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Well, that sucked.
For the last 5 weeks (which felt like an eternity but also the blink of an eye), The Weeknd and Sam Levinson have stolen our Sunday nights to lead us through their haphazard haunted house of kink and gender, The Idol. And, fittingly, the show’s ending was just as disorganized as the show’s production beginnings. As Rolling Stone reported, the production was a flaming hot mess — unraveling at Tedros’s wig rates before it even began. You can read the article in full here, but what kept playing through my mind during each episode was this section:
The first public inkling of trouble came last April, when director Amy Seimetz, of The Girlfriend Experience and She Dies Tomorrow, suddenly exited with roughly 80 percent of the six-episode series finished. HBO addressed the news by confirming The Idol was set to have a major creative overhaul and would be adjusting the cast and crew. There was little explanation for the shakeup, except for reports that Tesfaye, who is co-creator, felt the show was heading too much into a “female perspective.”
In interviews with 13 members of the show’s cast and crew, Rolling Stone has learned the drastic delay was caused by Levinson taking over as director and scrapping the nearly-finished $54-75 million project to rewrite and reshoot the entire thing.
What that “female perspective” was, we’ll never know, but one can’t help but assume that there was some kind of narrative cohesion in the first version of the show that the released version lacked. Rumors have it that Levinson was typing scenes furiously on his laptop on set as actors waited for pages, and as any writer (or Dom!) will tell you, that’s no way to attain a satisfying scene.
I could dedicate this post to a laundry list of the show’s plot holes — the Schrödinger's cat of whether Jocelyn’s mother actually abused her with that Goody hairbrush, how poor Troye Sivan got Tedros-pilled that quickly, whatever happened to the loose jizz in the Valentino dressing room — or the show’s hollow ideological conclusions, i.e. “lol, women make up abuse to manipulate the poor men around them” (extremely dark coming from Lily-Rose Depp considering what we all saw in the Amber Heard trial and its ensuing internet misogyny circus). But what I’d rather discuss is the eerie similarities between bad writing and Fake Domming.
I’m only going to give a very brief definition of Fake Domming here, because I’ve done it in greater depth in this pod ep called ‘Real Doms, Fake Doms, and Can Submission Be Feminist.’ In the simplest terms, Fake Domming is the act of putting yourself forward as a Dom without any knowledge or respect for the structures that make the practice not only safe, but satisfying for everyone involved. Those structures being negotiation, limits/safe words, and aftercare. And while yes, technically Tedros gave Jocelyn a bath and shaved her legs the morning after the hairbrush beating (I can only imagine how that sounds to anyone reading who didn’t actually watch this trainwreck), the whole process was fundamentally lacking in not only safety measures, but that somewhat ephemeral sense of empathy a Dom must have for their sub, as well as the basic narrative cohesion a show should offer its viewer.
I’m not naive enough to expect movies and TV to only present safe and proper BDSM (in fact the show’s weak stab at portraying aftercare truly activated my gag reflex). The lack of safety is not what gave me the ick here. It was the show’s total lack of interest in the sub’s inner world, motivations, and perspective. The show portrays Jocelyn as this mysterious and erratic powerhouse with no discernible motivations for her actions other than manipulation of those around her. This gaze is certainly male, but more than that it’s vanilla. It’s a gaze that plays blind heteronormative mad libs on the actions of a complex individual. Women manipulate, of course. I love a female anti-hero. So give me reasons! Some subs take pleasure in physical pain, yes. So show me what she feels! What’s it like for her to be deriving creative inspiration from this weirdo off the street and the way he light chokes her? Her blasé acceptance of this seismic change in her life robs the viewer of what could have been a really interesting push-pull of internal conflict. But instead of that we get… Jocelyn smoking poolside with her entire ass crack out. The whole show is viewing her from behind rather from the inside.
But the moment you begin to interpret the intent behind this show, you proffer it an intentionality that just isn’t there. Just as you shouldn’t waste your breath explaining to a guy on a dating app who has called you “Daddy’s little princess” in the first message after matching why this isn’t ok (and in fact is desperately cringe), we also shouldn’t spend too much effort breaking down this shit show into digestible pieces. Then you’re just eating… well…
If there’s one thing the show and I have in common, it’s that we’re fan girls for Paul Verhoeven’s Basic Instinct. A film, I would argue, that problematizes the Male Gaze, shows how (some) mens’ fear of empowered female sexuality makes them ripe targets for manipulation, and ultimately concludes that privilege clouds your deductive reasoning and foresight. How amazing would that kind of finesse be if applied to an onscreen dynamic between an empowered sub and her Fake Dom? How chilling would it have been if The Idol could have made a decision about who its protagonist was, what actions were intentional, and what people were trying to gain by playing with kink in this power-imbalanced setting?
But instead we got a show so bad, people didn’t know that this image that circulated on Twitter was a parody:
Thanks for playing, HBO, but this Real Sub is swiping left. But just as in kink dating, I’m holding out hope for a winner one of these days.
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Thank you for writing this! I needed some sort of bookend to the chaos surrounding this show that I knew I would never watch a second of but that I couldn’t stop obsessively wishing would fail miserably.
your writing is brilliant as always. thank you for putting into words how I feel about random "doms" you meet on the internet. *shivers*