Sam Levinson Can't Keep Getting Away With This

Sam Levinson has figured out some sort of cheat code he's such a boring person yet I can't help but find myself constantly fascinated by him I'm wary of any artist who asserts themselves as an interesting figure when they aren't really but to such a degree that they become interesting in a roundabout way but something is different here the same can be said of his most recent work the idol which he predicted would be the biggest show of the summer and while I guess it probably is that's more by default because I can't really name any other shows that came out this summer without Googling it secret Invasion and just like that season two Downey's dream cars stiff competition but I think there's something incredibly ironic about making such a bold claim in releasing a total dud but that dud falling so flat that it's become the most talked about show of the summer and I think there's something in that dud that reveals Levinson's broader Tendencies as an artist and possibly an answer to how he manages to sink his hooks into me every time no matter how dull those hooks really are in a nutshell the idol is a pretty indefensible show that tries to satirize the music industry Without Really figuring out who specifically to go after and all that's really left in the wake of that confusion is a series of graphic Loosely strung together sex scenes we follow pop star Jocelyn a Madonna figure who becomes seduced and isolated by manson-esque Cult leader Tedros Tedros who leeches off of her and influences her music and she finds herself playing a psychosexual game with him that's half erotic and half ironic but the thin veil of satire becomes consumed by the show's Indulgence in these graphic set pieces and because everything else about this van d project is either Bland or flat out embarrassing the net result is five hours of nothing the creator of one of the Decades most popular TV shows and one of the Decades most prevalent pop stars working together to create a whisper that one in one ear of the collective Consciousness and out the other in record speed that's the idol to call it exploitation is maybe not entirely accurate but I think we can at least settle on calling this direction disingenuous to the show's original Vision I think by now we all know the story of how Amy simetz was ousted from the project after striving for a more pointed examination into the machinations of Industry abuse much to Able the weekend test phase Chagrin and how Levinson was brought on to overhaul the project both Visions were satirical but with Levinson captaining the ship the Gaze of the show is now more in line with the kind of sleaze and depravity that the weekend Taps into with his music making our perspective essentially that of the abusers here is a respectable Gambit but it pretty quickly Falls flat through a lack of visual risk-taking and more importantly a lack of commitment to the bit one such example early on I think demonstrates this failure on a micro level which I think also informs Levinson's self-destructive artistic approach in the macro the opening scene of the show pivots around Jocelyn's team excommunicate an intimacy coordinator from set which seems to serve the purpose of telling the audience right out the gate that we're about to get a No Holds Barred view into this seedy unabashedly naked World this beat would work as effective satire and help shape the abusive perspective we're supposed to be watching this through if you could sense that there was an inkling of understanding or empathy for the intimacy coordinator's work that our satirical targets these executives are ignoring instead his dialogue in which he justifies the duties of an intimacy coordinator is written with the same disdainful [ __ ] vernacular all the other Executives talk with which basically strawmans him and makes him seem just as much the butt of the joke as they are at best this is a demonstration of how lack of range in one's writing can have ethical implications and at worst it's a direct indictment of a job that came into existence in an effort to actively combat the abuses this show claims it's trying to examine whatever the show is actually going for though it's impossible to ignore the correlation this moment seems to have with the production of euphoria Levinson's Flagship work and subject of possibly the most intimacy coordination discourse in fact the idol as a whole which prominently showcases the frustrations of being on set and trying to capture something on film seems to be a bit of a deconstruction of the Euphoria workflow so one can't help but sense a certain resentment from Levinson coming through when this bout of anti-intimacy coordination sentiment despite the apparent complaining here though I do hesitate to use the word exploitation with regards to this Show's gratuitous nudity because of how vocal the cast of both shows have been that they felt safe and comfortable in these shooting environments and had agency over how much of their bodies they were showing any controversy surrounding the show has had more to do with creative Direction and character writing than forcing people to do uncomfortable things after all Levinson did reportedly comply with those moments of cast pushback during those intimate scenes of course the idol is a show about power dynamics and feigning a sense of agency almost spelling out for us that there are abuses between the lines but the writing is so all over the place that there's not really a coherent conclusion to be drawn about what the show or anyone involved seems to be saying about the matter or whether or not there is true hypocrisy at play here what it really reveals is the sheer level of consistent bad faith Levinson seems to be met with time and time again and I don't say that out of any sort of sympathy for him or any attempt to paint him as a victim of bad faith here I think he's an interesting specimen who has a particular knack for cultivating bad faith and I want to find out why that is for one he injects his work with the kind of Twitter speak that attracts a very moralistic audience and then takes the