Truth-telling does not get much better

Although I have small interest in popular culture, and even less in reality TV, like pretty much everyone else in the English-speaking world I found myself arrested by the incredible story of Susan Boyle. It is a story that is particularly fitting for our time, because it requires more than words.

I had caught a short segment about Boyle on a morning show that my wife was watching as she dressed for work. But I had been unaware of the background to the segment—unaware either of her life prior to appearing on Britain’s Got Talent ten days ago or the reception Boyle was given by the audience at the Clyde Auditorium in Glasgow. And I was only vaguely aware—aware, that is, beneath the level of verbal consciousness—of how the television directors, in both the U.K. and U.S., had selected camera angles that emphasized the 47-year-old Scottish spinster’s physical awkwardness and lack of beauty. The contrast between her looks and her voice was intended to be shattering. The power and depth of her singing—she performed “I Dreamed a Dream” from the musical drama Les Misérables—were more than sufficient to move even a casual listener. For television, however, and for a world that has been schooled in its visual values, her singing was not enough. Boyle was a sensation precisely because the beauty of her voice was treated as astonishing given her lack of physical beauty.

And I write all this—not one word about literature till now—because this morning, warming up with a cup of coffee, I read a wise and lovely column about Boyle and her worldwide reception by Colette Douglas Home, a Northern Irish writer who is married to the editor of the Glasgow Herald. As they say, read the whole thing. Truth-telling does not get much better.

Update: In the New York Post, Maureen Callahan is suspicious. It is not that she believes there is really no such person as Susan Boyle. Rather, she is suspicious of the impresario Simon Cowell. “Not since P.T. Barnum has there been a show business master of the trompe l’oeil like Simon Cowell,” she says. I am in no position to judge, having only the vaguest knowledge of Cowell. Yet Callahan goes on to say that Boyle’s story “would not be so compelling without the contradictions: the beautiful voice possessed by this defiantly unglamorous woman, who can somehow fully inhabit and interpret a love song without ever having been in love.” And I wonder if his genius, if indeed Cowell staged the whole thing, may be to spot a good story when he sees one—and to know just how to heighten the contradictions, to make a good story even better. Even if all that is true, the fact remains that the contradictions depend upon just the cultural assumptions that Douglas Home identified in her column: “Not only do you have to be physically appealing to deserve fame; it seems you now have to be good-looking to merit everyday common respect.” Even from the likes of Maureen Callahan.

Update, II: David P. Goldman, the Asia Times columnist who writes under the appropriate pseudonym Spengler, for he too is convinced of the West’s decline, argues that Susan Boyle validates the mediocrity of popular audiences and represents a “[c]hurlish resentment of high culture.” Tone deaf as I am, I have no truly informed opinion about Boyle’s singing. As Robert Levy observes, the whole thing was great theater. Yet I still maintain that Colette Douglas Home has reported a real cultural distemper—our confusion of youthful beauty with talent and goodness, and our increasing willingness to show a lack of respect for those who do not meet our standards of youth and beauty. That insight, rather than Boyle’s singing, is what motivated my original post.