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Sam Levinson’s The Idol (2023) was met with a firestorm of negative press and vituperative criticism before it even screened and then much more afterwards; the critical consensus was so unified in this regard that it became a veritable tidal wave overwhelming any dissenting voices and shifting attention away from the very object of the criticism. Some of this had to do with reports of a troubled set in which original director Amy Seimetz abruptly left midway through production due to “creative differences” and the entire series changed course and was reshot. This set the stage for bad press reactions with the final product bearing that out.
The series focuses upon Jocelyn (Lily-Rose Depp), a young and powerful pop singer, going through a period of crisis following the death of her mother who, though purportedly abusive, was also her primary motivator; looking for inspiration, she falls under the influence of Tedros (Abel “The Weeknd” Tesfaye), a figure of dubious character and mysterious background, who effectively takes over her palatial estate with his coterie of devoted minions and perpetuates a cycle of domination and seeming abuse as another means of motivation. Superficially this is provocation enough with critics reacting predictably, responding primarily and with great vehemence to the elements of exploitation that they picked up on. Time Magazine wrote: «The Idol only pretends to expose exploitation, while actually reveling in it…». Variety said it «Plays like a sordid male fantasy,» while The Hollywood Reporter determined it to be «More regressive than transgressive,» and Rolling Stone proclaimed «More toxic and way worse than you’ve heard». But perhaps the level of critical insight was best encapsulated by this observation from Showbiz 411: «The Idol is grim, gross, and vulgar. It’s full of preposterous recycled ideas and pornish sex that would be at home on HBO’s Cinemax, not the main HBO which we know loves Emmy awards.» This is revealing, especially as it comes from a source dedicated to “showbiz” and yet seems so utterly uncomprehending of the aspect of artifice that instead is such an essential and pronounced component of The Idol. Levinson’s Euphoria (2019-present), the series that made his reputation, is awash in a similar heightened style, but here that style has found an even more natural home in the glamorous world of the characters and as an appropriate expressive mode for the subject. There is a curdling of this visual presentation throughout reflective of a noir genre atmosphere but the high style is an extension and support of a serious ambition. Indeed the critical opprobrium might have been settled or at least answered if these critics had had the patience to watch and assess the entire series before commenting.
Much has been said about the debt The Idol owes to noir and erotic thrillers but far less (if anything) has been said about the debt it owes to Zalman King’s erotically charged melodramas, themselves often maligned as trashy kitsch rather than recognized as grand exultancy. The fetishistic composition of many shots in The Idol is straight out of King. The entire conception of whole set pieces is straight out of King. Beyond the aesthetic and stylistic resemblance Levinson’s series also shares with King a fascination with the trappings of artifice and, more specifically, life made from the endless enactment of high artifice, its coming-into-being, its parameters that of a whole saturated world. King always took artifice seriously and examined it as something we perpetuate and respond to, something we recognize the reality of even in all its heightened excess, and Levinson does that here as well. King understood fantasy as performative spectacle or that fantasy is performative spectacle, a thorough organic integration, and, at its best, The Idol does too (we are positioned to recognize how Jocelyn’s music videos are more than just parallels of her heavily aestheticized clinches with Tedros; each is an extension of the other). A seemingly paradoxical question emerges of how authentic is the artifice?
The kinship with King also helps clarify some details which appear to have been difficult for some viewers. The Weeknd’s performance, for instance, has been eviscerated, even being called “execrable”, but that’s entirely unfair, betraying only an inclination to force a certain standard upon it; his performance here is a lot like the male characters in King–it simply functions on another level and is pitch perfect for that. Dramatically The Idol features a compelling psycho-sexual dynamic folded into its assessment of how figures of guidance fulfill a need and exert an influence; all of this takes it far beyond the fatuous superficiality it may otherwise seem to be.
The noir element that ends up regulating the show’s form and structure is up front from the beginning and not just in the unearthing of some of the sleazier undersides to the celebrity industry. There is, for instance, the not so subtle hint to the characters inherently suspect nature as Jocelyn and her friend and assistant Leia casually watch Basic Instinct (1992).
But, much more critically, the first episode begins with what will prove to be the ultimate code key for the entire series as Jocelyn is put through her paces during a photo shoot where she is asked to demonstrate and/or feign a vast range of emotional responses on command and she accomplishes this to perfection. The noir aspect to The Idol then is what gives it its ultimate identity and it is this finally that opens it up to criticism of a different kind, one attuned to the vast chasm of difference that opens up between the accomplishments of Levinson and King.
