Like most people, I’ve been receiving all sorts of video clips of, and opinions about, Susan Boyle’s appearance on Britain’s Got Talent. For those of you who don’t know, Boyle is a 47 year-old woman who wants to make it in the world as a professional singer.
Boyle, who is unemployed and lives with her cats, has an overdeveloped forehead, which renders her kind of Neanderthal in appearance. Her hair is like steel wool, her accent coarse, and she moves about with a graceless practicality. You could imagine that she grew up always being the first person hit in a dodge ball game.
At any rate, like Paul Potts before her, she was being set up on the show to be the next miracle. Potts, if you’ll recall, was a portly, insecure looking guy who sold cell phones, but when he took the stage and began to sing, well, angels fell from the sky, and he became an instant sensation.
Finding that the public liked an uplifting underdog story more than a public evisceration of mediocrity, the production team latched onto the formula, and so now, every season, we see a contestant who is sculpted to perform against expectations.
As Boyle takes the stage, we’re cued to gear up for nasty laughs. She states her age and Simon rolls his eyes. The audience mutters darkly to one another, “who does she thinks she is?!” Boyle says she wants to be a pro singer, and the camera cuts to a pretty teen in the audience who makes a cruel “AS IF!” face.
This, of course, is supposed to represent a sort of Coles Notes of her life. Unloved and unlovely, the world has been against her from day one and nobody has ever believed in her. Of course, we have no idea if this is true, but it’s the story we’re being aggressively sold.
Before Boyle even begins to sing, the producers have already put a soft focus lens on the camera. We see the blonde judge resting her arm on her head, reclined in a beatified position, her eyes glistening with joy. The entire audience is leaning forward, anticipating another Paul Potts. Boyle begins to sing a Broadway song from Les Mis, and when she strikes the first note, everyone cheers and rises. This had nothing to do with her actual singing, which was fine, if lacking in character and depth, and everything to do with, well, marketing.
The song finishes, and as the accolades are being delivered, the music continues in the background, forcing the audience to live in the moment that has just passed. Simon looks like the Grinch, after his heart has grown three sizes, and a jubilant Boyle does a masculine little dance, as if she had just scored a touchdown.
It’s an appealing vignette, as we all need to imagine that we can transcend our circumstance and the rigid, unyeilding opnions that help confine us to them, but it was also a terribly insincere and condescending one, too. Her singing was confidently in key, but if she looked any different, she would have received a terse “no thanks” from Simon. What’s remarkable is not that this Ugly Duckling myth exists, but that so many people need it to be true that they willingly suspend their disbelief in order to create a miracle from the mediocre.