Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [53]
Drama is about consequence, a small decision or turning point with implications that will ripple across a protagonist’s life, creating tidal waves that will take years to dig out from. Achilles must decide whether to put aside his grudge against Menelaus, and on that hangs the Trojan War and the course of all Western civilization. David Copperfield has to find a way out of the blacking factory so that, instead of being a bleary-eyed bottle worker, he can grow up to invent the modern novel and stop Uriah Heep from marrying poor Agnes. Now and then, it’s a nice change of pace to read a modern work where there is nothing at stake and no action has any discernable consequences. But by and large, the author’s rule of thumb is that the higher the stakes, the bigger the drama; thus James Bond generally spends his time trying to stop some cartel from blowing up the world, not from pocketing a Three Musketeers bar at the corner grocery.
Now, when looking for material for high stakes, dramatists tend to fall back on a few tried and true motives. There is always love to dangle in the balance; while the hero sorts out his life, he risks losing the girl to the mildly creepy partner of a giant law firm. Tying the stakes of work to a competition over love has the advantage of casting the drama in a fuzzy glow that everyone can feel good about when love does conquer all in the end. Still, as perfect as the hero and heroine may seem for each other—well, there are a lot of opportunities for love in the world, and once the disappointment of losing Jennifer Aniston or Emma Bovary fades, we all know that the hero could pull himself together and find someone else who may not present quite as many challenges.
The stakes can be money—as they are on every game show from Jeopardy! to Survivor—and while it’s nice to see the hero get a big bag of loot, knowing that our leading man is somewhere out there $43,000 after taxes richer doesn’t exactly make us feel warm all over. And besides, if a mountain of cash is going to be your punch line, it’s got to be a really, really big mountain of cash. A million dollars isn’t what it used to be in the changing-your-life-forever game—as we saw when Survivor’s first champion was carted off to jail for tax evasion.
And then there is power—political power, power over people, the power to do good. But that is just icky. Or way too earnest and dour to be the subject of a kind of art that anyone would ever want to see.
But there is one currency in our society with a value that’s uncontestable, that’s worshipped by young and old, rich and poor alike, that opens every door in the fifty states plus associated territories. There is one thing that drives even billionaires to memoir publishing madness and whose white heat holds our society in awe. Whatever cracks Warhol may have made about fame, its reign in America is stronger than ever, and it remains the asset before which all others stand in awe. And it is this resource that Idol alone can confer on someone like nothing else in human history.
The fame that American Idol offers its contestants is not the fifteen-minute flash-in-the-pan variety attained by guest stars on The Hills, Olympic champions, or prostitutes caught with governors. American Idol takes at least one person each year and, within the run of a season, transforms him or her from a bank teller or waitress into a genuine, durable, built-to-last star. Consider the current first lady of country music (Carrie Underwood), the rocker with the biggest-selling debut in a decade (Chris Daughtry), and the woman who, on her first outing, both blew Beyoncé out of the water and won an Oscar (Jennifer Hudson).
And when Idols return home in the final weeks of the show, their cities turn out and greet them with parades. No one gets parades anymore