The Girl Who Refused to Be Explained
The MTV documentary Miley: The Movement, which aired in late 2013, was sixty minutes of rapid cuts, dramatic score drops, and mutual admiration: Miley talked about Pharrell, Pharrell talked about Miley, a little Britney, a little dancing, a lot of MTV congratulating itself for still mattering to anyone. I’d seen it in advance and came away with nothing I hadn’t already known.
The photographs Terry Richardson shot of her around the same time were more honest—or at least more direct. There she was, the former Disney princess, stripped of the Hannah Montana gloss and visibly, almost aggressively, delighted about it.
Armchair psychologists had been circling her for months by then. The diagnoses ran the full spectrum: damaged girl, calculated provocateur, trauma response, brand pivot, genius, slut. Anyone who’d taken one semester of psychology had a theory about what had happened to the sweet kid from the Disney Channel. She’d twerked at the VMAs and the internet treated it like the fall of Rome. Every music review became a pretext to linger a little longer on her, to turn her openness—physical and emotional—into something to be managed, analyzed, and condemned before moving on to the next target.
What I kept coming back to was simpler. She seemed to be having fun. Not the manufactured kind—actual fun. Whether she had some grand master plan nobody else could see, or was simply improvising her way through twenty years of deferred adolescence, the effect was the same: she was living in the specific moment she was in, doing exactly what she felt like doing, and leaving the wreckage for other people to sort through.
And if living freely meant letting Terry Richardson photograph you half-naked, if it meant riding wrecking balls and confusing the squares, if it meant having the most fun of your brief life so far—then none of the commentary really sticks. Not the think pieces, not the pearl-clutching, not even a meaningless MTV documentary made to prove the channel still has a pulse.