Enhanced by its aesthetic, the series sustains itself and even excels for most of its duration as it is far more serious about its inquiry and examination than has generally been acknowledged. The stylistic presentation is a way of doing that by emphasizing the expressive artifice as revealing much about how these characters function and interact, how they exist and are to be understood; but from the beginning there is also a psychological dimension that gets more acute and penetrating in its precision as the series progresses. This attempt to balance these two formal modes of inquiry and examination, to actively integrate surfaces and intimate depths, is admirable for as long as it is capable of being maintained, which is not, unfortunately, for the entirety of the series. Still, the effort alone is far more than we get from most.
To what extent is The Idol a satire or send up of the recording industry? The humor is almost entirely confined to the supporting cast, the substrata of industry representatives and celebrity enablers whose concern over Jocelyn’s relationship seems just as likely for their own livelihoods. Levinson is astute enough to recognize however that some of these characters may have real affection for her, certainly as much, if not more, than Tedros does. And yet everyone is finally compromised and corrupted by the bottom line demands of their world. As alluded above, it may be read then as a critique of the industry, but if so this is a critique that extends out to encompass all as everyone is touched by its ethos here and the series then becomes an utterly corrosive portrait. The recording industry ends up being just a warped mirror reflection of the abuses of Tedros’s cult while its diminished imaginings infect those of everyone connected to it and reconceptualize those imaginings accordingly. The narrative thread here involving the appropriation of a personally compromising intimate photo for future album cover art demonstrates a kind of crisis control in which a potentially damaging leaked image can be spun to an advantage but also demonstrates how a “bad girl” fantasy image can be constructed from authentic articles. Key to this latter point though is the exposure and transmutation of vulnerability, the seeming substantiation of the fantasy image and the element of real personal risk involved. As Tedros remarks, “If it’s risky, it’s risky for a reason.”
Part of Levinson’s pop culture profundity is in this portrait of a pop artist, a creature of that culture, stuck in stagnation and stasis, recognizing that but unable to do anything about it, struggling against the creative limits of that very culture and the imaginative limits it cultivates within her. Levinson is very wise to model this character on the most prominent pop singers of decades ago as that alone emphasizes the cultural stagnation while also ironically recasting that same stagnation as the closest possible approximation of a transcendent timelessness within that same culture. It is here too where Tedros’s presence is most felt, insinuating himself into the process as necessary and even invaluable intermediary for Jocelyn between herself and the fullest possible expression of her art. This is seen blatantly in her home studio performance of “Fill the Void” in which she sings “I don’t wanna decide things for myself,” while being blindfolded and groped by Tedros who talks to her in whispering commands that are close to threats. What results artisitcally from Tedros’s intervention is not some radical reinvention (at least not in the most obvious sense) but rather an incremental readjustment, perhaps the only kind available within the restrictions of the industry. What is subversive about it, mirroring the rest of his relationship to Jocelyn, is that it introduces an element of destabilizing madness that undermines slick pop products. What complicates all this is the metatextual element of Tedros as some kind of warped alter-ego for The Weeknd (an identity which is itself an alter-ego for Abel Tesfaye as he is notably credited here, adding more complication); this is further compounded by the presence of real life musicians such as Mike Dean and Ramsey gathered around and among the actors.
During this performance Tedros leers at the assembly of Jocelyn’s longtime associates, links to the world of the recording industry, as though to parade his triumphant dominance over her to them (and by extension his triumphant dominance over them); it’s a moment of supreme provocation as what is being put before us is the challenge to determine for ourselves what “goes too far”. This is indeed a very fine line to tread; Tedros’s later extended physical assault of Xander is an example of possibly pushing it too far as such brutality upends the very delicate ambiguity the series pursues. Tedros’s history as it is brought out, shorn of romantic veneer, just seems bluntly criminal; these revelations may pile up as “provocations” but they also simply start to tip the scales too heavily rather than just muddy the water or further complicate the scenario. The alternative to this appears in the scene in which Leia confides to her own new sexual partner, Izaak, a member of Tedros’s ensemble: “Honestly, I think it’s just really fucked up that we’re all just sitting around watching Jocelyn get assaulted.” Izaak’s minimizing of her concerns points to a cultic emphasis upon the plasticity of language and ultimately comprehension itself.
