer and wrecking ball, which slowly destroys the four walls that she is being contained within. Combined together, the video is a confused mixture of suffering and longing, of hating and loving, of fucking and being fucked over. Miley’s tears fall down soft, young cheeks, and are cut next to the images of fellatio and sex – an allusion perhaps to her own sexual exploitation at the hands of patriarchy. There is also a touch of the masculine about Miley: her short hair, work boots and physicality blurs or complicates her sexualisation here. Drawing on O’Connor of course enables this reading: O’Connor felt abused by patriarchy and resisted it through the rest of her musical career. These ‘sisters’ are sharing an affective moment of loss and confusion across time and place. (In the interview, Miley connects her work to other females who have pushed the envelope, including Britney Spears, Madonna, and Lady Gaga, further suggesting an awareness of shared resistance to ‘acceptable’ patriarchal norms). The sledgehammer and wrecking ball are the cock and balls of patriarchy, no pun intended but a good one nonetheless. She is in there thrall but they are breaking down around her. At the end of the video the suggestion is that Miley somehow escapes this perverse world and the perversity of her own star image. Although, of course, this is not the case: a star like Miley remains dependent on its architecture if she is to remain relevant and in the public eye.
Sex sells but it is unlikely to be the only story worth telling, or sharing, or identifying with. For female fans, the Wrecking Ball might not be a gross celebration of available female sexuality but an indictment of it, or at least one that brings the contestations and contradictions of female sexuality into the open.
Sean Redmond
Note: a thank you to Tamara Heaney whose ideas have helped shaped my thinking in this piece, but who would probably offer a different reading to the one that concludes this blog.
Postscript
A ‘Director’s Cut’ of Wrecking Ball has just been released. In this cut, the video exclusively focuses on Miley’s tearful, emoting face. All the nude and suggestive footage has been removed. This may have been a planned release to help continue to promote the single; or a reaction to the adverse criticism it received. I don’t have the space here to offer a counter reading of it but Richardson seems to be staking a claim to authenticating Miley – it his ‘cut’ – and the post credit fool around potentially places him the role of a Father figure come Sugar Daddy; her innocence and playfulness before the man who literally and metaphorically stripped her bare. I actually find this version more troubling, particularly because it has to be ‘read’ or understood against the other version.
Sean Redmond is an Associate Professor of Media and Communication at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia. He writes on stardom and celebrity, science fiction, screen aesthetics, and authorship. His latest book on The cinema of Takeshi Kitano comes out later this year with Columbia University Press.
Sean Redmond, Deakin University, Melbourne: s.redmond@deakin.edu.au
