One Last Gasp for American Pop
Sam Levinson and The Weeknd's pop fantasy is a dream of sexual domination and a nightmare of American decline
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Trigger Warning: Because of the content of the show, this article explores themes of sexual abuse and exploitation, including graphic descriptions of the show’s plot.
The Idol is, among other things, fan fic. Yes, it’s set in our world: a world where Britney Spears, Vanity Fair, Live Nation and revenge porn all exist. And yet, like the bright filmic filter that creator and show-runner Sam Levinson uses on his other mega-show, Euphoria, something’s a bit off, or heightened, here.
Over-saturated. A sticky sweetness that’s delicious but rots sugary. Like that last shot you take at the club when the smiley haze becomes suddenly nauseating. It feels pretty good, but now we’re blacked out and we wake up to the Uber-fee. We threw up in the back!?
Fan fiction is a form most practiced by young girls and queer fans of pop stars and franchises. With it, a fandom creatively inserts their perspective into a narrative or pop culture property, evoking new pleasures from what’s already so pleasing. There’s a playfully radical nature to fan-fic. The world, imagined or real, becomes the malleable clay in which new(ish) narrative can form. The medium’s lack of ultimate originality is why the it’s usually cast aside as pedestrian and unserious. But there’s no deeper measure of testing the cultural impact of a cultural property than the amount of fan fiction it inspires. Justin Bieber. One Direction. Harry Potter. Dr. Who.
The Idol is the world’s most expensive piece of Britney fan-fic. Jocelyn, the mega-star played with cool-girl ease by Lily Rose-Depp, is almost immediately compared to Spears. Dan Levy, playing a bumbling member of Jocelyn’s team, remarks to a Vanity Affair reporter working on a profile on her that, “like Britney,” the media has been “so brutal” to her. In another allusion to Spears, that reporter remarks that she has watched her since she was child, insinuating Jocelyn’s own Mickey Mouse Club.
In The Idol, Jocelyn is alone, controlled completely by her label, yet defiant in small ways. As the mega-American pop star Britney phantom, Jocelyn becomes a vessel, a literary trope to be played with and re-arranged. Like all good fan fiction. Except this time it’s not young queer fans and women who get to re-imagine pop culture in their image, but Levinson and the pop megastar himself, Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye, who co-created the show and stars in it as well.
Such fan-fic roleplay-fantasy would explain the baffling moments of agency that Jocelyn displays. To be fair, trying to apply a feminist reading to The Idol is like applying a Marxist reading to a Margaret Thatcher speech . . . like duh! But truly, all of this is the crudest shit imaginable. I mean, the plot essentially boils down to a story of Jocelyn refusing the control of her label by embracing the control of a sex-cult. Don’t worry though — she likes it. In fact, the scenes are a series of grating reminders that no matter what you see Jocelyn likes what’s going on
Like when Jocelyn is talking to her best friend/assistant about The Weeknd’s character, Tedros, who is a club owner and cult leader. Jocelyn’s assistant remarks that Tedros is “rapey,” to which Jocelyn responds by insisting that she “kinda likes that.”
Like when Jocelyn masturbates while choking herself, only to tee up a scene where Tedros ties a cloth around her face, asphyxiating her util she’s nearly dead. That is, before he generously cuts one literal vagina-shaped hole for her to breathe. She likes it!
Or like the moment Jocelyn refuses the patriarchal control of the intimacy coordinator who’s managing her album cover’s photo shoot. He demands she put her top on because nudity was “not in the rider,” a technicality she defiantly ignores. The intimacy coordinator is then punished by being locked in the bathroom by Jocelyn’s bullish manager. The true annoyance of patriarchy, the show tells us, is the liberal paternalism of the social justice professional. Why? Because she likes it!
She likes it all. Nudity. Liberty. Domination. Pain. As she croons in the chorus of her single, “I’m just a freak/you know I want it bad” . . . “You can pull my hair, touch me anywhere/ball and chain.” Every scene, as if contractually obligated, ends with such a sentiment. She’s a freak and she likes it and did we mention yet that she’s a freak who likes it?
