"Reality" television is generally scorned as mindless, vulgar, exploitative and contrived. So is it ever sociology, is it ever real? Yes, if it's American Idol , the FOX show that recently wrapped up its blockbuster second season. The program, for the uninitiated, pitted 12 young performers against one another for a chance at a $1 million recording contract. True, American Idol was adapted from a British series, Pop Idol , which had attracted a record 14 million voters and made an instant celebrity of a colorless boy singer. True, the program's producers were motivated by only the slickest of intentions: to manufacture a lucrative audience for a recording star before even one CD had been released. True, the twice-weekly programs, with their drawn-out commercial breaks and clumsily staged group numbers, were not the material of art. And yet, in its shape and timing, American Idol has provided a fascinating snapshot of American youth culture in the 21st century. At once a competition, a...

S ince the beginning of the women's liberation movement in the 1960s, theorists have recognized two kinds of contemporary feminist culture: Feminism Heavy and Feminism Lite. Heavy, or high, feminism includes art exhibits, academic books, PBS, foreign films by Dutch or Belgian women directors (such as Jeanne Dielmann, Chantal Akerman's interminable saga of a housewife's interminable day), the novels of Susan Sontag and Toni Morrison, and learned journals such as Signs, Genders, or Legacy. Lite, or low, feminism includes advertising, the fiction of Anita Shreve and Terry McMillan, the plays of Wendy Wasserstein, commercial television, women's magazines, and most Hollywood movies. Indeed, the central axiom of high-feminist film theory is that the on-screen woman, however liberated or radical in her actions, is nonetheless the object of the camera's gaze--a gaze that is predatory, controlling, and metaphorically male. But this theory depends on the formal and structural analysis of film,...