REVIEW: The Idol by Sam Levinson and The Weeknd
REVIEW: The Idol by Sam Levinson and The Weeknd
They took on the Woke Mob and the Woke Mob won
The best part of finishing a work of Western cinema is surely watching the YouTube video essays after. This form of debrief is especially popular when a show is controversial, bad, or better yet, both. The Idol, most have been led to believe, was both.
The Idol – co-written by screenwriter Sam Levinson (of Euphoria fame) and singer Abel Tesfaye (better known as The Weeknd) – tells the story of pop sensation Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), who, lacking artistic inspiration after her mother’s untimely death, has fallen into an ennui-filled hiatus. This is only broken after a chance encounter with the mysterious Tedros (Abel Tesfaye), with whom she begins a BDSM-fuelled sexual relationship. Before long, Tedros has installed himself in her home, alongside his equally bizarre entourage, with the apparent aim of restoring Jocelyn’s artistic mojo by means of his own highly unusual (if not downright cultish and abusive) methods, much to the concern of Jocelyn’s old staff and friends.
Despite the massive controversy surrounding the show, most of the video essays that discuss The Idol are either entirely devoid of substance, consisting purely of ‘comedic’ play-by-plays of the most ‘bizarre’ scenes, all context removed; or, alternatively, they spend much of their time scrutinising the intentions of writers Levinson and Tesfaye, either because of their respective pasts, or because of the latter’s choice to reshoot the whole thing because it wasn’t sufficiently in the ‘male perspective’.
That the female lead actress, Lily-Rose Depp (Jocelyn), wholeheartedly endorsed Tesfaye’s artistic direction is of little value: the media want nothing more than to beat the poor girl to within an inch of her life for the crime of opposing Amber Heard’s domestic abuse case, as well as for her being the postergirl of the coquettish ‘Anacore’ (anorexiacore) aesthetic of Miu Miu. Unfortunately, you have to be a girl’s girl to be entirely safely part of this aesthetic’s club, and Lily-Rose Depp is neither, either on or off the stage. It is within the first five minutes of the show that we hear Jocelyn’s cynical producer, Nikki (Jane Adams), admit that the product she is selling is not for girls: not crafted to illustrate the depressed female genius wronged by the patriarchy, à la Black Swan, but rather an object of wish fulfilment for ‘men in Sioux City, Iowa’ who could never dream of personally bagging a girl under 200lb, unless she were off her rocker.
‘Mental illness is sexy’. If this show has a ‘moral’ to its story, then this is it: every frame of the show basically screams this message. Jocelyn, a blonde popstar in an artistic rut, gaslights ethnically ambiguous nightclub owner and independent ‘talent manager’ Tedros into acting as her abuser in order to deepen the supposed ‘depression’ – if we could even call it that – that would become the new basis of her musical inspiration. This would enable her highly successful rebrand away from ‘pale-and-stale’ bubblegum pop, and towards ‘black’ soul pop, after which Tedros is discarded.
Even for narrowly commercial reasons, is this a wholly unrealistic direction for Jocelyn to want to take? Probably not: the most streamed song of all time on Spotify is Tesfaye’s own ‘Blinding Lights’ – with ‘Starboy’ coming in ninth place – and not a song by Ariana Grande, an artist of almost unqualified Woke political approval. The ghastly Taylor Swift (only really hamstrung in Woke opinion for her unambiguous whiteness) is nowhere to be seen in the entire top 100. Tesfaye evidently knows something about how genuinely popular music is made, despite frequent accusations of the show lacking ‘realism’, rather than simply being a somewhat stylised version of his own reality.
When Jocelyn’s artistic career was still safely in the hands of a highly corporate middle-aged white woman called Nikki, she produced the focus-grouped and utterly cynical ‘World Class Sinner (I’m a Freak)’ – which, I hope everyone would agree, is terrible art. Even if not to everyone’s taste, the ‘problematic’ music she produced after meeting Tedros was objectively not only artistically better, but more commercially successful. Can we say that the abuse plotline was necessary, and not merely an attempt to be ‘shocking’, as is often alleged? Yes: the story within the show tells us just as much, even though it didn’t need to. The Woke love Tedros’s (and The Weeknd’s) music, but hate the ‘toxic’ process that apparently created it.