The Idol is sharp and observant about celebrity and this is perhaps seen best in the conflicting views toward it which are presented, and these views in turn are affected by the ambiguities of the show, moral or otherwise. Jocelyn’s manager Destiny says at one point, “The moment that voice gets out into the world, there’ll be a lot of people that are gonna want to take it. But you can’t let ‘em, cause what you got is special. Don’t let nothing, no one or anything, get in the way of your gift. ‘Cause it is pure and it is beautiful.” Elsewhere, Izaak seems to directly respond to this view in his denial of a realm of privacy: “She’s not a human being. She’s a star and stars belong to the world.” Whereas Destiny’s perspective may genuinely be actual sympathetic concern, Izaak’s is reflective of a sensitivity to a pop mythic conflation that’s almost cosmological. This dichotomous tension, this serious consideration of what “stars” owe to the rest of us, is productive for as long as it is not formally resolved.
Meanwhile, it’s worth noting the absence of Jocelyn’s audience throughout The Idol. There is a logic for this, as the series is mostly set within an interstitial period leading to the start of her new concert tour. But, even so, the emphasis is primarily upon the pop idol sans her presumptive audience, the very one that made her an idol in the first place; when that audience is glimpsed at the end it is obscured and out of focus. Concerns over perceptions of her are acknowledged, but this theoretical audience remains theoretical, a distanced abstraction, another subject capable of being manipulated. This absence is ironically perverse in some ways, such as in the lack of direct evidence of her command over crowds, but the reality of it is simply taken for granted, subsumed into and implied by her very identity (and her solitariness matches that of The Weeknd himself as a pop performer). The intensity of the hermetic environment is very much about what it means to be cut off from any outside world or external context that determines reality; what is aligned then is whatever there is of Jocelyn’s interiority with relentless surface gloss fantasies of luxury and transgressive sexuality.
But at its best this alignment within the series confounds any simplistic interpretation. The romantic gloss of the early episodes introduces an element that confuses attempts at easy moralism; the central relationship then transcends moralistic discourse, finding a way to represent real liberating potentialities. It may be accomplishment enough that something this boldly blunt and forthright could also be, for a long and productive stretch at least, obliquely indeterminate. This productive lack of clarity, this rough hewn ambiguity, is threatened finally by that very same pushing of the boundaries; perhaps this was inevitable but it exposes just how precarious such an endeavor is, how easily it can collapse under the weight of one too many miscalculated signifiers. Later, it will be the very structure of the series itself, its fealty to noir, that will fatally undermine its ability to soar free of overly deterministic reductions.
Leaving aside his not inconsiderable work as an actor, Zalman King’s first foray into the terrain of cinematic erotic fantasy was Nine ½ Weeks (1986), though he did not direct this seminal film; he was a producer on it and adapted the screenplay from Elizabeth McNeill’s book. Adrian Lyne directed and, as a great visual stylist in his own right, made an able translator for the kind of florid excess with which King was soon to become permanently associated. Many now think of this film as a kind of forerunner to Fifty Shades of Grey (2015) and its similarly perceived interest in power games guised as S & M experimentation, and it could be seen on those terms as a forerunner to the similar such terrain covered by The Idol. But that doesn’t give the film remotely enough credit, especially as such a description is inadequate to what it accomplishes and what a thorough, carefully crafted cinematic presentation lends to it (specifically, an intensification and a profundity which utterly eludes Fifty Shades and its banal aesthetic treatment and far more prosaic orientation). The sex in Nine ½ Weeks is not purely decorative or simply a puerile provocation; neither is the focus upon the flux of power behind it confined or restricted to easy or obvious statements. Rather, the real interest of the film, as properly expressed in its cinematic language of imagery and grammar, is exactly the far reaching realms beyond or behind any such inclinations at all. The heavy emphasis upon the imagery then, and the concomitant surafces or “superficiality”, is not only appropriate but necessary to adequately address its subject. The film is also heavily about the very idea of visual presentation and spectatorship; it’s no accident that Mickey Rourke’s character John has a bowl of popcorn during the famous Joe Cocker scene but it’s just as clearly seen in the dissolve from the close-up of Kim Basinger’s Elizabeth in the blindfold to a similar supine figure on an artist’s canvas, a figure she describes as “sleeping”.