The challenge she faces, the show tells us, is the fact that everyone around her is just so hellbent on limiting her sexual freedom. Her label wants her to sell sex, but within a pre-set boundary. And they control her activities accordingly. Well, everyone does. The coddling intimacy coordinator. The concerned friend and assistant. The team stressed by her sexual exploits. If only she wouldn’t be so sexually liberated, so risky. She’s a victim, but not in the way you would think. The world doesn’t force her to be a “freak,” but punishes her for it. We sympathize, because it is true that those in her orbit are concerned about her exploits for self-interested reasons. But also: isn’t this a convenient struggle to depict for the series’s notoriously ogling writers?
And none of this is to say that this broad dynamic or psychology is possible and/or real. Many people do crave expansive sexual liberation, as well as domination and subservience. This is not a novel nor particularly interesting idea. And plenty of artists have explored the pleasures of pain in ways that negotiate the complex interplay between freedom and restraint. But The Idol, which reportedly was re-written and re-shot because The Weeknd found it to be taking on too much of a “female perspective,” only reveals these deeper themes glancingly.
If I’m being generous to the plot’s construction, I could posit that Jocelyn is mourning the death of her mother (who once guided her career and died one year before the show’s events). And now she is caught in the bloody churn of global capital and culture. Thus the attention granted by one charismatic sexual agent (The Weeknd’s Tedros) gives her a sense of both guidedness and agency too. She’s consenting here to the domination. But generosity is often naïveté and this Britney figure, this global pop star mega-victim, reads to me as mere wish fulfillment for a crude male gaze. If we get a glimpse into her psychology, it’s because of Rose-Depp’s surprisingly confident and wrenching performance. But when my eyes drift to my close-captioned subtitles, the words blare as hateful and grating.
(TW: an insane sex scene in the show can be watched here).
That’s to say nothing of Jocelyn’s very powerlessness in relation to her label in the first place.
As Hazel Cills wrote for NPR, this trope of the pop girl megastar victim is nothing new. “Jocelyn's suffering and alienation under the weight of her surveilled pop career feels all too familiar. She's the young woman ensnared in the music industry machine, coached by handlers, every bit of her body lit flatteringly for the camera, her personality and humanity sanded down for the sake of the brand. You've seen her in film or television before.” Like most tropes, it comes from a place — be it the timeless Star is Born narrative or the the ongoing tragedy of yes, one Britney Spears. But to make this show revolve such a trope and, crucially, set it in 2023 feels like . . . well, a choice. A fantastical one at that.
Cills correctly posits:
“In Jocelyn's case, her troubles also don't feel in step with what's demanded of mainstream music stars in 2023. The extreme, over-sexed artifice championed by her team hasn't been en vogue these days among the tween audience I imagine her label is trying to court, who'd sooner find themselves in the lived-in songwriting of stars like Olivia Rodrigo, Lizzy McAlpine, SZA, Lana Del Rey and Taylor Swift.”
It’s not to say that patriarchy and music-biz machinations don’t serve an outsized role in the music industry today, but on the grandest of grand scales such as Jocelyn’s, the story doesn’t pass the smell test. Who is an IRL Jocelyn — fame-wise — today? Taylor Swift? Well, she just re-recorded her first few records to right a wrong made by a male empresario. And she’s profited millions upon millions. Beyonce? Well she has complete control of her career and output, doing fully no press for her latest record. Why? Well because she’s Beyonce. Even on a smaller scale of the megastars, Doja Cat released one of the biggest smashes of the 2020s with her album Planet Her and then admitted it was a “cash grab” listeners “fell for.” Now, she’s making a seemingly heavy-metal inflected rap album? IDK, seems like she’s in some sort of driver’s seat.
If the 2023 mega-pop star generally possesses power and agency, albeit with caveats, why then did Tesfaye, Levinson and the suits at MAX tell this particular story using a character rendered so weak under the tyranny of the label system? Why did they fire a female show runner and completely re-shoot the show to fit Tesfaye and Levinson’s vision? I can’t help but think that pop music, and the pop girl victim archetype is not a narrative or even cultural reality the minds behind the show are interested in exploring, but rather a simple literary trope they are using for their own boorish myth-making.
The American Pop Star, or Britney as The megastar victim, is the ultimate expression of the interplay between a woman’s sexual agency and society’s control. In The Idol, the writers re-tell the cruel story of what was done to Britney, only to re-write her as enjoying her subjugation. It’s a fantasy of domination turned up to the megawatt scale of pop super-stardom. Jocelyn then, could have been any profession, but there’s something special and fun and huge about pop. Incel-propoganda, it turns out, just isn’t as salacious when set in a kitchen or department store.
