The Idol

The show made lots of people mad, but for the wrong reasons.

The HBO Max (just Max?) show The Idol had a lot of buzz before it started a month or so ago. The Weeknd (a very famous musician who I have listened to maybe two songs by) plays a kind of sleazy producer/pimp guy who gets into a weird relationship with the pop star Jocelyn (Lily Rose Depp). The show features fairly graphic sex scenes and so lots of people on social media got mad at it, calling it exploitative and demeaning to women (I think, I didn’t really parse all the outrage about it). I wasn’t planning on watching it (I don’t watch most prestige streaming/cable shows, I just don’t care anymore)—but the hysterical reaction against the show intrigued me a bit.

Here’s a quick plot overview (spoilers if you care): Jocelyn is the daughter of some mega celebrity who recently died, and so is struggling to cope with that, and stake out her own identity as an entertainer. She has lots of hangers-on and handlers who carefully manage her brand identity. Jocelyn is popular but doesn’t really know who she is—she’s very manufactured. She bumps into the Tedros (The Weeknd, real name Abel Tesfaye) at a nightclub and is entranced by his pimp magic. Tedros is a kind of con man with a criminal past, which is pretty obvious from how he carries himself, but Jocelyn likes it. He has lots of kinky sex with her to help unlock her authentic musical potential—he even fingers her to orgasm while she is recording a song—and her inner circle gets concerned that he is taking over her life. He is manipulating, abusing, etc. etc. Toxic masculinity, very bad and so on. But eventually Jocelyn reveals that she is far colder and more manipulative than Tedros could ever hope to be. She totally pulls back all emotional connection with him, and treats him like a dog in front of the whole posse. She humiliates him again and again, and he just takes it, because he needs her more than she needs him at that point. He served his purpose for her—she got her artistic authenticity from his weird sexual investment in her, and she’s off to the races now. She doesn’t need him anymore—she is now a burning bastion of pure sultry empowerment. Tedros still needs her though—he’s been living in her mansion with his posse. She not only kicks him out, she lets his posse stay. But then at the very end, she is on a massive stadium tour, and she brings Tedros on stage and tells the crowd that he is important to her—so there’s something of a happy ending for Tedros; but not really, because he is still like a beaten down dog just tolerated by Jocelyn. The end.

Sidenote: the character names on this show are awful. Has there ever been any celebrity named “Jocelyn” before? I just can’t imagine anyone named Jocelyn becoming a massive star. It just sounds wrong. Also “Tedros” is a terrible name—the only Tedros anyone knows is that awful guy who runs the World Health Organization. Bad!

Sidenote 2: One of the episodes features The Weeknd doing a cover of a John Lennon song, “Jealous Guy,” that I thought was really great. “Jealous Guy” is one of Lennon’s overlooked gems in his solo career (everyone just focuses on Imagine, Working Class Hero, and a couple others). It’s a totally different take on the song, obviously, but he does it justice—and since Lennon died in 1980, he didn’t get a chance to explore electronic, synth, and other musical styles, which I think he would have liked. So having The Weeknd bring that shit to it was cool. And the fact that he even knows that song exists is pretty cool.

So who cares? Well, the show, in my view, turned out to be misogynistic, but in a kind of reverse way that I found interesting. The discourse around the show was just that it was too sexual and Tedros did bad sex stuff and was a toxic bad man—the typical annoying liberal media nonsense. There is some of that in the show, but it ends up transcending all of that—but in a way that also reinforces a negative view of women. Jocelyn ends up being way more manipulative, heartless, abusive, etc. than Tedros could ever hope to be—and it’s all so effortless for her. Not only that, but it makes her more powerful and she is celebrated and praised for it. Once she embraces this kind of toxicity, it takes her to the next level, and only then does she truly become The Idol.

The way I see it, with this final twist, the show becomes a commentary on how toxic women are empowered and celebrated—and made the very core of culture now, radiating their evil throughout society to masses of young women, perpetuating the cycle of their awful behavior. Jocelyn becomes The Idol, but she is not someone to be idolized. It is not a show that celebrates women’s empowerment, and it comments on the problematic nature of it in a way that is very rare today. This is what is really transgressive about the show—pointing out how women can be toxic, and how their toxicity is celebrated as positive empowerment. But the outrage machine on Twitter missed this—it just saw the surface level stuff about sex to get mad about. If they were able to pay closer attention, they would have found something more serious to be mad about.