There is also a sequence toward the end that juxtaposes a scene of spectatorship around a sex show and, directly following that, an art gallery exhibition, the one display being merely a more socially acceptable form than the other.
The film is really a fusion of many sensibilities and projected facets. Most prominently, there’s Lyne of course and the actors who put themselves in his care (and Basinger especially deserves far more credit than she’s ever received for taking many risks here) but there’s also McNeill, the author of the original memoir, and King, whose career to come would mine and refine the same themes found in this movie. His penchant for certain tropes is already very much in evidence (e.g. a fixation upon sensuality as erotic gameplay and constructing such scenes into elaborate set pieces, little details of minutiae which recur through his work: the hat flung in the air; the comical supporting characters such as the flower delivery guy; the heroine’s more down-to-earth best friend, here actually crocheting in one scene). If anything, King’s later work as a director becomes so ornate with the heightened style so heightened that it can obscure some of the more direct appeals which are on clearer display in the Lyne film. However, given that it’s never gotten the credit it deserves, it may be that it’s not that clear either or maybe it’s so clear that its accomplishments are easy to overlook. Similarly, the McNeill book is often cited as being far more unremittingly savage and dark in its presentation than the supposedly light weight movie. But the focus is simply elsewhere, somewhere slightly different, highlighting another angle which brings out a different set of preoccupations and observations. Ultimately though the book and the film share a very daring challenge at their base, which is rarely recognized, of not finally coming down on one side or the other in simplistic and reductive judgement on this central relationship and what it may mean and whether it could legitimately represent love. They are both far more elastic in their conceptions and confrontations than most of their critics.
The sexual content of the movie and its presentation is both paramount and misunderstood. The first actual sex scene isn’t until the film is almost half over. Prior to that the emphasis is entirely upon the sensual as an exploratory realm of the erotic. That first sex scene though is significant as it is, effectively, a kind of rape fantasy, far more rough than anything up to that point and made even more unsettling as the boundary lines are blurred and vanish as they are crossed. So the physicality of the sex act is associated with a certain specific coarseness or aggression which is recognized as a reduction of possibility, a delimitation. But, structurally arriving relatively late into the proceedings as it does, this scene complicates an established scenario. Later, sex is expressively integrated with the imaginative, with the romantic or erotic spectacle of heightened stylistic detail. But this first confrontation with the bluntness of the physical act disrupts and unsettles an easy understanding of what is being explored here. It demands a recognition of the challenges that must be met to integrate the imagination and literal material reality. But even during this scene, suggestions of that are glimpsed through the specifics of Lyne’s technique (e.g. Basinger’s blonde hair spilled out like an open wound across the black table top and Rourke all in black with his dark hair bent over her and blending into her clothes and that table).
There is also the pertinent question as to whose fantasy this is. For one thing, John is presented as more than just a mysterious figure but quite possibly also a fantastical one. He is never seen by, nor does he interact with, any of Elizabeth’s friends and his own barely seem to exist. It is perhaps not for nothing that one of the most explicitly intense sex scenes for her is an onanistic one (as astutely depicted on the accompanying poster).
The first residence that John takes Elizabeth to is one that belongs to one of these supposed friends of his who is never seen. Still, this is a far more conventionally comfortable and appealing space than that which is later revealed to be his own. That’s stark by comparison and one can’t help but perceive the first location as specifically selected for elements more conducive to seduction. But it’s also a space more suitable for initiation. John’s own apartment, wide open with sleek surfaces and only glass as barriers, could be criticized as barren and arid but it’s also representative of effectively limitless space, effectively limitless imagination, effective limitlessness; it is ultimacy and emptiness as the consolidation of all possibility. And that is, then, the metaphorical and symbolic meaning of John’s wealth as well (“I buy and I sell money.”); it is an abstract notion of the wealth, the capital, that gives rise to freedom and possibility. However, in its literal form it manifests as its own set of parameters and is a reminder that any manifestation, but in particular any literal one, is a diminishment of possibility, albeit an inevitable one. This is why it doesn’t matter if many of the sex scenes seem like kitsch to viewers (e.g. sex under a torrent of rain, sex in a clock tower, etc.) because they are merely representative examples within a given set of parameters, here a pop cinematic idiom, and the sex itself is just a representative expression of imagination. But, still, there is a craft there within the representations which suggests an overall artfulness and John in particular as artist figure with accompanying inflated ego (he refers to Elizabeth always by her full name, never a shortened version or one of intimacy and familiarity, evidencing again an artist’s remove and formalism). The precision and rigor of this actually prefigures Cronenberg’s Crash, which is also about, in large part, an artist’s precision control directed toward a loss of control, whether it be in the specifics of sex or the more abstract realm of imaginative release. Elizabeth gives herself over then to a godlike figure representative of creative force and potential beyond the purely sexual. Her potential is clearly expressed when she asks John why he thought she’d respond to him and he states that he saw himself in her. Of course, this is what sets up the final dissolution which she can’t see yet.
