AMERICAN IDOL: Official Ledge Thread

[TrueFaith77]

American Idol - Season 8
Hollywood Week (Episode 1) Recap

American Idol constructs a version of reality that associates normality with materialism and reduces individuality to product (usually for the sake of derision).

Example: widower Danny Gokey, along with two fellow Top 36 contestants: failed pop singer Joanna Pacitti and Jeanine Vailes, takes a ride in a show-sponsor Ford car. Gokey delivers some scripted dialogue to the girls and then shows off the car's cool features by pretending to offer a voice command for some some music, specifically the Rihanna hit "Shut Up and Drive" -- "get it?" they're in a car! It's phony, but the pretense of candid reality makes the quest for Idol-dom indistinguishable from the aspiration for material things, such as Ford cars with cool high-tech features. All it really tells us is that Gokey will play ball.

However, because most practitioners of television are inept, these attempts at creating forced narratives out of reality sometime make for unintentionally bizarre spectacle. Everything widower Gokey does on the show is connected to his wife who passed away -- suddenly -- one month prior to Gokey's audition for Idol. Gokey, himself, actively participates in this narrative as he declared that the Golden Ticket to Hollywood was "for" his wife. However, in Hollywood Week's first round of solo singing, Idol introduces Gokey with another montage of Gokey telling the story of his wife's death and home video footage of him and his wife. Was it, then, a manufactured bid to sway sympathy on the part of Idol producers that Gokey sings Seal's "Kiss From A Rose" -- another "get it?" song choice? The result, however, was that everyone I've talked to felt like the whole scene resulted in a creepy vibe that intimated, at best, exploitation and, at worst, foul play (reinforced by Gokey's unfelicitous song choice, mediocre singing approach -- roundly praised by the judges, and smug Cheshire grin). The result is that Gokey appears to be riding a new Ford model car -- The Ford Sympathy? -- to Idol victory.

Along with "The Widower Gokey Mystery," Idol 8's other most compelling -- unintended(?) -- narrative is "The Myth of Tatiana Del Toro." Keen-eyed viewers caught a few glimpses -- four shots -- of Tatiana on last night's Hollywood Week Episode 1: 1) A face in the crowd, wearing a red dress with matching grin after Barry Manilow's pep talk; 2) During the "goodbye to new friends" montage, Tatiana is shown wearing loose-fitting hoody(?) from last week's Hollywood Teaser; she's crying as she says "Thank you!" to one of the show's crew members -- not a fellow contestant; 3) in a teaser for the Day 2 solo auditions, she is shown wearing the same hoody(?) on the stage of the Kodak, with her arms in a prayer pose as she cries; I remember it being in slow-motion -- though we never see her perform on Day 2; and 4) during the teaser for tonight's Group Number episode, wearing the same hoody(?) and crying the line that now summarizes anticipation for Group Number dramz: "This is not a game to me! This is my life!" Yet, the Idol producers arrange her image, her signficance, her life like a pawn in a chess game. In the above breakdown, shots 2 and 3 ultimately have nothing to do with the ideas they're selling -- faux spectacles of friendship and hardship. The Idol producers' "Myth of Tatiana Del Toro" centers primarily around the presentation of her as a freak prone to hysterical laughing. Anyone with eyes can see that the producers strung together a series of shots -- gleaned from HOURS of footage -- of the bubbly gal giggling to create the impression of hysteria (etymology of hysteria: "of the womb") -- a misogyny made explicit in news from London that Simon Cowell told her during her audition: "You look like a h***er!" (Google it.) This impression of her also makes people keen to find out what Tatiana will do next, thus the use of her in the above teasers. However, the irony is that, for those who can discern Idol sleight-of-hand, that laugh is what tempers Tatiana's drive (all the contestants are ambitious) and keeps her significance from being entirely owned by Idol -- it bursts through the sutures. She's great Television, but the question will be whether or not she can translate that appealing humanity to her singing. During her audition, Tatiana claims to be the best singer in the room. Remember that episode and clear away the producer-constructed derision! She was right: Nobody was better.

For Gokey fans, Sympathy is just a pose, a product into which they've bought. Tatiana's life depends on the real thing.