The HBO Max viewer was this Monday with Lily-Rose Depp looking at the camera in The idol. She is Jocelyn, a music star who wants to return to the spotlight after having health problems. She only wears a robe that barely covers her nipples and the bracelet from her last psychiatric admission. “Mental illness is sexy,” says one of the people around her. The photographer asks her to laugh, to be innocent, naughty, pure sex, to cry. The character is an artist who bends to the demands of the industry. She voluntarily sexualizes herself and exposes herself to sell herself to the public.
In Cannes the maneuver gave the impression of taking effect with a five-minute ovation. “Being at the Cannes Film Festival has been the dream of my life,” said a visibly emotional Sam Levinson, the man who had created the series with Abel Tesfaye, the singer known as The Weeknd. The idea had come from a conversation between them: Tesfaye told him that, if he wanted to, he could found a sect for his popularity. This is how they conceived the story of a singer who falls into the jaws of a guru with an aura of Charles Manson. Sharon Tate is even mentioned in the pilot. However, hours after the show, the spell was broken: the first critics skinned the work.
It was a situation that could be foreseen since March when Rolling Stone published a report on the filming of The idol. Amy Seimetz, the director, had been fired from the project for focusing too much on "the female perspective," a decision that bothered Tesfaye. Levinson took over the directing reins and scrapped the footage shot by Seimetz. In times of vindication of the female gaze in Hollywood, the maneuver was read as misogynistic. And, later, the speculations about the content of the fiction began from leaks by members of the team, giving rise to a new genre of cultural analysis: pre-criticism.
It was condemned that The idol denounced the sexualization of women in the entertainment industry at the same time that Levinson and Tesfaye found new ways to exploit and harass Depp in scenes defined as "torture porn". The articles seemed conditioned by the climate of opinion around Levinson, the chaotic filming of Euphoria and the fact that actresses questioned the amount of nudity in the scripts.
With the appearance of pre-critics before the reviews, The idol has put on the table to what extent the creative result can be as important as the cultural and social framework in which a work is received. The critics, in fact, have not seen beyond the first two episodes and the public, for the moment, only has 50 minutes of footage to form their own opinion while comparing the series with Brian de Palma, Paul Verhoeven's Showgirls and Fifty. Shades of grey.
