In Which I Watch American Idol So You Won't Have To

So here I am, the last guy in America who's never seen American Idol. Until now. (And no, I'm not going to post a link to it. You can just go find it yourself. So there.) Their new season has begun, and the crew are on the road, visiting Minneapolis and Seattle in search of talent--or the opposite of talent, in many cases. Most of you probably already know this, but it's all new to me. So I watched about twenty minutes of Tuesday's show in Minneapolis, and about an hour of last night's Seattle program. But bear in mind that a lot of that hour was spent fast-forwarding through the many many commercials (geez but I love my TiVo!), and then fast-forwarding through the worst of the very bad singers.

Which brings up Point No. 1: if in Minneapolis they began with a stadium full of 10,000 contestants, then clearly there's a screening process before anyone ever gets into the room with Simon, Paula and Randy. Just as clearly, then, the screeners are deliberately letting in some awful, awful singers. The only reason for this is, plain and simple, exploitation. Put them in a room with mean ol' Simon (and man is he mean--as a person who has often sat on Simon's side of an audition table, I would like to apologize for Simon and swear to you that most of us would never behave like that to an auditioner--and anyone who does is simply an asshole and you don't want to work with him) and let him abuse that person so that we in our comfy little homes can feel all superior because at least we're not that doofus. This is what you call exploitation: the ritual abuse of some poor schmuck so that we can feel better about ourselves. It is also monstrously conformist: the strange and the hapless are willfully preyed upon, thus reinforcing standards of "normalcy" and further ostracizing those poor souls who don't quite fit in--all this in a show that is supposedly about finding unique talents, people who stand out from the crowd. Sure the winners stand out--but only in the right way. You can see it happening in these roadshow tryouts: some poor girl with a weight problem and a penchant for pink fishnet walks in, and already Simon and his cohorts are smirking, already they're coming up with something awful they can say to this poor person.

What's saddest is that on some level, at least a few of these sad sacks must know they're going to be abused, but they accept it so they can get on television. That's the quiet agreement that allows shows like this to exist at all, a cruel compact between abuser and abused; television as the ultimate Enabler.

On the flip side, there is Point No. 2: stardom ain't as easy as all that. Take the juggling kid in Minneapolis. (If Simon is ever murdered there's going to be a long list of suspects, and this kid would have to be on the list.) When he got rejected, brutally of course, he ran out of the room swearing a blue streak; and when a family member reminded him he's only 16, he wailed "But I wanted to start out famous!" To which the only real response is "Well there's your problem right there, kid." Because if there's any one thing that I learned above all else during my years as an actor, it's this: your performance isn't for you, it's for the audience. The only reason to get up in front of people and do a song or a dance or a recitation or whatever is to provide entertainment and, even better, a little enlightenment. To make people laugh or cry or sigh with recognition; to make them lean forward in their seats, transfixed by what they're seeing on the stage. But if you're performing because you get off on applause, then please, Simon, go ahead and say whatever you want to say because these are the sorts of people who need to be shunted well clear of the performing arts.

This is not to say that you shouldn't enjoy what you do; in fact you should, you should totally get off on the performance. But your pleasure in the work should be directly proportional to the audience's pleasure in the work, and that may be hard to measure sometimes: everyone's faced a dead audience from time to time, only to discover after the fact that what seemed dead was in fact a deep but undemonstrative appreciation. Then of course there are the artists who are doomed to be misunderstood in their own lifetimes, the Van Goghs of the world; but the trouble here is that way too many lousy artists convince themselves that they're the new Van Gogh and continue on much longer than they should. And you could see these people, too, on the Idol shows the past two nights: the ones who vowed that despite their brutal rejection at the hands of Simon, Paula and Randy, they would go on undeterred, their resolve only strengthened by the cruel hand of societal rejection. Only one guy said, when interviewed, that his rejection had been a wake-up call; he may have been the only realist in that entire crowd of 10,000 people.

So. Is American Idol evil? Well of course it is. Is it addictive anyway? Of course it is; that's why it's so evil, because once you start to watch it's very hard to pull yourself away again. Does it manage to make points about the American obsession with stardom and self-delusion? Yes it does, but it makes that point while at the same time reinforcing the problem on a scale previously unimagined. Even more to the point: will I watch this program again?

Damn. Yeah, I probably will.

P.S.: After American Idol ended last night, I then pivoted to a movie I had recorded a few weeks ago, Everything is Illuminated, which Liev Schreiber adapted and directed from the novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. Now this, this is art. Really truly Art, and why on earth I spent so much time talking about the pop claptrap of American Idol when I could have been talking about the illuminations of this movie is beyond me.