Back to the Tube

Through out the week, I confess, I still watch the Susan Boyle YouTube video of her first performance. I find it, or rather the first version - not this still slightly truncated one, to be almost the quintessential perfect story. It's just over seven minutes, has great background, asides, characters, music, heroic figures, the hero's quest, tension, drama, emotion, and a surprise ending. What more could you want in a story?

The second round I found disappointing both musically and as a story. It's distant, isolated, non-interactive and unresolved. It's a let down. I've seen it once and mostly likely never again.

Tonight I stumbled upon her "final" performance just posted on YouTube. I was 324 to view it - sort of like having a low license plate number I guess. It still has that distant feel to it that their level of production and staging makes. She sang her original song from Les Merisables and it was good, though I felt her first performance had much more character. In her interactions on stage afterwards she seemed on the edge of coherence, less certain, caught in the spotlight in the worst sense of the phrase. Not that I could do any better. In fact she seems to be doing much better than I would ever manage. I think I would have passed out by now from fright. Sort of like wondering how Jack Bauer can actually live through the day with that much adrenaline in his brain. But in my mind it does seem to highlight the artificial nature of that "professionally packaged" level of performance. You can't really see anything on stage from the glare of the spotlight - it's all black beyond a few feet and that emotional wall or distance seems to kill any spontaneous interaction that she exhibited at first. That "cheeky grin" and head shake that the crowd roared to. It's all deer in the headlights and stammering prepared quotes that don't exactly fit the question. But it's not her I dislike, it's the situation she's in. It's not real. It's fake and uninteresting.

Even the judges and the two guys on stage all seemed less interesting, less likable, more packaged with odd clothes and too much makeup. It was unseemly - unpleasant. Simon, unusually, was much more philosophical and tried to contextualize the situation the most with phrases of "no matter what happens", alluding to the fact that she, in fact, might not win the show, but would beyond all doubt still be a winner.

So, again we can ask, what's this really all about. It's classic. It's the contemporary intersection of commerce, talent-scouting, vaudeville, media in the form of both old-school TV and semi-new-school YouTube, and just people. People transposed out of their normal lives into environments unknown and not well understood; put up both for their own benefit and the vaster benefit of others to be poked and exposed on a scale that should cower most of us and certainly alter anyone.

Other than Susan Boyle's performance I've lost interest in the show, but I do miss that ungainly Scottish woman who sang the first time. I wonder where she went to and I wonder how she is. I wish her well and hope that woman gets to sing for the Queen. They both need it.

gunther