DARK SIDE OF THE SPOTLIGHT
Alice Vincent wonders why Disney’s female stars have trouble growing up.
Before she’d reached double digits, Demi Lovato had a vision of her future. She had made her TV debut at six in the children’s show Barney and Friends and idolized Shirley Temple and Amy Winehouse. But by the age of 13, she was already jaded. Signed by Disney three years earlier, she had been cast alongside teen heartthrob Joe Jonas in Camp Rock, the singalong followup to the phenomenally successful film High School Musical. Lovato was about to appear on the TV screens of nine million U.S. households.
But, even as she was making it, Lovato worried she was following in the footsteps of troubled Disney stars Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan. “(During filming I thought), ‘Oh crap. In three years, that’s going to be me,’” she said in a 2016 interview. A year later, she said she regretted her childhood career: “I wouldn’t start that young if I could do it over again.”
Lovato is now 25. On Tuesday, it was reported that the star had been rushed to hospital after an alleged opioid overdose. A month earlier, the singer’s single, Sober, which features the lyrics “Momma, I’m so sorry I’m not sober anymore,” confirmed that she had ended a six-year stint of abstinence from alcohol and cocaine, substances she’d been consuming since her teens.
Los Angeles is filled with tales of child actors who have battled crises while making the transition to adulthood, and the graduates of the Disney Channel are among the most prominent. Spears, who was a regular on the star-making TV show The Mickey Mouse Club, suffered a brutally public breakdown in 2007 that saw her shave her head and fend off photographers with an umbrella. Miley Cyrus, formerly the perky teen heroine Hannah Montana, underwent a controversial, highly sexualized image change in 2013. Once-frequent Disney film star Lindsay Lohan has had numerous legal troubles, including arrests for drunken and reckless driving, while a host of graduates, less-well known in Europe but stars in their home country, have found their troubled lives splashed across the tabloids. Could Hollywood do more to prevent the burnout of these girls?
Alison Roy, a child and adolescent psychotherapist, thinks so. “Some questions need to be asked about the roles of these (executives) who are maybe just paying lip service to psychological support. Are they able to say that a child isn’t well enough, or well-supported enough, to perform? Are their individual needs ever assessed?”
Lovato’s troubles started before her career did. She was raised in a house blighted with eating disorders (as suffered by her professional cheerleader mother) and alcoholism (her father, a musician), and was bullied so brutally by her classmates that she resorted to homeschooling.
But in pursuing her dreams, Lovato encountered an industry that made her life less normal. Her acting career sat alongside a musical one via a complex web of music lessons and auditions: in becoming part of the Disney family, Lovato also signed a contract with Hollywood Records. Her musical talent was integral to her big break in Camp Rock, appearing as Jonas’s girl-next-door love interest.
“All of a sudden she had to be this role model, and I don’t think she was ready for that,” said Phil McIntyre, Lovato’s manager, in Simply Complicated, a wartsand-all documentary co-produced by Lovato. “She was living two lives. Here she was, squeaky clean on the Disney Channel
... and just intense (scrutiny) around behaviour. Once the camera stops rolling, she’s living another life. She couldn’t be a normal teenager.” Lovato would later be diagnosed with bipolar disorder, and suffered from unstable mental health throughout her early teens. She first used drugs at 17, while starring in her own show, Sonny With a Chance.
It’s this dichotomy — the need to project perfection while weathering the storms of adolescence — that is at the heart of the pressure heaped on these teen idols, especially the girls, who have to conform to a particularly narrow concept of the way they should look.
“From the time I was 11, it was, ‘You’re a pop star! That means you have to be blond, and you have to have long hair, and you have to put on some glittery tight thing,’” a 22-year-old Cyrus told Marie Claire about starring in Hannah Montana. “Meanwhile, I’m this fragile little girl playing a 16-year-old in a wig and a ton of makeup. It was like Toddlers & Tiaras.”
“It’s a big shock when you have someone presented as a lovely Disney character,” explains Roy. “All those darker feelings go underground.”
Then there’s the sheer physical exertions of the hours these teenagers are expected to work. In 2016, Lovato claimed “we were shooting shows and really overworking.” A 2011 study in the journal Child Development found that teenagers who work more than 20 hours a week are more likely to use drugs and alcohol.
When it comes to the issue of child stars, increasing scrutiny is paid to the studios and their duty of care. But while Disney recognizes the demands on its teenage stars, it has always maintained that a child’s welfare should be managed by other people.
Disney has introduced new measures to make things easier. Since 2014, parents and children have been encouraged to go to monthly “life skills” classes, which focus on emotional and physical well-being. There’s also the half-day Talent 101 course that tells fledgling stars how to deal with aspects of contemporary fame, such as social media.
At the time of writing, Lovato is recovering with her family, with the messages of support flooding in on social media. While her honesty is to be commended, we mustn’t forget the demons she so confronts have been harboured in an industry that routinely produces damaged young women. Until something changes, teenagers will continue to struggle within the confines of Hollywood’s warped reality.