For as much as her boundaries are challenged she cannot ultimately shift to a plane in which conventional concerns are inconsequential. We’re shown the pull of the more familiar intimacy of community and more relatable, immediately comprehensible associations. But we’re also shown a resistance to John’s self-fulfillment through images and sounds of children. It is explicit community then versus explicit atomization. The film does not denigrate her pragmatism but neither does it moralize about John. Unlike the book, in which Elizabeth’s final rejection of John is based on his increasingly violent behavior, the Elizabeth of the film finally just seems to hit a wall of what is tolerable to her; she faces up to the reality of a natural jealousy which limits her. But, again, she isn’t denigrated for this and John isn’t either. It’s simply the recognition finally of a division between them and between their respective realms of community and isolated ascetic practice, alternate ends of a spectrum of realization. And here too, in their final breakup scene, the film is aesthetically beautiful, suggesting a heightened domain accommodating them both (e.g. John in dark clothes against the blinding white of a background bathroom, complete even with white towels).
Earlier in the film, Elizabeth visits the artist whose solo show her gallery is hosting and she tells him how much his work resonates with her; to this, he replies, “It’s the moment a thing is so familiar that it’s strange.” That assessment applies to and sums up this entire film, familiar but strange and dislocating, and more so the more one gives oneself over to it: a subterranean but recognizable human condition finally emerges. Elizabeth is our proxy and guide for this and through this; her conspicuously heavy eye makeup making her appear spiritually hollowed out from the beginning, an anticipation of being (ful)filled.
Zalman King’s own directorial career began shortly after the release of Nine ½ Weeks and inherited much of the same concentrated focus; his romantic fantasies prioritized women’s roles as leads, as determiners of their own fantasies, and, as such, were often considered latter day “woman’s films” (it’s not insignificant that his wife, Patricia Louisiana Knop, co-wrote several screenplays with him). His work includes such titles as Two Moon Junction (1988), Delta of Venus (1995), Women of the Night (2001) and Wild Orchid II: Two Shades of Blue (1991) as well as the long running anthology series Red Shoe Diaries (1992-1997). His later series Chromiumblue (2002), though critically lambasted at the time of its original broadcast, is groundbreaking in its pop deconstructive technique in a way comparable only to Tony Scott’s similarly under appreciated Domino (2005); the extraordinary challenge of both of these works is their conflation, almost even total integration, of extremes of absurdity and dramatic sincerity which often overwhelm but do not self-negate. 1993’s Lake Consequence was another King feature which he wrote and produced but did not direct (duties for that went to Rafael Eisenman, a collaborator on Red Shoe Diaries); it is worth singling out, however, for the extent of its mythic imagining, with a relentless series of gorgeous images carved out (this was the first film by noted cinematographer Harris Savides) and established almost as pure pop romantic iconography. But it is perhaps the original 1990 Wild Orchid which expresses King’s tendencies in the most concentrated form and also provides the most instructive point of contrast with The Idol.
Though Wild Orchid is nowhere near the explicit parallel to The Idol that Nine ½ Weeks is, it actually better captures the pervasive atmosphere of fantasy, a saturation so thorough that it becomes fantastical. Fantasy as a form of transformative vision is here expansive and totalizing, the only parameters being those of the film itself as experience or literal artifact. In this way, the aesthetic style alone is the liberation the characters seek. Wild Orchid also builds upon specific strands found within both The Idol and Nine ½ Weeks, in particular those of wealth and the god like stature of the singular artist, but finds nuances that those others do not and this propels it into another realm entirely.
