Much as I would like, I can't ignore the Miley News. I would love to see headlines about, well, damn near anything else, but the media is all above over the grand and terrible spectacle that was Miley Cyrus's . . . oh, what the hell, performance at the VMA. So here's what I have to say about it.
Back during the heyday of the long and increasingly sad train wreck that was Anna Nicole Smith – when she was humiliating herself with a reality show and pretty much every public appearance she made – I heard probably the best and most appropriate thing I’ve ever heard anyone say on the subject of our reality TV culture:
“For Christ’s sake, put the camera down and fucking help her.”
They didn’t, of course – they filmed her all the way over the cliff, and she wasn’t the last.
Read on . . .
And that’s how we ended up with the mess we saw last night. MTV has sunk so low into irrelevance that Miley flailed her swizzle stick of a body in her weird Pedobear dance number just so she could end up on Youtube. And the notion of celebrity has sunk so low that she did it by nothing more than making a pathetic spectacle of herself with dancing skills that make a grand mal seizure look like fucking ballet.
It wasn’t a performance; it was cry for help, vlogged to the whole world. She might as well have just stood there and recited her emotional problems – severe body image and self-worth issues, a desperate/borderline pathological need for approval and attention, etc – as a kind of sad, free-verse poetry.
And a whole slab of the country ate it up. Most of them – way too many – are from the generation of girls behind Miley. Yes, welcome to the new celebrity – no matter how much of a disaster you think someone on TV obviously is, they are someone else’s George Washington.
I used to joke with friends that I wanted to do a "Punk’d"-type gag and do auditions for a phony reality show called “Debase Yourself For Money”, to see how many people would actually show up to apply. That joke stopped being funny years ago.
The only bright spot, for me, was the photo of the reactions of Will Smith and family, who were sitting at the front during Miley’s whatever-the-hell-that-was. They have about the same looks on their faces as they would if they found out that the halftime show at the next Superbowl would involve throwing toddlers to crocodiles. I imagine – or like to imagine – that a lot of America looked like that last night.
I also like to think there’s an emergency brake around here somewhere – that we will, collectively, realize this has all just reached the point at which the viewers are just as degraded as the specimens whose lives the producers are vivisecting on our TV’s, and all grab the lever and say “Stop!”. Anna Nicole didn’t do that for us, and neither did the Real Housewives or Honey Boo. Maybe Miley doing early registration for the 27 Club last night will do it. I can hope. But whether it does or not, I just want to go on record, right now, for posterity:
“For Christ’s sake, put the camera down and fucking help her.”