Perhaps the show, far from being badly written, or merely attempting to ‘shock’, was just too realistic for some to handle. One piece of dialogue that has come under special fire is Jocelyn remarking to her best friend and assistant, Leia (Rachel Sennott), that she actually liked Tedros’s ‘rapey vibe’. (Naturally, it did not help that these lines were written by two men.) I can personally promise you that every single woman who finds The Weeknd’s music seductive – clearly not a small subgroup of women – has said something similar to a friend in one way or another. The semi-improvised BDSM sex acts that Tedros performs on Jocelyn? These sorts of acts are far more likely to be requested by a woman than a man, whatever post-liberals and frustrated TERF mothers may claim: online pornography may still be harmful, but the front page of a website like PornHub is strong evidence that most men’s sexual fantasies are still fairly conventional, at least when compared to women.
Amusingly, despite having this aspect of Tedros’s character – and indeed, his perplexing appeal to a woman like Jocelyn – thrown right in his face, Jason Gorber of RogerEbert.com still criticises Tesfaye’s acting for being ‘bad’, because it was ‘rapey’ rather than merely ‘louche’ – wasn’t that the point? he’s a cult leader! It seems that for Gorber, Tesfaye’s acting is inherently worthy of criticism because he had the gall to play a ‘rapey’ character who was popular with (some) women, based partly on himself, in the first place.
Bizarre relationship dynamics (and so-called ‘power imbalances’) between a thin, attractive white girl, and an older – and considerably less attractive – ‘ethnic’ man? Just go to Toyroom, Tape, or Scandal, and you will soon spy the Tedroses of the real-world walking right through to their £2,000 tables while a bunch of half-German, half-Bulgarian University of London freshers queue up outside (after having found a promoter to put them on the ‘guest list’) before proceeding to awkwardly sip on their ‘vodka-and-orange-juice’ while dancing around their tables. Very true to life. Indeed, it was extremely realistic to make Tedros a nightclub owner. A bunch of barely-clothed people hanging around a white-walled home the morning after, half on a comedown from drugs, while the other half top up? If you exchange Jocelyn’s mansion for those glitzy apartment complexes in Vauxhall’s Riverquay, and add a couple of Albanian drug dealers, that’s just a fairly standard ‘afterparty’ after a night at these clubs. Tesfaye, and his music, would be entirely at home at either of these venues. And this is London, not Los Angeles. Derivative, boring material doesn’t tend to anger people. But you know what does? Realistic material that declines to moralise or wallow in its own sincerity.
Does the show, apparently so offensive to bien pensant critics, make anything much in the way of a political statement? Not explicitly, barring a few jokes at Hunter Biden’s expense, but there are numerous digs at the prevailing ideology that have received surprisingly little fanfare, perhaps partly in an attempt to minimise their exposure to the public. Jocelyn’s ex-boyfriend Robert (Karl Glusman) is falsely framed for ‘sexual assault’ through a carefully orchestrated plot by a jealous Tedros in an obvious jab at the evidence-free vagaries of #MeToo. The Vanity Fair journalist Talia (Hari Neff) is no fearless truth-seeker, champion of women, defender of democracy, but rather little more than an industry hack who is sent on an urgent mission to destroy Tedros by Jocelyn’s thuggish manager, Chaim (Hank Azaria). Jocelyn’s leaked photos, far from having her denounced as a whore by her fans, conjure up a horde of parasocial supporters who proclaim her as the new face of the women’s movement. And Jocelyn’s ‘joke’ about liking Tedros’s ‘rapey’ vibe portrays female sexual proclivities as more in line with something that Andrew Tate would tell you than whatever the official doctrine of the Woke currently is.