The film has a clean and simple narrative line: young Midwestern lawyer Emily (Carré Otis) is hired to represent a development company in Rio de Janeiro, specifically to help assist Claudia (Jacqueline Bisset) in closing a real estate deal; while there she meets and is drawn to Wheeler (Mickey Rourke), a remote and mysterious millionaire investor with a penchant for manipulating others through the orchestration of elaborate fantasy scenarios. The tone and atmosphere is dreamlike from the start and mythically pitched with its immediately fantastical notion of the naive young Midwesterner cast directly into a boldly exotic setting in which she is forced to confront her nascent sexuality within a seething hotbed of sensuality and eroticism. King utterly embraces the heightened extremity of his scenario as Wheeler does with those he conjures up. Rourke’s presence is a direct link back to the similarly envisioned character in Nine ½ Weeks though here his mystery is even more pronounced to the point that it becomes not some problem to be solved (as it might be in noir) but rather the very subject of the film with the fantastical or visionary being its organic extensions. And unlike Nine ½ Weeks or The Idol, despite this film’s obviously heated erotic content, it is more about how the explicit sexual congress of the main characters is delayed, deflected, redirected until the quite literally climactic consummation. Again, King pitches seemingly simplistic soft core erotic melodrama on a grandly mythic scale of significance and meaning.
King’s artistry is apparent right away in the credit sequence in which we watch a horse drawn cart and driver, a throwback arcane enough to become exotic in itself, as they approach us against a blood red horizon. We cut from this looming image to a shot from a distance, finding a car bringing Emily to meet her bus on the dusty plains; far in the deep background of this shot, barely visible, is the image of the horse and cart, crossing that horizon line.
This instance of almost astonishing continuity gives immediate evidence of King’s scrupulous attention to detail and carefulness of construction (there are further examples of this minute attention to continuity such as the scene in which Wheeler is given the gift of a necklace by a couple in his limousine as he leaves it and we see this incidental seeming detail noted and then its more significant reveal to Emily later in the same scene). Another intricacy, and one that gives access to the film’s whole conception of heightened fantastical states as an all encompassing reality, is in how Emily’s hair lightly blows at moments of enhanced awareness or sensitivity; this is keyed to the specifics of the erotic content, of course, but such an intricate detail again suggests the vastness of what substantiates that content or those specific moments–they are not in a contextless vacuum, in other words.
Though the heightened stylistic mode is set from frame one and informs the entire film, there are multiple moments in which it is most clearly at issue or even directly addressed. Certainly this applies to any scene featuring Wheeler as his entire character is conceived of this way, as a kind of conceptual focal point, but specific instances emerge to further highlight that. An early dinner scene between he and Emily is almost entirely composed of their wild conjecturing about the other diners around them, a game he encourages her to pursue but which shifts from being just a game to an insistent reality as he refuses to be derailed from it, from the sustaining of the fantasy. Later, when he manages to convince the estranged couple in the limousine to heal the rift between them through a renewal of physical intimacy, Emily is repelled and states that all she sees before her is a couple having sex and he reproves her by saying, “No, making love. There’s a difference.” Here in a scene of soft spoken well meaning seeming coercion he still reflects the same stage-managing tendency of both Tedros in The Idol and John in Nine ½ Weeks but also, more specifically, echoes the cultic plasticity of language we see deployed in The Idol. The difference though is that despite these similarities Wheeler remains defined by his crypticity throughout and thus cannot be diminished or reduced to a simple moral threat (which may be why the preferred critical response to this and so many of King’s works is to find them simply risible).
Meanwhile, it is no mistake that King situates this in Rio during Carnival. The invocation of Carnival as a literal event and as a state of being is a staple of his world and a perfect means of expression for it. The frenetic highs of an endless party is a kind of context here for this kind of imagining. This idea too is directly acknowledged and addressed. In preparing for the close of her business deal, Claudia says that she’s “planning a big celebration, dancing girls, bands, the works.” When the moment arrives it is almost immediately unclear where what she has planned ends and where actual Carnival begins, so thoroughly does the one blend with the other. At a different point, after another similar occasion, Emily is startled and runs off, dropping her mask on the pavement behind her like an errant Cinderella slipper, though the party, as already indicated, never really ends, it merely allows for a range of different tonalities.
