Hannah Montana and Me

What she meant to me then and what she means to me now. On double lives, public image and redefinition.

I remember the first time I saw Hannah. I was eight years-old, sitting in my step-grandmother’s kitchen in Woodward, Oklahoma, watching the TV on the bar. Hannah performed at a concert in Florida broadcast on Disney Channel. I distinctly remember her singing “Life’s What You Make It” and how she captivated me. Whether that was love at first sight or a queer man discovering his first idol, I do not know. It was my first time in America and I could not fathom how the place was so big, could not even begin to comprehend the vast distance between Oklahoma and Florida. (The Philippines, my only frame of reference then, is comparable in size with a single US state.) Four years after seeing Hannah, my family and I moved to America permanently and grandma eloped with an old fling and moved to Arkansas. That was around the time the last season of Hannah Montana began airing.

Growing up, no one made a more indelible impression on me than Miley Cyrus as Hannah Montana. Many children aspired to the lives she led as both Miley and Hannah, and I was no exception. The best of both worlds. Fame without scrutiny, fame without consequence, the fantasy goes. But of course there is always consequence. “Living two lives is a little weird” seems like an understatement regarding what we have come to find out about our child stars. Miley Stewart may have been able to keep it anonymous but not Miley Cyrus; the media scrutinized her at every turn for mistakes typical of someone her age. Meanwhile Demi punched a dancer who told on her for partying, went to rehab, relapsed, fell out with Selena, who broke off with Justin and became friends with Taylor. Justin found drugs, found God, then found love apart from Selena. Nick Jonas married too, each aspect of the wedding sponsored by one company or another and meticulously documented. Their once enviable lives have been revealed as a gilded cage or, in Nick’s case, a glass closet.

On a whim, one Wednesday evening, I decided to revisit Hannah Montana. The pilot is a coming out of sorts; Miley comes out as Hannah to her best friend Lilly. In case that sounds too gay, Disney has you covered. Along the way there’s some light homophobia, (Miley’s brother Jackson is made to wear women’s clothes by Hannah’s flamboyant, lavender-coded personal stylist,) and the manufactured idolatry of an Aryan teen pop sensation. (Oliver says multiple times how he longs to shampoo Hannah’s “long, blonde hair.”) We see Hannah’s closet à la MTV Cribs. Best friends fall apart, they make up. Bullies get their comeuppance, the end.

I willed my myself through the last season’s first episode. Hannah Montana Forever finds them in the last year of high school acting like no high schooler would. There’s a shiny new intro, a new house. Conflict: Miley doesn’t like her new room but she doesn’t know how to tell her dad. It’s her childhood bedroom, an allegory for Cyrus growing too big for her britches, too grown to play Hannah. Jackson begins making the moves on a neighboring model. Another TV trope is afoot: average guy, hot girlfriend. You can tell Cyrus is over this. She hams up every scene.

As I watched this, I could not believe this was the show that held such symbolic significance to me. I did not laugh once, much less crack a smile. I began to understand more clearly why Cyrus rebelled as she did, why she wanted to get as far away as possible from Hannah. Not all of us may have our mistakes broadcast to the world but we all lead two lives, public and private. Our selves are not just something we decide, something we can change on a whim, but a constant negotiation between us and the world, a constant give and take. Cyrus, during her Disney years, did not even have a chance to decide, much less negotiate, who she was without people inserting their opinions on it. That just goes to show the insidious power of marketing to create enduring symbols, to create idols out of fallible human beings; people’s image of her as a “tween star” had been solidified, but she was no longer so young and it was never who she was.