The Idol: An Informal Review

One of my friends is also really into Euphoria, and she had sent me an audio message saying that if I missed Euphoria—don’t we all?—that I would also really like The Idol, another artistically curated show by Sam Levinson with Abel Tesfaye (the Weeknd) both substituting for Labrinth and casting himself as the antagonist, nightclub owner and cult freak Tedros, opposite Lily-Rose Depp as Jocelyn, a child actress turned pop star (think Britney or Miley). I hadn’t yet watched the show because I had only heard it received negatively since it first aired, but I trusted my friend’s good taste and then was almost immediately enraptured by the visuals, sound, and story. What were people complaining about?

First, I have to give Levinson his flowers. His writing and direction have a certain effect on viewers to make them identify actors fully with their characters, for better or worse. Often when I talk about Euphoria, I attribute the depiction and development of characters fully to the actresses, sometimes surmising that Zendaya and Hunter Schafer must be the real brains behind the show. I don’t doubt that Levinson lets his cast contribute to their characters, but without Zendaya or Schafer being on camera I was confronted with the fact that Levinson either has a fat thumb on the pulse of the zeitgeist, or is highly collaborative with his casts regardless of one’s particular members. For better or worse.

Anyway, as my friend told me, The Idol is similar to Euphoria in that both are about self-destructive tendencies driven by one’s desire regardless of how much it hurts them. There’s a key difference, though, besides all the main characters being ten years older (it’s notable that Euphoria is also undergoing a time skip; Levinson must be trying to beat the accusations). Euphoria is about conflicting internalities of characters: how their trauma manifests in outward lashings out. The Idol however is about conflicting externalities, how different parties compete to exploit Jocelyn commercially and sexually. The first episode thoroughly gagged me because it was shot voyeuristically: every angle of Jocelyn is from the perspective of a diegetic camera as she shoots a sexy album cover, or from that of her superiors as they judge her practicing sexy choreography. This signalled off the bat that Jocelyn, unlike Rue and Jules, lacks any self-concept whatsoever, as we learn throughout the first few episodes that she’s crashing out because of the death of her abusive mother (think Dance Moms). To borrow Deleuze’s terminology, Jocelyn is a body without organs, waiting or even begging to be territorialized.

Who are her lucky claimants? The first is her management team from the time since she was a child actress and singer, a bunch of overtly Jewish (put a pin in it) talent agents and producers and record executives; I don’t know how the music industry works. They are all cartoonishly conniving, one being Hank Azaria as a live-action Simpsons character, and in the first episode they conspire behind Jocelyn’s back to sexualize her enough to sell her new image as an adult pop star, but not enough to compromise her incumbent audience of teenage girls who look up to her. The other claimant is the sleazy, scandalous, and (of course) ethnically ambiguous Tedros who seduces Jocelyn and teaches her how to sing like she fucks by (of course) literally fucking her in the studio.

I won’t spoil the show except for the ending which—if you’re a real one—you know is the least important part of a narrative. Jocelyn escapes Tedros’ abuse and recruits his cultlike entourage, a bunch of talented freaky singers, to open for her stadium tour. Her managers are very happy with this situation, both because they are wowed by the other singers, and they feel like they’re pulling one over Tedros who they thought had corrupted Jocelyn and turned her into an unmarketable freak. This happy ending is then subverted in an ending probably meant to be the show’s last episode (since they condensed 5 & 6 into just 5 due to poor ratings): Jocelyn invites the defeated Tedros to her first performance under what we learn to be his real name, Mauricio Costello Jackson, and she brings him out on stage to announce him as her loving partner and muse, much to the horror of her management who had just been congratulating themselves in Hebrew (“Tov meod!”). Then Jocelyn tells Mauricio that he is now hers forever.

