http://www.palmbeachpost.com/accent/content/accent/epaper/2008/05/08/a1e_pretty_web_0508.html

Pretty babies Does this photo push the limits of decency? That's up to you. But it's nothing new.
Photo of Miley Cyrus for 'Vanity Fair' by Annie Leibovitz Adolescent sexuality never fails to cause an uproar. Remember Brooke Shields in 1978's Pretty Baby,' or 1962's 'Lolita'?

By SCOTT EYMAN - Palm Beach Post Arts Writer

Thursday, May 08, 2008

Here we go again.

Lost in all the uproar about the Vanity Fair photographs of Miley Cyrus is the recurring nature of the issue. Whenever adolescent sexuality breaches the media ocean - in this case, a 15-year-old with a bare back - the response will be unvarying.

For a similar breach and a similar response, you have to go back to Louis Malle's film Pretty Baby, and my trusty calendar informs me that was 30 long years ago. Since we live in what Gore Vidal refers to as the United States of Amnesia, where no one's cultural memory extends back more than six weeks, a refresher course is in order.

Pretty Baby, for those who haven't seen it, is a good, if pathologically subdued film about the photographer E.J. Bellocq, whose oddly decorous and respectful photographs of turn-of-the-century New Orleans prostitutes created a sensation when rediscovered.

Malle cast Keith Carradine as Bellocq, while the 12-year-old Brooke Shields played a young prostitute in training. Carradine's character never sleeps with Shields' character - Bellocq liked to watch, not participate - but the mere casting of an authentic 12-year-old to play a sexualized 12-year-old created a great deal of trouble for Paramount, which had made the film.

Despite prestigious film-festival bookings and good reviews, the film encountered resistance from some theater chains and notably under-performed commercially.

This followed two years after Jodie Foster's performance as Iris, another 12-year-old hooker, in Taxi Driver, which seemed to skate by mostly because Jodie Foster invariably plays the toughest character in every movie she's in, and Taxi Driver was no exception.

Somewhere in England, Stanley Kubrick was undoubtedly smiling at all this, because he had chosen to avoid the very same issue with his 1962 film of Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the novel that fired the starting gun for the entire concept of dramatized pubescent sexuality.

Kubrick was a courageous filmmaker, but never a suicidal one, and he cast 14-year-old Sue Lyon as the 12-year-old Lolita. Since Lyon basically looked 18, not 12, the film possessed an entirely different ambience from the book, whose elevated language has a way of absorbing the sweaty sex even as it's proclaiming it. Kubrick's film emphasized the wistful sadness of Humbert Humbert's less-than-holy passion for the daughter of his landlady, helped along by James Mason's prodigious performance.

The end result was that Kubrick's Lolita was widely distributed, widely respected, and encountered no particular distribution problems.

At the time she made Pretty Baby, Brooke Shields was a strangely mature child model, but Pretty Baby introduced an element of hesitant but still transgressive sexuality in her image that was amplified a couple of years later in The Blue Lagoon, which was more or less soft porn for kids.

Miley Cyrus has been in the public eye for a number of years, and her TV show and recordings have established the fairly well-set public persona of a nice kid with a small problem - Hannah Montana can't tell her friends the truth about who she is. Pretending that she didn't quite understand how those suggestive photographs happened - Annie Leibovitz, you manipulative scamp! - is a transparent dodge that nobody will remember in, oh, about six weeks.

Maybe Cyrus or her handlers are trying to lay the foundation for a career longer than, say, Debbie Gibson's, or Tiffany's, and simply miscalculated, thereby suggesting a first step into the squalid swamp of Britney Spears.

Of course, reasonable people can differ about all this, about the permissible level of skin for a 15-year-old to show.

But we can all certainly agree on two things: One, this argument is as old as pop culture itself. And, two:

Billy Ray Cyrus: Worst. Hair. Ever.

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