Last night I watched some of the American Idol season 6 premiere, and I noticed that it had a lot in common with the 24 season 6 premiere – namely torture. There’s no other word for what goes on in the preliminary rounds of the singing competition, when anyone can walk off the street and inflict their terrible voices on us and have Simon Cowell in turn inflict his own brand of nastiness on them.
Later in the season American Idol turns into a genuine singing competition, but in the beginning it’s nothing but a way to feed our most base instincts and schadenfreude. Witness the young woman whose idol was Jewel, who happened to be sitting on the judging panel last night: she sings a Jewel song and kills it, getting laughter and groans from the judges. As it sinks in that she’s not getting on to the show, the girl drops to her knees and begins weeping – it’s utterly compelling, seeing a human being humiliated and broken like that, and seeing the sheer glee that the judges get from not just dismissing her but grinding her hopes and dreams into the dirt. “The good news,” Simon tells her. “Is that today you learned you’ll never be a singer.” That’s torture.
There was something I noticed in the few minutes that I caught of the show: when the auditioners are sent out of the room, often in a fog of rejection and depression, they again and again try to leave through the wrong door. There is a double door, and only the right side is open. After being humiliated by the drugged up wreck of a woman who once sang with “Scat Cat” (a great name for a kitty litter if I ever heard one), contestants receive the final blow of trying to open a locked door and having Simon snarkily say, “The other door.” After watching this a couple of times, I realized they were doing this on purpose. Enough people had tried to leave through the wrong that someone from the show could have unlocked both exits, but watching these losers push fruitlessly against the door is meant to be the cherry on the top of their ruination. And every time I laughed.
American Idol’s cruelty is exhilarating – it’s a way of making us feel better about ourselves. Whatever our problems or shortcomings are, we’re not being nastily dissected on national television, being revealed as delusional. And it’s the flip-side of what makes the show so popular – while the basic premise is that a nobody can become a somebody in a few weeks, the underlying theme is that many of the nobodies out there deserve to stay that way. We get to identify with the serious contestants, and the losers who get weeded out of the mass cattle call stand in for every jerk-off and asshole who sells us a hamburger or is obnoxious to us at the DMV. It reinforces superiority.
I think that’s why I don’t like the people who come on as a joke – they’re gaming the system from the start, and their insane get-up or their over the top and purposefully bad singing is just an attempt to get themselves on TV. It feels like some of these people are one step away from dousing themselves with gasoline and lighting a match just to secure some air time, and having them get their way is no fun. But when that kid from Gary, Indiana who needed to leave the audition to get some water comes out after being rejected and is bitterly angry and broken – that’s entertainment.
The question, of course, is how long before someone kills themselves after being dissed on American Idol. I was surprised it took so long for the sleazy daytime talk shows to lead to a murder, so maybe Idol has a couple more years before a contestant puts a bullet in their brain, but it seems like it’s inevitable. It’ll be interesting to see how comfortable America is with its own schadenfreude the day after that happens. Unless it’s one of the people who weep like bitches in the hallway – can’t you even hold it in until you’re off camera? I think America would be OK with those people killing themselves.