Making the Dream a Reality (Show): The Celebration of Failure in American Idol

Abstract

In American Idol, fame is as readily won through harsh rejection as it is through approbation. As millions tune in each season to watch the dismissal of a tragic‐comic parade of anti‐stars, it becomes clear that something beyond mere reality‐show ridicule is at work here. In failing, those rejected from American Idol succeed in authenticating certain understandings of the American Dream—obligatory ambition, individuality, and the necessity of failure in the process of achievement. This paper examines the negotiation of failure in American Idol, and addresses the question of why, in the end, losers sell just as well as winners.

Notes

1. Sandage himself recognizes this, to a degree, in an interview published in Cabinet (no. 7, 2002), http://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/7/inventionoffailure.php.

2. This essay's author further investigates the relationships among the American Dream, Weber's “Protestant ethic,” and the “spirit of capitalism” in her 2007 PhD dissertation, “America Singing: The Mediation of Identity Politics in American Idol” and in “A Singing Citizenry: Popular Music and Civil Religion in America,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 45.4 (2006): 497–503.

3. A 10 May item in the Los Angeles Times (Collins) inspired apologies from the WB Network, as well as some further media commentary about the public's appetite for (public) humiliation (e.g. Shain; de Moraes; Oldenburg).