material places he should know they won't be down with even if he believes on some level that it holds up to moralistic scrutiny the two most common phenomena that go down with a Levinson release are as follows people psychoanalyze and attribute the text of the story to being a very explicit diatribe from Levinson himself and related people assume this is all coming from just Levinson and no one else when Malcolm and Marie came out people jumped on reading moments like John David Washington complaining that critics are white as [ __ ] and male as [ __ ] to be Levinson airing out his own frustrations with the critical reception of his first movie but making himself insert black so that he could blame systems that don't actually apply to him in real life but not only was this just faulty logic but in doing so people kind of glossed over the fact that Washington and Zendaya had a lot of creative input and worked collaboratively with Levinson not to fully exonerate that movie but I'm just fascinated by the degree to which people myself included struggle to let the work speak for itself this isn't just a movie that makes statements about the world in a vacuum with these characters there's an irremovable context that renders the whole thing a mere conduit for Levinson and only Levinson to speak explicitly to us about whatever's on his mind the same thing is true of the idol littered with lines that seem to scream self-consciousness I want people to like make fun of me I just the Iran like in a way that like the fans are not gonna understand why is it so hard to take this as a story about someone who's insecure why are we so inclined to read into these lines as Levinson's own insecurities which he's merely voicing through the characters and why are we so hesitant to attribute agency to anyone else in my last Euphoria video I attributed Levinson's condition to a simple case of auteur theory gone sour but I think there's more to it than that here's a little anecdote that might help illustrate my theory so when I was in Middle School like many I became increasingly self-conscious and awkward in my own skin and I wouldn't know what to do with my hands when I'd walk I felt eyes on me at all times even when there weren't any and I started walking around with my hands sticking straight down like a stick ironically that's what made people notice me and go what the [ __ ] is wrong with that guy and rather than swing my arms like a normal person I started looking for things to occupy my hands with so I wouldn't have to figure out what to do with them I would carry my backpack instead of wearing it I would walk around with excessive textbooks Musical instruments chairs anything I could get my hands on and it was a burden but it gave me an excuse not to swing my arms and walk like a normal person or hold them stiff at my side and walk like a freak or even make a choice on the matter it's not my fault my hands are full I think something similar is going on with Levinson he's clearly very self-conscious and with something like Euphoria he's able to channel these feelings into something bursting with visual ideas it's been well documented that I'm not a big fan of that show but at the very least it's a beautiful mess and it strives to be taken seriously on its own terms even if I struggle to do that but it's second season in many ways crumbled beneath the weight of its many onset controversies and I'm starting to realize that maybe Levinson is setting these burdens up for himself Malcolm and Marie was faced with the coveted curveball a movie literally conceived because of this massive obstacle and to Levinson and companies credit everyone was trying to make a covid movie and play into their limitations but in this case those limitations resulted in Levinson falling into a mode of the characters just rambling and rambling about things that lined up suspiciously well with his own circumstance so it's no wonder people began to take him at such face value so we have a covid movie par for the course obstacle everyone was doing it we have a messy production that seems like the natural consequence of upping the ante on such an already massive show nothing too suspicious no discernible patterns or anything yet so what's his next move oh he swoops in on a show that's 80 done and attempts to rebuild it from the ground up the man is drawn to obstacles this is him keeping his hands full he can't swing his arms like a normal person he can't operate with a smooth set he can only work in the context of some sort of external opposition it's genuinely commendable that on a basic level these works are competent and cut together sources have lauded his problem-solving on set but you can't help but wonder how many of those problems he created himself or rather how many of those problems were the primary draw for him to begin with I hate to mince metaphors but he can't help but put a stick in his own bike wheel it's impressive that he can get a couple rotations out of it but it's no wonder the whole thing Falls over I don't think he's doing this on a conscious level but I would go so far as to call this self-sabotage a bit of a cop-out and which the result is that his work can only be praised under the circumstances leaving it up to our imagination what it would look like if there were no circumstances such an approach seems destined to messy spectacle but while Euphoria often is something you can't help but Marvel at the idol is proof that sometimes a car crash can actually be really boring rather than a bombastic sense of grit and spontaneity emits the high pressure environment the production brought upon itself the show is visually lethargic like Euphoria like Malcolm and Marie it's impressive that on a basic level this Cuts together competently but the trick becomes less and less impressive the more I sense that Levinson's inviting these obstacles and the less it seems he even knows what he's trying to convey with these images so much of the dialogue I can only chalk up to bad improv hi I guess we're hugging now okay we're hugging we're bottom of the barrel cultural Jabs I'm [ __ ] [ __ ] blood than a kid at Epstein's