As with both The Idol and Nine ½ Weeks there is an awareness of the significant contribution of material wealth to making a sustained state of fantastical imagining, a transforming of reality itself, even possible; but here that reliance may be at its most emphatic and consequently most thoroughly considered with the underlying concept of capital understood as a way of “funding” imagination. Right from the start Claudia remarks to Emily that “it’s all play money anyway.” But it’s restrictive too. During that early dinner scene one of Wheeler’s questions to Emily about the couples around them is “Whose money is it?” Later he tells her about his impoverished father and that “he talked a lot about not having any money,” yet he also says to her with seeming sincerity, “If you want me to apologize for being rich then I will. I’m sorry.” Even when he bluntly states, “No one ever has enough,” it’s as likely an acknowledgment of a particular plight then a boast about it, though it may also be a broader acknowledgment of the very state of imaginative being. The most pointed critique of materialist escapism, perhaps the only kind of fantasy vision available within the restrictions of a limited imagination, is contained in the lyrics to the Underworld song Promised Land which plays faintly in the background of a scene between Claudia and Emily as they reflect on the source of Wheeler’s power:
In the late great nineteen eighties / image conscious fashion victims / read the latest information / from the latest questionnaire / welcome them with open wallets /prophets armed with facts and figures / murderers of generations /come to lead us to the promised land /away / we sail / to the promised land
There will be no place for the old and weary / no dependence no decay / poverty and deprivation have no place in the world today / this is natural selection / leave them to the life they got / leave them to their own devices / we have all paid good money / to get into the promised land / away / we sail / to the promised land
Claudia’s fixation upon Wheeler and the need to “understand his source of power” could be yet more of this focus on material wealth but it’s the unique emphasis in her inquiry that matters and proves revealing; it’s not just some glib allusion or association. That source of power is the locus of the mystery here as well, what lies behind and informs all else. With that as a determining factor for the film’s particular matrix we can extrapolate an implicit dimension of its meaning. Wheeler’s mystery may be paramount but it’s Wheeler as avatar of mystery that is most significant. In that capacity he propagates the role playing and mask wearing elements of fantasy. This aspect to his character is underemphasized within a hyperbolic realm and yet is completely congruent with it and intrinsic to it. He is effectively the god-like figure presiding over all and yet, more specifically, a demiurgic figure caught between the corporeal and the cosmic real (as suggested by the rosary beads he constantly clutches like a totem that both grounds and points elsewhere). We see glimpses of this throughout, such as when a masked Emily comes to him distressed at being mistaken for a prostitute and he says, “Is it so bad? To want someone so much that you’re willing to pay for it?” The dominance of money is recognized again but here as an admission of the compromised state that ties him to materiality. Otherwise he floats free across the surfaces of this environment; and, like a spectral presence, often just suddenly appears unexpectedly as in Emily’s hotel room or Claudia’s. He consistently demonstrates an omniscient god-like knowledge which he openly acknowledges, at one point responding to Emily’s incomprehension of him by lightly saying, “How did I know about the roast beef and mashed potatoes? Or how did I get into your room?” While it’s easy enough to attribute all this to his obvious markers of wealth and privilege, that signified state becomes a total abstraction in how it blatantly functions as this means of access; again, it’s the unique emphasis that counts. Wheeler’s disconnected remove, his fascinated authority caught between worlds, is symbolized in his impotent lack of affect, his inability to touch or feel. When he encourages Emily to follow through on a proposed sexual encounter with a stranger she directly confronts him, stating “You don’t touch so you’re touching through me. You don’t feel so you’re feeling through me.” This complicates any simplistic read of the following scene’s eroticism.
The de facto inhabitation of Emily by Wheeler is mirrored by Claudia’s desperate desire to be Wheeler. At the signing ceremony, for instance, she dresses as a man and wildly removes this costume in an act(ing out) of abandon but also reacting to a sense of being betrayed by him, exclaiming, “Good-bye, Wheeler!” This desire for intimacy, some kind of close contact comprehension, is contrasted by the other scene of mirroring in which Claudia observes a naked man from a distance as Wheeler observed Emily in a similar state from a distance; as Claudia declares at one point, “there’s nothing personal about it”. And Wheeler is just as likely to gravitate toward that end of the spectrum. In a deleted dialogue from the original script Wheeler says this: “The word ‘carnival’ comes from the Latin ‘Carne-vale.’ Carne meaning ‘of the flesh,’ vale meaning ‘farewell’ or ‘to take away.’ To take away the flesh, to allow your spirit to soar above it. Do you think you can do that, Emily?” This exultancy of the spiritually diaphanous is further emphasized in a matching set of dialogues between Emily and Wheeler at pivotal points in which each expresses to the other the fear that they may disappear.
