Worshipping False Idols: A Confession

Ok, I admit it: I think I'm addicted to watching American Idol. Yes, me, the person who for many years didn't even watch television at all. I still don't have cable--I just have a pair of rabbit ears. But I don't know what's happened to me in the last six months--I even watch certain shows on a regular basis: CSI, Law and Order. I'm not a television junkie, but I sure am tuned in as I haven't been for a long time.

I think I first watched American Idol by accident, really. I wasn't doing anything and thought, gee, I'll flick on the tube, just for the hell of it. I became interested in the criteria by which people were chosen for the competition and interested in particular in the (now-former) contestent, Frankie. Her fate intrigued me because her voice was (is) so powerful, but she was a full-figured woman--very attractive, but not conventionally so. I wanted to see what would happen to her: how the judges would assess her, how this empty mass called "the American public" would respond to her. I followed her participation in the show long enough to get hooked, long enough that when she was booted off the show for failing to disclose that she had posed for an "adult" website, even my outrage did not keep me from continuing to follow the progress of things.

I don't really have any other good explanation for why I keep tuning in (besides just being "hooked"), except the fact that I don't have a good explanation probably insires me to keep looking for such an explanation. I think I keep hoping I'll be somehow surprised by the turnout, though that hasn't happened yet as week after week people get voted off the show.

One of the things that I do continue to be surprised by is the extent to which this voting American public has its opinions shaped by the crabby Simon Cowell, the judge with the most acerbic comments to make about all the contestants. He's a Brit, so I wonder if there some kind of colonial hangover working here. But he's anything but "nice." He's hardest to please because his standards are so high (or so he suggests), at least until his judgment is clouded by a pretty girl with not much talent like Ms. Carmen Rasmussen.

The other thing that fascinates me is a question about mass culture more generally: how does it renew itself? How does it create new famous people? Where do they come from and what compromises must they make to become and stay mass produced? American Idol is nothing if not a lesson in how to find star. It begs the question: what kind of "liveness " is possible in mass media? And is whatever liveness we might observe, really in the end just an illusion of whatever liveness fits the mythology we want.

I suppose the show doesn't really ask any new questions or present any new answers to old questions. And given my propensity to "intellectualize" life (as so many people point out to me), perhaps in the end it's just brain candy, not worh the paragraphs I've just typed.

Sometimes a pipe is just a pipe.

Posted by Bush Whacker at April 8, 2003 10:54 PM