The Idol

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt's senior staff writer, on the erotic vs. the pornographic in HBO’s The Idol.

The opening scene of The Idol is a sultry close-up of Jocelyn (Lily Rose-Depp), the titular pop star-slash-idol, cycling through a dramatic palette of emotions. She is on set of a boudoir photoshoot for an upcoming album release. Jocelyn laughs, dials up the doe eyes, and mischievously smirks to the instructive command of an off-screen photographer. “Play with the camera,” he says to the harsh claps of a flash bulb. “Okay, pure sex now.” Jocelyn breathily inhales, open-mouthed. Her blonde head tilts back to convey a pre-orgasmic sensuality. “Give me vulnerable. Now emotional.” Jocelyn’s dead eyes well up on cue. A single tear slips down her left cheek, then right. Her choreographed flirtation resumes as the shot pans out. Her robed figure continues to contort like a snake, haloed by large light fixtures.

Of all the scenes in The Idol’s frenetic first episode, these few minutes on Jocelyn, Sam Levinson’s latest dolled-up vessel of a character, remind me of a shot from Euphoria season two. A melangé of flowers surrounds Cassie (Sydney Sweeney) while tears cascade down her made-up face. Her doleful gaze is turned slightly upwards, as if she is praying to some unseen deity. The dream-like shot, which Levinson said was inspired by early 20th-century Mexican murals, received praise for its florid composition. But even Sweeney’s layered performance couldn’t disguise the flatness of her written character. Euphoria’s heavily stylized visuals are the cinematic equivalent of an Instagram filter, overlaid upon the show’s graphic and “pornographically sad” subject matter to camouflage the grim realities of drug use and sexual violence behind glitter tears and blooming vanities.

Plenty has been (and will be) written about how Levinson was brought on to make The Idol more Euphoria-esque, since the original script allegedly had too much of “a female perspective.” (Rolling Stone reported in March that the show’s original director, Amy Seimetz, left the show when it was nearly done filming.) Bigger stars were brought on and more explicit content was reportedly added. If the reports are to be believed, Levinson’s rewrite has eradicated much of the show’s satirical potential and its commentary on the entertainment industry. What’s interesting to me about his version of The Idol, though, is how it mistakes the pornographic for the erotic.

The Idol is a crude attempt at an erotic thriller; there’s a nod to Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct, which Jocelyn and her assistant are seen watching in the first episode. However, Levinson and his co-creator Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye don’t seem to realize that the mere display of gratuitous sex and nudity is not erotic. Of course, I don’t expect them to have the intellectual acuity to distinguish between the two. They seem to operate on the premise that sex is sexy. They would tell me to “stop trying to cock block America,” as one record label executive says to the assistant who worries that Jocelyn’s photoshoot is too risqué. But this quippy retort doesn’t make sense. There is no cockblocking because there is no potential for sex in the first place. You can’t have sex with a pop star’s image. You can only fantasize. I’m reminded of what the philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote in The Illusion of The End: “At the heart of pornography, sexuality threatens to disappear. Everywhere we find the same stereophonic effect, the same effect of absolute proximity to the real, the same effect of simulation.” What is a “stereophonic effect” but a vibe? Here, pornography risks disintegrating into pure vibes: nudity and sexy lingerie are requisite symbols to complete The Idol’s visual moodboard.

Over the weekend, the writer Sam Kriss wrote about his frustration with “tediously explicable” characters, whose motives are written to be “far too neat.” This kind of characterization is common in films and shows that subscribe to “therapeutic realism,” a term Kriss coined to describe stories that reduce “the limp violence of being … to feelings and experiences.” Kriss takes issue with how the characters produced by this genre are too relatable, likable, or predictable, in the sense that even bad actions can be justified, “You start with the idea that humans are made of named and identifiable feelings, and then conclude that to invent a believable human, you have to stuff those feelings into everything.” The irony, for Kriss, is that these characters don’t seem like real people as a result.

I’ve yet to fully digest Kriss’s argument, but he questions what gives a character inadequate complexity—which I suspect will be at the heart of criticism leveraged against The Idol. Already, critics have regarded the show as “torture porn” and anti-feminist, as there’s little revealed about Jocelyn’s psyche. She is a manufactured commodity, an object to be desired. There are shades of Netflix’s semi-fictional biopic Blonde, without the visual nostalgia of Marilyn Monroe to keep us watching. This could still make for an interesting character. Maddie, the femme fatale in the erotic thriller Body Heat, wields her sexuality to sociopathic lengths; we learn little about her motive until the end but it's her overwhelming mystery that is alluring. The same goes for Basic Instinct. Surprise can be erotic; it alludes to a character’s depth more acutely than the narrative exposition that’s confused for complexity.

The Idol doesn’t fall into the trap of therapeutic realism, but it exists on the other end of the spectrum as a vapid, vibes-only spectacle. The bad writing makes the characters’ fates feel foreordained; the bad acting adds to the campy artifice. Without any element of surprise or mystery or complexity—all key components of eroticism—the stylish illusion of sexual danger feels farcical.

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• E. Alex Jung profiles Drew Barrymore and her “radically intimate” daytime show. (Vulture)

• WGA strike targets Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference. (Deadline)

  • More strike reading from Alissa Wilkinson, who reports that Hollywood might be staring down the barrel of a triple strike, with the Directors and Screen Actors Guild’s looming contract expiration dates. (Vox)

• Apple introduces its first VR headset, offers a game mode for macOS Sonoma, and a new 15-inch MacBook Air. (The Verge)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Everything wrong with the Brooklyn Museum’s “problematic” Picasso exhibit. (NYT)

• More metafictional interviews please! I enjoyed this one Slate conducted with the fictional biographer of Catherine Lacey’s Biography of X.

• Writer Susan Straight spent five years reading various classic American novels and placed them on a regional map.

• In Artforum, hannah baer examines Western mythologies of intelligence as it pertains to AI:

  • “The way we conceptualize intelligence is rooted in the assumption of violence … Underneath the perceived threat of AI is an assumption that greater intelligence means more domination, and less intelligence means subjugation.”

• Max Read predicts the future of pro-smoking discourse. (Substack)

 🌱 JOIN THE DIRTYVERSE

• Join our Discord and talk Dirt-y with us. It’s free to join! Paid subscribers have access to all channels.

• Follow @dirtyverse on Twitter for the latest news and Spotify for monthly curated playlists.

• Shop for some in-demand Dirt merch.  🍄