In the Flesh: The Idol

The Idol is satire. It’s black comedy in the vein of Basic Instinct or RoboCop, mean-spirited and sharp, full of babbling record industry morons convinced of their own genius as they orbit deranged starlets and megalomaniacal producers. I won’t waste time speaking to the backlash against its scenes of fairly mild BDSM play except to say that its frank and sleazy sense of sexuality is tremendously refreshing in an increasingly sexless media landscape. The show’s depictions of sex range from the absurd, as when Manson-esque manager and cult leader Tedros Tedros (Abel ‘The Weeknd’ Tesfaye) jerks off in a Valentino dressing room while groaning and puffing like a winded hippo, to the salacious, as when he slips an ice cube into struggling pop star Jocelyn’s (Lily Rose Depp) vagina as they remaster her latest single. It’s hardly the depraved, sadistic bacchanalia early critical reception seemed to see lurking in the shadows. Tesfaye, himself as big a lightning rod for outrage as Levinson, gives a complex and frequently amusing performance as a sort of cosplaying sexual vampire, a man unaware of his own absurdity and utterly convinced of his genius even as the system he tries to worm his way into strips his bones and cracks them for their marrow.

There’s a lot of Neon Demon here, a lot of Sunset Boulevard, Jocelyn’s cigarette smoke swirling around her like she’s a young Norma Desmond just beginning to feel the rot setting in. Shot on film and liberally suffused with cool, dreamy blues and hazy reds and golds, Tesfaye and Levinson’s show is a treat to look at, studiously artificial and impersonal in its clubs and offices and especially in the empty art museum that is Jocelyn’s mansion in the Hollywood Hills. The staircase scene in the final episode, a clear homage to Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, nearly swallows Jocelyn up in the white void of the interior. Repeated cutaways to the maids responsible for keeping the lifeless abattoir clean and orderly are playful and engrossing, and Lupe Carranza and Sheila Korsi make a meal of their dialogue, sniping back and forth in rapid-fire Spanish over their employer’s ridiculousness. The whole thing is obscene, and the supporting players sell it beautifully, especially the magnificent Hank Azaria, more animated than he’s been in anything since The Birdcage, as Jocelyn’s agent Chaim, and Da’Vine Joy Randolph as the imposing and insightful Destiny, her manager.

The seesawing power dynamic between Jocelyn and Tedros sublimates the music industry’s craven, barbaric greed into a relationship between two selfish, violent idiots with little interest in humanity outside of what they can strip mine out of the people around them. Jocelyn presents herself as a successor to Britney, a beautiful, innocent teen idol damaged and exploited by a ruthlessly abusive mother, but whether or not that’s true she’s firmly in the driver’s seat of her own parasitic existence now, leveraging that image to exploit and cow the people who think they’re exploiting her, continuing the centuries-long practice of ransacking Black talent for white profit, and selling herself as a kind of darling victim and woman of the people. “I want you to meet my family,” she says with a tearful smile as she invites a thoroughly ruined Tedros onto the stage at her comeback concert. She’s a woman who lives in a palace, who goes around escorted by armed killers in black body armor, who relishes torturing her friends/employees when they aren’t in lockstep with her mood, but these tens of thousands of screaming fans are “family” because she cries in front of them. The poor schmuck never had a chance.