Feminised cinema would have you believe that all art produced by and/or ‘for’ men is ‘anti-woman’, merely ‘objectifying’. The idea is that ‘male perspective’ media must have an ulterior agenda other than entertainment or art, i.e., that it is knowingly or unknowingly directed towards bolstering women’s oppression by men (‘the patriarchy’). Fans of the feminist ‘critical lens’ lack self-awareness when they say things like this. They construct a monolith of what art by men is supposed to be like so they can put it on the same level as their own agenda-filled media.
It is poignant how even in this day and age, a show like this which is said to be ‘from the male perspective’ doesn’t feel gendered in any specific way, as opposed to just uninterested in the feminist agenda. Women in this show are not portrayed as being any ‘worse’ than their male counterparts. The ‘male perspective’ is just a value-free product of art having been mostly male dominated, and I am starting to see that there is no problem with that. Dalí, for instance, did not become a household name because he was a man, or because he painted ‘for men’. Although his art was, by default, from the ‘male perspective’, like this show, it is not fundamentally about either gender. The female sex simply did not even try to compete. And although obviously not comparable to Dalí, the show stands out so much today in part because it is explicitly a ‘male perspective’ show.
Even more so, it also stands out because it is a show that has no serious moral or political agenda. It is the cultural antithesis of the ‘New Sincerity’, or the feminised fourth-wall-breaking television favoured by many modern screenwriters. For all of its subversiveness, both intentional and unintentional, the show is emphatically not about pushing a cackhanded moral or political message to the public. It was meant to entertain, and as a product competing on the free market, it was indeed highly entertaining, at least to the open-minded: an aesthetically- and musically-pleasing romp that was, as a bonus, true to life, in terms of portraying how a certain subset of cosmopolitan men and women currently think and act.
The ‘victim’ of The Idol, in the mind of the Woke, is Jocelyn, a blonde white woman, and the ‘villain’ exploiting her is probably Tedros – a racially ambiguous man who, characteristically, gets deadly offended at being (jokingly) called ‘gay’ because he knew women’s fashion. But in its own way, The Idol chooses to devictimise (or, using Woke parlance, ‘empower’) Jocelyn, by showing her to be the real Machiavellian manipulator in the end. The final episode reveals that Jocelyn almost certainly fabricated much of the story of her abuse by her mother – Tedros realises that the hairbrush that Jocelyn’s mother supposedly repeatedly beat her with for years, and got Tedros to hit her with, is in fact brand new – and thus shows that she merely used Tedros, a Person of Colour, to help recreate herself as a serious artist. But despite objectively being a story of ‘empowerment’, this was a twist that no-one interested in moralising would be much happy with: whatever happened to #BelieveAllWomen? While pitting white women against ethnic minority men is hardly an entirely new trick for mischievous writers, it is quite clearly still not something that the Woke are entirely comfortable at dealing with, not least if the latter is an ‘abuser’, which further muddles the ‘correct’ ordering of the progressive stack.
Indeed, for many, the lack of a clear ‘moral message’ is downright infuriating. The implicit political subversiveness of the show is just icing on the cake (one critic declared the show ‘regressive’). Freddie DeBoer recently wrote that
Gen Z are the generation that defies subtext and subtlety and asks to be hit over the head with every theme. It’s the generation of Everything Everywhere All at Once, where talking rocks just tell you how to feel about the movie halfway through, and Stranger Things, where once an episode a character looks dead into the lens and says ‘friendship is the real magic!’.
An anonymous J’accuse columnist made a somewhat similar point last year – arguing that the phenomenon as originated with David Foster Wallace’s ‘New Sincerity’, and christening its lowbrow cousin as ‘Whedonism’ – noting that
…Tumblrists… criticised angsty, dark settings you might easily associate with Warhammer or Alan Moore’s comics as a case of white male privilege… [Another] champion of the New Sincerity… was Josh [sic] Whedon… The use of dialogue to deliver moral character judgments on the villain, typically in a pseudo-ironic, flat tone is a distinct feature of modern American pop culture… It’s entirely normal for the best grossing films to include embarrassing propaganda on behalf of the status quo…
The response of the critics, of course, reveals just how widespread this intellectual and artistic disease really is, and that it is not restricted to any one generation, or to Tumblr: as J. Sorel has also argued, we live under a regime that feels threatened, and thus has no time for such moral greyness. When presented with a piece of media without an (inevitably lame) ‘lesson’ to be learned, left-leaning millennials are seemingly no less likely than Gen Z to start foaming at the mouth, screaming ‘WHERE IS MY MORAL MESSAGE!!!’.
