The Idol.
Okay, I tricked you, I don’t love The Idol. But I do love thinking about race, particularly Blackness, as it’s represented in pop culture, so that’s what I’ll do here. I know it’s very popular not to like this show. But when I’m scrolling on Twitter, I’m mostly hearing how it’s un-feminist and how it’s cringe and how it’s trying to be this edgy sex thing when it’s in fact pretty tame. And all that’s well and good, but as someone who works on representation and can’t quite turn that part of my brain off ever (a bummer, maybe, to my boyfriend, who wants to watch The Guardians of the Galaxy in peace), I can’t stop thinking about the racial element of the show. I can’t stop thinking about Tedros as a Black pimp, Izaac as a Black buck, Destiny (as if it’s actually her destiny) as a mammy and faithful servant. I know it’s 2023 and Black people can be villains, but I wonder at them being villains (and buddies) in the same roles they’ve played since Birth of a Nation.
Okay, I didn’t mean to pull out the D.W. Griffith card, at least not this quickly, but aren’t both that infamous movie and this terrible TV show White fantasy-nightmares about what a Black presence can mean? Aren’t they both wary of Black people in a similar way?
I know what you’re thinking. I’m taking this too far. It’s supposed to be a fun show we hate watch once a week, and I definitely get that, but hear me out. When I watched Birth of a Nation, what I saw was not just bad representation but what felt like the inner mind of a scared White person. I say scared. I think I mean paranoid. I think that’s the problem with all of this for me, fantasy-nightmares with Black villains seem to indicate that White people, whether they are conscious of it or not, are still a little paranoid, still see Black people as a threat unless they prove themselves harmless.
Destiny, for example, is not a threat because she is a faithful servant. Izaac is a threat because he’s not only aggressively having sex with a naïve White girl, but he also chases and holds down a White guy so that another Black man can put him in a shock collar and torture him. How is that not like Birth of a Nation, where the greatest threat Black men presented was sex with White women and the second greatest threat was destruction of White men? Why are most, if not all, of the girls that Tedros has brainwashed White? Why is his sidekick a big, dark-skinned Black man? What ideas get reproduced, if sleepily, if unconsciously, by the way we represent Black people in mainstream TV shows?
I want to like this show because I like Sam Levinson’s work in general. I think his dialogue is often genius and his plots tend to hook me the whole way through. The first time I watched Euphoria, it sort of opened up for me what writing can do. So this is not a hate essay. I guess I’m just feeling a bit troubled – not by Levinson so much as by how prevalent these tropes are across American culture. Why do Black characters in White TV shows either need to be exceptionally good (buddies) or exceptionally bad (villains) — where is their room to make normal human mistakes? And why don’t we catch this polar representation more often? I don’t think most of the Black characters in The Idol would fly if they weren’t Black. Could a White woman play Destiny, giving pep talks and singing lessons and serving all the White girls without anyone saying that it’s kind of weird? Could a White man play Tedros, beating and torturing and controlling and raging, without people calling for the end of the show?
I guess I’m wondering whether or not having Black characters is progressive if these Black characters are established figments of the afraid White imagination, there either to encourage White fear or to soothe it. What might it look like for White writers to write Black people who are neither unnaturally good or bad, who do not respond directly in any way to White fear? I want more Black characters in White shows who are allowed to exist outside of their relation to Whiteness, to be good and selfish in normal ways (like Marcus in the second season of Max’s anthology show Love Life).
And if these Black characters are going to slip into historical tropes, maybe it’s good to acknowledge this. Perhaps that is the difference between The Idol and, say, Native Son. Maybe if you are going to reify the imagined tropes of Blackness, you should say so outright, lean in.
I don’t know.
I’m going to finish the show, but lately, it’s made me queasy to watch it and not just because of the sex scenes. I can’t even really think about the sex scenes without thinking about what they’re communicating racially. Why a Black pimp, a Black mammy, a Black buck, and if White people don’t even notice, how baked into Blackness are these ideas?
Image: Max
