If you wanted to go full conspiracy theory, you could make an argument that The Idol is aversion therapy by the big anti-sex scene mob, because nothing makes us want to perceive even the illusion of sex ever again less than watching The Weeknd, without even a shred of emotion, say “fucking stretch that tiny little pussy” in a vanity close-up. It's male fantasy in its purest form, made by men who think they know how to tell complex stories because they can light a nipple artfully. It gives us no real explanation for why Jocelyn would want to go near Tedros, let alone be the personal ragdoll for his horndog monologues. The Idol offers none of that, instead making sex a performance, and always one by women. In its best form, sex on screen offers us so much as a shorthand, from people falling in love or lust to a character showing vulnerability in moments only shared in private with another person. Dontnod’s lead writer dives into what the studio had to do to write a more honest type of sex scene, coming from the eyes of an unexperienced teenager. With every argument for why it's a necessary form of narrative worldbuilding, there's a rebuttal about how seeing two co-workers fake intimacy feels icky. Sex scene discourse has entered such a terminal loop on the internet by now. To them, sex is as follows: ‘A woman gets so turned on because a man exists, then something messy and weird happens in the middle (We won’t say what it is, but trust us, we've definitely had sex before) And then finally, when it's all over, she lets them know that was the best time she's ever had.' That the episode's climactic scene (metaphorically speaking, of course, because no one comes in this show) ends post-coital with Depp topless and Tesfaye still buttoned-up to the neck, is all the proof that Levinson and Tesfaye are simply just 2 children in a trench coat. It's all talk and no action, leaving the heavy lifting to its lead starlet who bears all the brunt of trying to titillate the audience while telling us that women like to be exploited, actually. Its unrefined adolescent horniness is exacerbated by the fact we never actually see anyone have sex, instead always cutting right before the good stuff. It's essentially a $75 million dollar version of one of Jay's stories from The Inbetweeners ("Yeah, man, she got so horny thinking about me that she wanked with a glass of whiskey"). That he doesn't see the irony in that statement, given that the dialogue and choreography feel like they're plucked from the brain of a horned-up teenager who just found out they could google ‘boobs’ on Google images, is perhaps one of the biggest self-owns in history.Įverything about the sex in The Idol, especially its most provocative scene yet, is like your older brother's friend at school trying to impress you with how much he knows about fucking. At the series' premiere in Cannes, Sam Levinson, who co-wrote the series with Tesfaye, said “Sometimes things that might be revolutionary are taken too far” in response to allegations of the show just being gratuitous male gaze torture porn. It's hard to imagine anything as unsexy as what we're told to believe is the most radical, boundary-pushing TV sex ever.
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