Britain’s Got Archetypes

It was just one month ago that an unemployed charity worker—failed singer, romantic exile—lived alone in her family’s home in Blackburn, Scotland, shunned by a world with no place for a 47-year old ugly duckling whose sole talent was obscured by her plain and aging appearance. Though the taunts of sixth grade bullies still echoed in the back of her mind, the passing of her 97-year-old mother pushed her to peek out of her shell for just one more, all-or-nothing performance. As Susan Boyle walked onto the stage of “Britain’s Got Talent,” she brushed off the laughter of the audience with unassuming familiarity. What neither she nor they knew was that this duckling was about to deliver anything but a swan’s song.

In the midst of the applause, inspirational music, and tears that followed, it became clear that Boyle was set to be the new water cooler discussion topic and national media darling. Just weeks later, she was on Oprah with a makeover, her performance racking up YouTube hits in the multimillions.

Boyle’s story is one we’ve heard thousands of times before. Her rags-to-riches ascent joins the long tradition of Cinderella, Philoctetes, Cyrano de Bergerac, the frog prince, and Rudolph the red-nosed reindeer. No doubt the producers of “Britain’s Got Talent” knew this when they decided to recast the age-old archetype on a modern stage like so many authors, playwrights, and bards before them. The fresh angle in Boyle’s case, though, is that this isn’t a puppet show Christmas special or a child’s folk tale—this is reality. As scripted and replete with emotional cues for obedient audience members as her journey has been, Boyle is still a real person with a real back-story. It’s this reality, lurking behind the crafting inherent in all “reality” TV, that should give us pause before we swallow wholesale the narratives that networks feed us.

In a sense, Susan Boyle represents the fullest realization of the media’s memoir-molding potential. The combination of reality television and YouTube’s diffusive power catapulted a nobody into a worldwide phenomenon in a matter of minutes, ushering in a supposed moral revelation for pop culture in the process. They plucked a better-than-average singer from obscurity and made her, in the words of BGT judge Amanda Holden, “the biggest wake-up call ever.”

However, too few people seem to realize that we shouldn’t have been sleeping in the first place. The idea that talent correlates with physical appearance is a relic of Chaucerian thinking that has somehow still managed to permeate the culture of American Idolatry in spite of what we preach to our schoolchildren. Without the enduring assumption that a beautiful face precedes an equally attractive voice, we’d never have heard of her—an embarrassing sign that Rudolf’s isn’t so elementary a lesson as the age of his target audience might suggest. If Susan Boyle has taught us anything, it’s that the beggar-to-princess narrative hasn’t.

And unfortunately, despite whatever epiphanies Holden and various pop-culture commentators have claimed she’s brought to us, the very fact that Boyle is real (in the flesh and the falsetto) means that she’s actually less likely to change anything than an animated ogre turned unlikely hero. Unlike storybook fables, human interest clichés like Boyle’s story are constantly pushed aside for the next season’s craze—as modern parables, they can’t last. Indeed, despite all of its potential for crafting the perfect narrative arc, reality TV’s pitfall in the business of moralizing seems to be its unapologetic reality. Next year, YouTubers will find another craze, Britons will find another media darling, and Simon Cowell will find another unlikely star to mine for ratings. Boyle will land a record deal and sell enough albums to live comfortably to a ripe old age. But the next time a buffoonish-looking, middle-aged woman with a stellar soprano auditions for Britain’s Got Talent, she won’t make it very far—that’s already been done. Money, not principle, will always be the goal, and in a music scene full of Beyoncé Knowleses and Kelly Clarksons, there’s still room for only one Susan Boyle.

Vladimir Nabokov once commented that “reality” was one of the few words in the English language that is meaningless without quotation marks. Reality TV gives this observation a whole new meaning—one that makes me wonder whether those who wish to follow in the footsteps of Britain’s newest talent would be better off had she, too, been a fairytale.


Sean R. Ouellette ’12, a Crimson editorial writer, lives in Straus Hall.