Island which had to have been the consequence of a rushed writing process and a lack of time to work through takes on set the end seems to try to recontextualize the whole story into this Twisted Phantom thread-esque relationship of mutual hostility where Jocelyn is actually calling the shots much like the end of Malcolm and Marie where the idea is they're destined to do this dance forever but not only are neither of these endings really earned but here there's no legwork done beforehand or any specific moments The Twist really re-contextualizes other than giving us a general sense of she was faking it all along which could have been more organically Incorporated with more storywork or could have been scrapped entirely if they took one minute to realize how much of a cheap shot it is to undermine their whole satirical approach and be like oh no this misogynistic torture porn was actually sincerely uplifting the whole time you don't understand there's seemingly no episode structure as the show infamously went from six episodes under cymats to five under Levinson and there's consequently no new sense of stasis once Tedros enters the picture as much much as they try to convey it an awkward montage and cross-cutting and the show is riddled with insecurity to compensate for all this not just in those lines from Jocelyn airing out her own insecurity but how it feels the need to explicitly spell out its already heavy-handed Manson family and Little Red Riding Hood parallels and how it undercuts every line that's actually trying to make a point with some sort of punch line you know you just you're just a [ __ ] Tick-Tock obsessed [ __ ] algorithm [ __ ] oh whoa okay dude that it is a cliche lion the same kind of Twitter buzzwordism Euphoria thrived on but either own it or make it not cliche playing both sides doesn't work here all these shortcomings seem to be consequences of the Herculean task Levinson brought upon himself here and like Malcolm and Marie's rambling all that's left with basic competent writing and visual conception to the Wayside are Levinson and his direct thoughts this brings us to the finale which in a spurt of baffling narrative economy devotes most of its run time to showcasing these artists Tedros has had in his pocket there's a little bit of burbling tension with Tedros that's mostly pretty inert and in all fairness they are talented musicians even if Levinson straight up forgot to make one of them a character but I couldn't for the life of me figure out watching it why we were spending so much time on pure performance art during what supposedly the climax of this story until it clicked with me that Levinson is Tedros and these stars are the cast of euphoria and even though this scene is wildly anticlimactic to the story it's the only fitting outcry to rap up in the meta what was already a reflection on Levinson's experience working on Euphoria the show tries to get us to ask in the 11th hour if Tedros is crazy or genius for curating these artists and to Levinson's credit he did sort of curate a lot of now stars from Euphoria but they're slipping from his grasp a little bit as actors are leaving the show and the show itself is being pushed further and further back and anxiety and paranoia are the only natural responses here and as Levinson says of Tedros this pimp from the Midwest who shows up in Beverly Hills ends up being the victim turning this whole thing into the same kind of self-pitying diatribe that Malcolm and Marie was and the irony here is that in making this whole point Levinson isn't even curating anybody who wasn't already famous to be in this show everyone involved in the idol was pretty much already a star it just doesn't work on any level I know this is more of a Sam Levinson video than at the Idol video but I can't criticize this whole phenomenon of people attributing Soul credit to him and then turn around and make a video about this show without talking about the weekend for a little bit who was of course the sole reason for Levinson joining the show in the first place as I mentioned before the aspiration was to make the show whether consciously or not more akin to the weekend CD music and to their credit it is an accurate translation of weekendisms like first I'm gonna find you then I'm gonna [ __ ] you I refuse to believe they weren't playing Tetris for Laughs a little bit they go out of their way to make him as revolting as possible but there is no layer to test phase performance he's not charismatic enough to believe that he could influence these people there's no sense that he and Lily Rose Depp actually want to [ __ ] each other and when he's performing different readings of his opener you can tell he wants to inflect differently but all he can really muster is sounding like a normal guy over and over a singer ironically trapped behind the confines of the spoken word his General lack of commitment to the role is represented by his inability to get naked for the camera like his co-star did between this and littering his own music throughout the show this is just as much a vanity project for him as it is for Levinson and like Jocelyn and Tedros they're pairing is a self-destructive match made in heaven up until now Levinson has been able to place these obstacles down in front of himself and stumble his way into success but that didn't quite happen with the idol the problem is with every pushback he assumes he's challenging the status quo and making important work for receiving so much criticism and I think the only logical outcome from this is that he burrows deeper into his ways I would be excited to see where such catastrophic decision-making would take him if the evidence thus far didn't point to work that's just so [ __ ] boring but hey we'll see until then you know like share comment subscribe all the usual nonsense uh this has been the idol see you in the next one thanks for watching and goodbye

Channel: Taylor J. Williams

Views: 109,608

Keywords: The idol, Sam levinson, The Weeknd, Lily rose depp, Tedros, Jocelyn, Euphoria, HBO

Id: 1EAVr5C1CYA

Length: 16min 33sec (993 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 18 2023