Susan Boyle is the feel-good internet sensation at the moment, never judge a book by it’s cover, blah blah blah. Frankly, I’m not buying into this crap. Britain’s Got Talent manipulated this situation and it worked.
Within 30 seconds, BGT has pieced together the following information for their viewers:
- Susan Boyle is a 47 year old woman
- She’s unemployed
- Never been married (oh the horror!)
- She lives by herself
- She has a cat
- Some clips show the not-so-flattering footage of her eating a sandwich.
The facts that they’ve given us paint her as a stereotypical old crazy woman. As an audience, we subconsciously associate her with all of those scary stories of a spinster in an empty house with her cats, talking to herself and chasing children down the street for kicks.
BGT could have focused on her support network or what she used to do before she was unemployed but omission is a powerful tool. In journalism school, one brilliant lecturer said that every thing, every article, every movie, every song draws on a myth, an archetype, a story that everyone is familar with. If that’s the case, BGT milked this bad archetype for all it’s got.
As this shy woman from Bathgate, U.K, goes beyond 20 million YouTube hits in under five days and dodges silly questions asked by some interviewers the question on my lips is; if she wasn’t single, middle-adged and had a cat, would everyone have been as astounded with her voice?
Play the clip again from when she’s singing, except this time imagine someone you find attractive singing the same song. Do you feel the same way, or do you expect a voice like that from someone more “typically beautiful”?
Is the world a sucker for a story like this or does her story fill you up with hope? I’d love to hear some opinions.
Yes, I read that she was deprived of oxygen at birth in a newspaper article, I also read that she looked after her sick mum for quite a long time then after her mum died, Susan had a touch of depression.
I think it’s great. And I’m willing to go along with the story for all of it’s sappy rags to riches goodness, just because I can’t be bothered fighting it.
The only thing that annoys me is that she obviously had to go through a screening process to get on that stage in the first place. But everyone acting like it was an OMG moment.
Also, I heard (not confirmed) that she was deprived of oxygen at birth. Not enough to make her really handicapped, but enough to slow down her development.
If she was a beautiful, young women then she probably would have been doing something different anyway and this story wouldn’t be at all relevant.