I probably wouldn't have wasted my time watching American Idol at all, but for the fact that my teen-aged cultural consultant watched it in the same room where I was working. I would have assumed at a glance that the program was just Ted Mack Amateur Hour on steroids. But as I continued to watch it I realized that the program made some profound statements about American culture.Editorial (New York Times)
Family Values on Fox
Published: January 22, 2006
The news that "American Idol" has started a new season with ratings even more enormous than last year's reminds us of an old query. In a nation with a disquieting surplus of moral arbiters, why isn't there a call to clean up television programs that specialize in humiliating the weak? People devote untold hours to worrying about the sexual orientation of cartoon characters, but nobody seems disturbed that more than 30 million American households watch a "family" show that picks out hapless, and frequently helpless, contestants solely for famous and powerful judges to make fun of them on national television.
"American Idol" is known, even among those who have never seen it, as a talent show in which a dozen or so young pop singers compete to win a recording contract and a national profile. But it begins every season with several weeks of early elimination rounds in which judges pick the handful of contestants who will make it to the finals from a preselected mixture of very talented and very terrible singers. The very terrible have reason to hope that, having come so far, they might actually be as good as they imagined in their dreams.
Most of them are extremely young, naïve and deluded. Many appear terribly vulnerable and some seem to border on mentally impaired. The fun is supposed to come from seeing the celebrity judges roll their eyes, laugh, and tell them that they are tone-deaf, fat, funny-looking or, in the case of one young man, "atrocious" and "confused." (The cameras followed him out of the audition room, the better to make sport of him crying with his family.) The producers so treasured the comment of one judge, Simon Cowell, who said an overweight woman would require a bigger stage in Hollywood, that they used it to promote the segment.
In many ways, all this is just a much more expensive, glittery version of the old "Gong Show" from the 1970's. But the targets of that less hypersuccessful program were generally older and frequently more cynical. And, of course, the whole thing happened in a different era, when family values was not an overriding obsession.
No one wants to censor Fox's money machine, but it does seem peculiar that a nation so torn apart over what message gay marriage or prayer in school will send to impressionable youth is so unified in giving a pass to a program that teaches young people that it's extremely cool to be mean.
If you have ever seen the tens of thousands of people who show up for the American Idol cattle calls, you realize that our society runs on dreams.
Anybody who didn't fall off the turnip truck last night knows that in America, even though we try to maintain the fiction that everyone is equal, some are more equal than others. By accident of birth some are blessed with beauty or wealth or talent that makes the playing field of life less than level.
Part of the American Dream is to be a star. I used to think that it was just me who had these delusions of grandeur, but life and American Idol has shown me that almost everyone who has a heartbeat imagines himself as being a star. It's as American as Ethyl Merman belting out, "Curtain Up, Light the Lights, I've got nothin' to hit but the heights." It's hope. It's confidence. It's the intrepid American Spirit. Or maybe it's the human spirit, to aspire to live your dreams.
Perhaps it is mean. Perhaps some participants get humiliated. Life is mean. Show biz imitates life. There is no drama without conflict. Good story is about aspiration and sweat and passion and insight or delusion, with one of the inevitable outcomes--success or failure. It's the universal human drama.
There is also something viscerally inspiring about watching those who are minimally blessed with talent but have high hopes trying to defy the odds and like sperm in a jiggling sprint, try for the sacred egg of stardom and success. It makes a statement about how much we as a culture value fame and wealth and success.
Personally, I think that we should run our government like American Idol. We should elect our representatives this way. First you have a cattle call for every nutty politician or cab-driver with a political opinion. Then a panel of judges who are more critical than Simon Cowell winnows them down to the top 12. Then America votes on them by telephone or internet. based on how well they can tap-dance around the issues or sing the praises of their position or, hell, just look good while saying nothing in particular. The suspense would build week by week. Ooops, there goes Joe Biden. And next week it's John McCain. When it gets down to the short hairs, we have Hillary and Condi and Obama in the final three.