While writing this article, I found myself wondering why the critically-acclaimed Euphoria, also written by Sam Levinson, did not suffer the same fate as The Idol. I think the answer is that Euphoria disguised its more politically contentious plotlines – such as the idea that most transgender women have no idea of what being a woman is, aside from the pornified image of the pink, mini-skirt, kitten-heel-wearing bimbo; or the idea that a fourteen-year-old losing her virginity to a random adult man could be ‘in control’ – because it distracted its audience by dealing rather less allusively with its more palatable subplots, such as how Cassie’s daddy issues make her a bad friend; or how Nate, seemingly a typical jock, is in fact a self-hating homosexual, much like his father. Euphoria thus throws some bones to the Woke to try to satisfy their incessant need for an insipid moral message. The Idol, by contrast, simply doesn’t bother.
The ruckus over The Idol shows that, for the Woke, there can ultimately be no female genius. Only men, then, are allowed to subject themselves to abuse in the name of art: women are too fragile to do so, and must be relegated to producing bubblegum pop from the ‘female perspective’; or to low-energy vanilla ballads, sang to the strum of an acoustic guitar. The Woke can introduce as many degrees in Taylor Swift Studies as they please, but iconic female singers like Whitney Houston and Amy Winehouse – both of whom led the sort of lives that the audience wants to save Jocelyn (and ‘Britney’) from – will always be considered real artists: Whitney Houston’s ‘I Will Always Love You’ – sang to an abusive boyfriend – and Amy Winehouse’s ‘Back to Black’ are timeless classics. And, ultimately, this art was not just the product of these two women’s incredible voices, but was also a product of their abuse from other people and drugs. Mental illness is indeed sexy.
This brings me to a final criticism of the show: that the show could have been about how ‘exploitative’ the music industry is of women. But quite apart from anything else, do we really need yet another rerun of Framing Britney Spears or Britney vs Spears? The Woke see Jocelyn as being partly based on Britney Spears, and they are not wrong, but I do not understand why this very much original character needs to be moulded into yet another tale vindicating the ’noughties popstar. I guess such questions would inevitably fall upon deaf ears, as the Woke have long become used to rehashing storylines with which they can most easily pursue their tedious moral agenda. Those of us who appreciate realism and (relatedly) moral ambiguity think differently.
There is, therefore, much to love about this subtly right-wing coded (read: not-moralising) show that centres a manipulative female genius. But I guess we are outnumbered: The Idol was not only cancelled – both literally and figuratively – but also condemned to be forever forgotten, remembered only for being ‘boring’ (how?) and ‘confusing’. This is a bit rich, given that many of the ‘confusing’ elements of the show were substantially a consequence of it being cut at least one episode short in response to the public outrage it created. Despite claims to the contrary, including from the writers themselves, there are numerous new narrative threads that are only introduced in the show’s penultimate episode, indicating that the writers expected to have much more screen time than they actually got. These narrative threads are resolved awkwardly – and in otherwise inexplicably short order – in the finale. This is unfortunate, but it is lame to criticise something for being affected by the wrench you threw into it.
Watch this show. Do not let them win. Call them out on their bullshit. There is still time. But at the moment, it seems like there is little hope. Even friends of mine who have led lives which partly resemble that of Jocelyn – minus the pop idol status – have not given it a try, as they heard that it was ‘silly’ and ‘turgid’ and ‘boring’. For all of its faults, The Idol was at least edgy enough to make the great majority of people confused and uncomfortable, and the rest of us thoroughly entertained. And for that alone, it deserves great credit.