The climactic sex scene between Wheeler and Emily becomes representative of far more than an explicit erotic coupling. The eroticism is just as much about an indulgence of exultant abandon as it is about the mechanics of sexual release; getting past the mechanics is like the liberation of being freed from hangups and inhibitions with the specifics of King’s ultra aestheticized imagery as a means of invoking that abandon. A fully participatory quality is emphasized but also a particularly mythically tinged one: a conflation between minimal and maximal, material and divine, a grander vision established. Fantasy arrives at a culmination, a giving up of control, a giving over of oneself, one to another; eros is seen as genuinely liberating through being reintegrative and therefore restorative of cohesion and coherence rather than a form of mastery or domination over another.
The film actually ends after this long sequence with the sudden appearance of Calypso singer David Rudder atop a decked out party bus, complete with a collection of dancers. He performs Just a Carnival as the film cuts between this jubilant music and images of the lovers united. It’s worth noting the central chorus of the song: “It’s just a carnival / and your life is such a masquerade / It’s just a carnival / Come on, see yourself now / Don’t you be afraid.” These lyrics suggest that this heightened world, this mode of being, has not ended but only expanded and fantasy itself, imagination as artifice, is endorsed as a means of understanding or conceiving of reality; this then includes the whole range of shifting masks and roles, projections and ideas. As a fundamentally celebratory conception it is closer to the music of The Weeknd than the series he stars in.
The Idol ends in quite the opposite way and, given its implementation of a King style heightened aesthetic, this can’t help but seem like a diminishment of possibility and meaning; even within its own transformational framework it’s not radically transformative enough as it’s not capable of being sincere. As a fable it is almost salvageable but still doesn’t amount to enough for all that’s been invested, underserves too many contributing elements, and is simply too schematic even for a fable: Tedros loses power too easily, becoming too vulnerable too fast; it’s too much the flip side. The central relationship is sentimentalized, aestheticized then in the pejorative sense in which surfaces are shallowly unreflective and reductive. The superficiality of pure power grabs for dominant control reveals itself as all this was ever really about (as the narrative final revelation forces that to be definitive). Harnessing this era’s sensitivity and attentiveness to exploitation and sexual violence, this then plays almost as a parody of victim culture but it’s also a hateful or spiteful one as perhaps per noir directives, so it can’t be said to be unaligned from that. Jocelyn’s oldest acquaintances seem to recognize and confirm the version of her mother she puts forward as real, presenting the tragedy of an abuse victim perpetuating cycles of violence; but the show goes to great lengths to suppress these corroborations of her own claims and to settle instead on a reveal of who was really in charge all along, revealing itself as insincere about the psychological depths that gave substance to its artifice.
The wrinkle in this clean cut assessment of the scenario, however, is that it is suggested that Jocelyn is taken aback and surprised, possibly even disheartened, by some of what she did not know about Tedros, especially as regards his own lack of conviction toward her and their relationship: the discovery that this may have all been nothing more than a contrived setup on his part from the start is treated as though it is the deepest of intimate betrayals. What that suggests, in turn, is that her own seeming control over the entirety of that relationship is not as definitive as it is eventually presented; she too then has a deeper investment that has been rocked by this betrayal. This introduces a note of welcome tragedy, welcome in that it complicates the otherwise too neat reduction of the end, but there is little else to indicate that Levinson and company recognized this complication as that and so we are left with the glibness of the reversal-reveal. And either way that may only be appropriate as any seeming betrayal here only serves to perpetuate a further grasp at control, so it matters little in the end. Similarly the inference of a jealousy on the part of both Jocelyn and Tedros only adds the inference of depth as it too is undercut by the noir fatalism, rendering Tedros into a violent muse and the series itself into the model of an aesthetics of violence. So this then is the triumph and ascendency of the purely aesthetic, the surfaces savagely whittled down to bare essentials of identifiable recognition. It may be that Levinson is satisfied with that but, as the show’s ambitious net was cast wider than this, it is also a cynical deconstruction or dismantling of fantasy’s resonance until the image of the idol is all that remains.