Viewers were aghast, I remember. For an abusee to become or be revealed as the abuser is such a lazy and insulting twist for a show purportedly about the media dehumanization and resulting downfall of female celebrities (particularly those entering adulthood). Could the show have ended any other way, however, even if it felt sudden and unearned from a narrative standpoint? Let’s cut to the chase: this is absolutely a fascist narrative. Another friend Ènziramire—you may know him!—shared with me a paper by Hylton White entitled “How is capitalism racial?” By synthesizing Fanon and Postone, White analyzes the racist symbols of the Jew and the Black as mutually constructive fetishes of capitalism:

Through a dialectical synthesis of insights from Fanon and Postone, we are able to advance our understanding of racial capitalism as a global form, by showing how the pair of antisemitism and antiblack racism find their political potency in their ability to offer racial proxies for the basic structure of capitalist social relations. Following Postone (1993), I take that basic structure not to be class but rather the alienated structure of social action, under its domination by the dictate to valorise capital. This structure of alienation appears in a polarised pair of fetishes, representing abstract value and abstract labour not as two sides of the same coin, which they are, but as two separate kinds of powers. On the one hand, a denatured, abstract will that has no body, but controls other lives through hidden operations. On the other hand, a brute biological force that lacks self-governing will and is thus in need of socialising violence to make it useful to civil society. The ideological pair of antisemitism and antiblack racism gives us human proxies for these fetish forms, casting the pathologies of modernity not as the outcome of a structure of alienation, but as the powers of antisocial racial types. That is how antiblack racism is such a recurrent figment of global modernity.

Hylton White, Social Dynamics 46:1, “How is capitalism racial?”, p. 24

That clears things up right away, doesn’t it? Pretty little Aryan girl Jocelyn recovers her dignity from her dead mother’s management cabal, and she simultaneously appropriates and redeems the artistic vision of the sexually degenerate Tedros. By setting these parties against each other, fighting for her, she comes out on top. Girlboss! There is no universe in which the show could have begun and developed as it did without ending in this way. Why did Sam Levinson (who is Jewish) and Abel Tesfaye (who is Black) write such a show? Beats me. Freak shit.

But wait…

There’s a certain metatextual aspect. Sam Levinson is a thief. It’s happened twice that he has a female artist develop a show which she is slated to direct, who then suddenly falls out of the picture for being too young and experienced. The first time was on Euphoria, as per an interview of photographer Petra F. Collins with PUNKT—which was later redacted when it went viral and Levinson began catching heat (see Internet Archive):

I tell you the truth about that series what never was told. I never talked about this publicly, because it is such a crazy thing, but basically, the reason I moved to Los Angeles was because Sam Levinson, who directed [Euphoria]. He reached out my agency and told “I wrote a show based on your photos. Will you direct it?”. So I moved to LA, and work for HBO for about 5 months. I was like “I am directing the show”. I created a whole world for it, I did the casting, whatever and the last minute HBO was like “We are not hiring you, because you are too young”. And that was like “fine, okay, thank you so much” They won’t take my version of the show obviously - I was so naiv - , they’ll just do another one. So it was fine, I learned a lot, it was interesting… And a year later I walked out of my apartment, and see this billboard and it’s exactly what I am, as a copy of my work. I started crying, I was so shocked. I mean it happens to me so many times in my career, but not on a scale like that. It was so intense to me, because this is the aesthetic that I built all my life, and now I have to change it, ‘cause it enters the mainstream and it’s been taken away from me. The worst thing was when people were unknowingly saying this show looks like your photos.

Then it happened again on The Idol: originally written and directed by Amy Seimetz, and filmed up to 80% completion before being thrown out with Seimetz. Some filmed scenes covered Jocelyn’s teenage years with her mother, conspicuously absent from the released version of the show. Rolling Stone quotes crew members:

What I signed up for was a dark satire of fame and the fame model in the 21st century. The things that we subject our talent and stars to, the forces that put people in the spotlight and how that can be manipulated in the post-Trump world. It went from satire to the thing it was satirizing.

It was a show about a woman who was finding herself sexually, turned into a show about a man who gets to abuse this woman and she loves it.

That all sounds about right, on a fundamental level. Two things. First, this all points to a central tendency in Levinson’s work: it’s about women, and it’s relatable to women, but the work’s male gaze (in the original, cinematographic sense) overwhelms it and creates dissonance; this is not artistically unfruitful because it can complement the work’s themes about the male gaze (socially or erotically speaking), but very often it only compromises them. Second, I can’t help but notice that the story of The Idol seems like a fascistic retelling of its own production; that casts Levinson and Tesfaye in a strange light as producers wrestling with the original writer-director for creative control of the show—again, what are we supposed to make of that? I don’t know. Freak shit.

Well-made show. Absolutely fascist. Sexist too, but as accessory.