One hundred million and counting. Every day the count goes up by a few million. On one link alone on YouTube, the clip has been viewed 40,187,032 times at the time of this writing.
"My name is Susan Boyle..." When the clip begins, we watch a stout, frumpy female seated on a chair, biting into a sandwich. She tells Ant and Dec her name, that she has never been married, and never been kissed. The only promise here is of a parade of the abject. Twenty-six seconds into the video, if you were watching it for the first time, you were probably wondering why your friend forwarded this link to you.
Certainly neither the crowd nor the critics expected much. "What's your name Dolly?" was Simon Cowell's uninviting welcome to Boyle on stage. It was easy to feel kindly toward the lady with the enormous double chin. But also unease. When was the last time a woman who didn't emit sexual heat get rewarded for her talent on TV?
This is what even a child knows nowadays: without makeup, you are mud. On Scottish television later on, Susan appeared with lipstick on her lips. Her wild hair had been tamed. It made me feel that she had been almost defenseless before.
But none of it mattered, did it? The background music for the "I Dream the Dream" song from Les Miserables began to play and a calm descended on stage. Amanda Holden, the sole female judge, whose glamor my friend's daughter wishes to emulate, raised her bare, depilated arms and rested them at the back of her beautiful blond head. In that coolness, with a tremble of a smile, Susan Boyle began to sing. Those first notes stirred magic in our hearts.
All that we were feeling, in a rush, was confirmed by the sight of Simon Cowell's eyes widened in surprise. And later I thought that this was the year of the Boyles: it is all about inventing games in which the loser is the dreamer who will win it all.
At a time of losses worldwide, banks failing, jobs gone, success has become sweet and natural again. That is the work done by the Susan Boyle phenomenon, even if it is only an individual, by herself, triumphing on the stage of the world with her talent.
When she sang, there was an exultation. This feeling would not die even when what she was singing about was sorrowful. "But the tigers come at night/ With their voices soft as thunder / As they tear your hopes apart / As they turn your dreams to shame." This is a song of heartbreak and despair but the audience was applauding because the voice on stage kept soaring to the heavens.
This feeling is recognized and also satirized by Jimmy Fallon on his NBC show: in a world gone wrong, Boyle singing "I Dreamed A Dream" can wash away all the malaise of the world. The copier doesn't work, but it's okay. You are pregnant, but it's okay. You're not pregnant, but it's okay. The plague has come, but it's okay. Zombies, too. But it is okay.
When Boyle was singing the closing lines of her song--"I had a dream my life would be / So different from this hell I'm living"--it was easy to forget that it might be her own life she was singing about. The life that she, an unemployed woman, is already leaving behind.
The words recall another song, "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan," an elegiac tribute to suffocated female lives in suburbia. "At the age of thirty-seven / She realised she'd never / Ride through Paris in a sports car / With the warm wind in her hair." I like the precision in that song. "At the age of thirty-seven...." It tells us that the gates close early. That because of the way we have set-up our lives we draw the curtain on our dreams prematurely. Our public culture is one in which only the young and the beautiful will succeed. If you're forty, you're finished.
Sung by Marianne Faithfull, who seemed to have smoked just the right number of cigarettes to find that raspy voice, "The Ballad of Lucy Jordan" was used in the film Thelma and Louise. It was there to remind us of the yearning whose lifted hands had left nail-marks in the roof of the sky.