american grotesque
Music: American Idol
The university has decided to hold class tomorrow---to my surprise. I predicted they would at least open at noon because all the elevated fly-overs are now closed (I'll have to take an alternate route to school tomorrow). But they were reporting that the city was out of de-icer? They're opening at 10:00 a.m., which means my 11:00 a.m. class will meet. I'm now scrambling to put together my outline for the class (I'm trying powerpoint for the first time . . . deity help me).
As I work on this task I'm listening to the Fox hit American Idol, which, at this point, is a media phenomenon that cannot be ignored. As I learned reading Variety, all the other networks literally throw up their hands when scheduling against the show, which is currently running four hours a week on Tuesday and Wednesday nights. The competing networks consider the Fox hit somewhat of a fluke, while Fox uses the show to launch others (the drama House was catapulted after it was scheduled following Idol). This is the 6th season.
Why the heck has this show lasted so long? First, I think it is because you can do all manner of things while you watch it. It moves very slow, and everything that happens is mostly predictable. You can go pee and nothing significant has transpired. Second, there is the ruthless, sardonic framing of freaks, geeks, misfits, and idiots that pretty much is the formula for the first part of the season. A young man with a touch of that Trekkie quality (he holds his waist nervously), with red hear, bulging blue eyes, and bad teeth confidently but cluelessly massacred some boy band song. They let him sing for a full three minutes because it was so terrible, and also because the young man was visibly unaware of how bad his singing was: "What the bloody hell was that?" says Simon. Simon is visibly angry. There is an awkward pause. A confident voice returns: "That was me." Another long pause. The young man then gives in. "Was that not good enough?" The judges proceed to tell the man he is terrible.
Now, the show tends to revolve around the fact that Simon is a "mean judge" and says harsh, terrible things. He does, actually (he said to one guy tonight he looked like a creature from the jungle with "big eyes"—he implied bug-eyed natives, but fortunately the young man went for the more innocent, "he said I looked like a monkey"). But what is really sardonic are the shots and the jump-cuts that elevate Simon's direct cruelty to a kind if indirect severity. After the young man above leaves the room, Ryan Seacrest approaches him and asks how it went. The young man replied not very well, and this was all he had to say. Seacrest stares at him, he stares back, and they just keep shooting in a prolonged scene of clueless humiliation. The sheer length of the shot is uncomfortable, then a jump cut to a head shot of the young man speaking definitely, then back to the stare contest.
For the most part tonight's program was cruel, although not in ways that I had expected. Instead of poking fun at their singing, all sorts of things are insinuated about intelligence, looks, class, fashion sensibility, gait---and anyone that is in some way physically awkward (there was, for example, a woman who had the appearance of Down Syndrome) will be featured. American Idol seems, in other words, to function by identifying its own "terrorists" against which to define the normalcy of the televisual audience.
As a fan of Jerry Springer and court television shows, I very much understand the enjoyable logic behind of negative definition. I watched in horror as an obviously mentally handicapped individual was ballyhooed as a freak (Paula seems to swoop in at the end to recover and provide some modicum of recognition/love). What seems missing in Idol is something like informed consent: a lot of the folks who are made fun of do not seem aware that they will soon become objects of derision. One might argue that because the show is in its fifth season, "they know what they are getting into." But it's clear some of these folks are incapable of discerning the social cues—incapable of understanding how they are being humiliated. Does humiliation require self-awareness?
Regardless, because the producers prey on ignorance, American Idol is a mean show.