There’s one more nervous fantasy I felt lurking between the lines.
Yes, the mega-American pop star victim trope feels dated, but on a more basic level: so does the American pop star trope as well.
A very thoughtful reader of this here blog, who also happens to be a crafty music manger, shared a very insightful, yet strange insight with me during a recent chat. “America’s inability to produce new pop stars,” he remarked vaguely, “is becoming a problem for America.” Here(!) Here(!) for the end of American cultural imperialism, but objectively: I’ll take the point.
The music industry today is spending more money on emerging markets, namely Latin music (Bad Bunny is The artist of the decade at this point) and K-Pop (Blackpink has broken records with their latest global tour). Additionally, catalog, that is songs that are two years or older, is streaming better today than new releases.
Thus two realities are baking into the industry writ-large: non-American music is scaling bigger in an industry that increasingly needs mass-volume to be profitable (because of streaming) and the bread and butter of industry revenue-wise no longer revolves around artists topping the charts upon release. If the timescale of profitability has now greatly expanded, then a label’s ability to create cultural thunderstorms that are all consuming (such as early Britney, Rihanna, Gaga etc.) becomes no longer the defining factor of the business. And thus a Jocelyn, or someone who can Break The Internet because of one salacious photo (I will spare you the details of that one plot point), becomes a less crucial figure to both create and exploit. The industry wants a steady stream, and doesn’t necessarily need an uncontrollable, momentary deluge.
I think our current moment reflects that business reality. At least for American artists. The past few years have created some megastars. Billie. Olivia. Ice Spice and . . . Who else? The rest of our crop of pop stars are legacy acts like Taylor Swift and Beyonce, who have worked for a decade plus to grow their committed global fandoms.
And still, even with this lack of rising American stars, the industry is doing better than any time since the ‘90s. Major label catalogs —which includes Queen, Whitney, etc, among newer acts — are the stable portion of the label’s investment portfolio and those global mega-stars (who can reach Huge Latin Markets re: Bad Bunny and are literally shaped to be global acts like K-Pop), well those are the new shiny possessions to have.
The American pop star queen is thus no longer the ultimate image of the music industry, no matter how hard Kim Petras tries. And America, believe it or not, may be edging towards sounding sonically provincial.
America too may simply no longer be the best in show at producing new pop stars. The show certainly discovered so when they cast Jennie from Blackpink as one of Jocelyn’s back-up dancers. In the premiere’s best scene, Jennie’s character is tasked with showing Jocelyn how to properly execute some exciting choreography. She delivers. There’s a professionalism and a rapturous quality to her dancing. A commitment to sex appeal that feels both perfected and direct.
It’s a machination of the show that Jocelyn feels stilted in comparison, but when looking at other rising IRL young American pop acts, we feel the lessened craft. GAYLE is meh as an opener for Taylor Swift. Kim Petras perpetually fails to launch. Shawn Mendez, Charlie Puth . . . . yaaaaaaawn. True great pop acts, like Charli XCX, Tinashe and Tovë Lo are popular, but remain comparatively relegated to their queer, cult-fanbases.
Maybe, part of the reason then that Levinson and Tesfaye set a story right out out of the early 2000s, today, is because they needed the ethos of another era of pop domination to explain their stilted plot’s context. Jocelyn is written in a fantastical dream world where she loves her mega-domination. But she’s also written in a fantastical dream world where The American Pop Princess Upstart reigns eminently supreme.
Or maybe they simply wrote it to fulfill all their brutish fantasies.
Regardless, their dream reads as more nightmarish than idyllic. And if this is the last gasp for the American pop star trope, then it’s too bad that it sounds like such a shrill and scary shriek. I hear the yelp throughout my hallways, but I turn away and nestle in my AirPods. “Blackpink!” begins the song — a call to arms for a new day.
You know, I just realized that K-pop stars are also called “Idols.”
But then again, so was the Golden Calf.
Some idols we worship, while others we are compelled to burn in effigy. Maybe though, for this one, MAX could do us all a favor and simply not renew.