MAUREEN CALLAHAN: The Idol is as poisonous as cancer

When it comes to ‘The Idol’ — HBO‘s unapologetic, unadulterated piece of misogyny masquerading as ‘art’ — one has to wonder: Where is the woke brigade? Where are the voices of #MeToo?

Why is Hollywood, having branded itself chastened and newly self-aware post-Harvey Weinstein, suddenly so quiet?

To watch the first three episodes, proudly heralded by the network as generated by the ‘sick and twisted minds’ of co-creators Sam Levinson (writer and director of ‘Euphoria‘) and Abel Tesfaye, aka popstar The Weeknd, is to despair.

‘The Idol’ begins with the tentative comeback of a damaged, Britney-like pop star called Jocelyn. Her re-packaging, as described by an older female label executive: ‘She’s young, beautiful and damaged… mental illness is sexy.’

This is not played for laughs. Irony does not live here. No — this is the show’s thesis.

That Jocelyn is played by Lily-Rose Depp, daughter of Johnny, is even more upsetting.

Apparently, no woman in Hollywood post-MeToo remains safe, no matter her pedigree or the powerful men in her corner.

To wit: episode one opens with Jocelyn in crisis, a photo of her doll-like face, smeared with semen, leaked online — a direct reference to the real-life hacking of private photos of famous women, many in compromising positions, going viral in 2014.

And, because it apparently needs to be said: There was nothing funny about that.

The creators of ‘The Idol’, however, seem to disagree.

Here’s the edifying dialogue to follow: ‘A face full of cum’, ‘the human cum-sock’, ‘jizz-rag Jocelyn.’

And the lyrics to Jocelyn’s latest single? ‘I’m just a freak, yeah/You know I want to bang.’

Let’s pause here to note how dated, how utterly retrograde, this depiction of female pop stardom is.

The biggest tour of this summer is Taylor Swift — estimated worth $740 million, a self-creation who calls her own shots, and is adored by girls and women the world over for that very reason.

Swift’s peers are equally strong, fearsome, wealthy and independent: Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Rihanna, Adele, Kelly Clarkson, Billie Eilish, Miley Cyrus, Shakira.

A character like Jocelyn doesn’t fit the culture. She sure doesn’t reflect it: Broken, bloodied, at times unable to literally stand on her bruised and battered feet (that’s the subtlety of metaphor here: women as so very weak).

Jocelyn lives to be cut up and choked out during sex. She’s a singer who chain smokes cigarettes — who smokes anymore? Is there anyone under 30 who thinks smoking is cool and glamorous?

No humiliation for Jocelyn/Depp is too small: The showrunners have her puffing away at the disparaged ‘lady’ kind of cigarette — super long and skinny ones like Virginia Slims, historically marketed solely to women as symbols of feminist liberation.

It’s strangely perfect. After all, that’s what ‘The Idol’ is: Poisonous as cancer, sold to you by the corporate cynics at HBO, positing male rape fantasies and a clear hatred of women as boundary-pushing avant-garde-ism and maybe, even, a sex-positive expression of feminism.

Hey — if Jocelyn thinks that semen on her face is a savvy marketing tool, who are we to judge? Right?

What an insult to viewer intelligence. ‘The Idol’ is pure garbage – Levinson, long a monster hiding in plain sight, enabled by a Hollywood misogynistic as ever.

If ‘Euphoria’, with its leering depiction of naked teens engaged in graphic sex acts wasn’t proof enough, ‘The Idol’ leaves no doubt.

Tesfaye — who is also the show’s male lead, cult-leader Tedros — is no better, and if there’s any justice, his career will never recover.

It seems clear that he’s acting out his own fantasies, having reportedly told Levinson when pitching the series that, due to the power of his pop-fame, ‘If I wanted to start a cult, I could.’

Ha! When Tedros is not going super-dark here, he’s laughable: A walking Napoleon complex in a floor-dusting raincoat — in L.A.! — with a hideous rat-tail and a lame cocaine habit.

He is pure edgelord. Yet Tesfaye seems to be getting off on it. His character wields a knife against Jocelyn during sex. He chokes her, blindfolds her, tells her to do everything he says ‘while I suffocate you with my c**k. I want you to choke on it.’

He beats Jocelyn in front of others while alternately making out with her and telling her it will break her writer’s block. Who among us, ladies, wouldn’t fall for that?

‘This is really gonna hurt,’ he tells Jocelyn. ‘If you push through it, the pain will be beautiful.’

This is mercilessly bad writing.

But make no mistake: Levinson and Tesfaye are showing us who they are. Yes, they’re awful filmmakers and scriptwriters, but they’re worse people. They hate women. And they really, really hate beautiful, smart, powerful, independently wealthy women.

At the end of the third episode they even have Jocelyn thank Tesfaye’s character for beating her — ‘for taking care of me.’ Whoever greenlit this abomination should be fired.

Now, should this argument seem reductive, an unfair conflation of the art and the artist — oh, how our once-favorite monsters used that line, Woody Allen and his ilk — consider reports from the set: Original director Amy Seimetz pushed out because, according to Rolling Stone, Tesfaye felt there was too much ‘female perspective’.

As in, women don’t take to being ritually abused and raped?

Tesfaye and Levinson reportedly wanted Depp’s character to insert an egg into her vagina and beg Tedros to rape her once it dropped out.

They are also said to have had another scene in which he smashed Jocelyn’s face in, giving him an erection and leading her to beg for further beating.

It’s all so sick. Even the crew, according to Rolling Stone, found the show’s treatment of women repulsive.

‘The Idol’ rapidly became ‘any rape fantasy that any man would have in the show,’ according to one production source. ‘And then the woman comes back for more because it makes her music better.’

It defies logic that not one exec at HBO flagged this as beyond the pale. That no one called out what was really going on here. For God’s sake — the showrunners cast Eli Roth, a director vilified for his own torture porn, and put these words in his mouth: ‘I’m f***ing sh***ing more blood than a kid at Epstein’s island.’

Ladies and gentleman, that is the Levinson-Tesfaye Brain Trust gleefully at work, endorsed by HBO.

You know, for a network in love with its daring, ahead-of-the-curve image, ‘The Idol’ is quite out-of-date.

It recalls nothing so much as the early aughts work of fashion photographer Terry Richardson and American Apparel founder Dov Charney, two other misogynistic monsters who hid in plain sight, their pornified images of young women so overt as if to indicate they had nothing to be ashamed of.

Similarly, Levinson and Tesfaye seem to think their dramatization acquits them.

To the contrary — I think this indicts them. Just as ‘The Idol’ indicts everyone at HBO, which loves to pride itself on its esteemed programming but often uses that as a Trojan horse for gratuitous female nudity (‘The Sopranos’), rape fantasies (‘Game of Thrones’) and glamorized violence against women (‘Westworld’).

There is no relief anywhere in ‘The Idol’. Jocelyn must be the only woman in post-COVID America who doesn’t own a pair of sweatpants.

Every time we see her she’s wearing skin-tight clothing that shows half her breasts or her butt, or we’re seeing her engaged in public sex acts or suffering a recurring motif: Hands around her throat.

And that’s what ‘The Idol’ feels like — the sanctioned abuse of women, commercially and culturally, hands around our throat until we submit.

HBO should be ashamed. Levinson and Tesfaye should never be put in charge of women again. And to the feminists of Hollywood, once so emboldened by the fall of Harvey Weinstein: Where are you now?