Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [54]
The actors on Lost and CSI, much like the stars of Speed Racer and Iron Man, might be hounded for autographs, but a public undergoing an intense love/hate relationship with Hollywood-generated celebrity would not laud them like heroes. And, in any event, they don’t go home. The majority of the entertainers whose faces adorn the covers of our magazines are there more to be reviled than worshipped. There are no parades when Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan come marching home.
Newly ascendant rock bands and pop stars certainly don’t receive parades. Considering the fragmentation of music, they probably wouldn’t even be recognized outside of their tiny demographic niches, anyway.
Politicians not only don’t get parades when they go home but they also probably have to hide their faces from a substantial portion of their local slice of polarized America. Heroes of the Iraq War may not be spat upon, but they aren’t exactly celebrated, either. Go ahead, try to name one. Astronauts have become humdrum. Inventors don’t leave their cubicles long enough to receive a parade.
A triumphant sports team receives a parade but its members, like solo athletes—from golfers to Olympians—so quickly license their likenesses to every product in sight (our adulation of them is harshly enforced by the marketplace) that a parade quickly becomes superfluous.
Which leaves American Idol. Only this show can harness a broad enough swath of the nation to command enormous crowds for their parades. And whatever their futures may hold, while they’re in the rigorously protective Idol bubble, only these young people, nearly at the end of their epic, awe-inspiring journey, inspire the sort of unembarrassed, unironic affection that leads to masses of citizens weeping in the streets at the very sight of them.
And so each week, I sat in the Idoldome, at first sneering but then unable to scoff at the sight of these very young people, weeks away from working the drive-through line at their local Taco Bell, spending a minute and a half on a very large empty stage trying to convince the world that their lives should be about something bigger. In the balance hung, on the one hand, the fulfillment of their wildest dreams’ wildest dreams and, on the other, a return to Taco Bell. If you can sit idly by and watch that spectacle, listen to the sound of a nineteen-year-old singing as though his or her life depended on it, and not be swallowed whole by the experience, then you are a stronger audience member than I.
Which is why, two years after I took on the assignment as a half-joke, I found myself strapped to a tattoo chair in San Diego, where the husband of one of the contestants marked me for life. At the end of the seventh season, I went out to follow the Idols on tour, much like my hippie classmates from college had done with the Grateful Dead. I had the thinly veiled explanation that it was for my column, but few who knew me well believed that anymore. During the seventh season, I had written extensively about Carly Smithson, the tattooed Irish song-stress whom I declared repeatedly to be the greatest performer in Idol history. What struck me about Carly was not just her stunning vocals but her thrilling backstory, which made her Idol journey a deep and harrowing tale of redemption. Six years earlier, she’d come to Los Angeles as a seventeen-year-old singer, been signed by a major label, and was represented by the biggest management powerhouse in the business. But that experience led to sorrow when her label melted down before her album was released, leading to the record being dumped on the market with no support—a sudden, abortive-seeming end to her career before it began. In the years that followed, Smithson left Hollywood and moved with her new husband to San Diego, where they ran a tattoo shop and she waitressed and sang in a Gaslamp Quarter pub,