Kelefa Sanneh on reality TV
There is a taboo that left-leaning critics of popular culture are obliged to observe: never criticize the populace. Pozner tries her best to honor this proscription, following the trail blazed, half a century ago, by the theorists Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, who lamented that “the deceived masses” were easy marks for a cynical and self-perpetuating “culture industry.” Because she writes about reality television, Pozner must observe this taboo twice over—the deceived masses are represented by the people onscreen, too. Starting in 2004, Omarosa Manigault-Stallworth, an African-American contestant on Donald Trump’s business competition show, “The Apprentice,” became reality television’s preeminent villain, possessed of an impressive ability to enrage the people around her; Pozner scrambles to explain this phenomenon without casting aspersions on either the antiheroine or her legions of detractors. First, she assures us that, whatever inspired Manigault-Stallworth’s “Black villainess diva” reputation, “it wasn’t her behavior.” Then, two pages later, she allows that “Omarosa has capitalized on a virulent stereotype about Black women, a path ‘Apprentice’ producers laid out for her.” She is eager to let audiences off the hook: in her account, “American Idol” (which she finds mean-spirited) was a success because energetic cross-promotion “guaranteed ratings gold,” and “Survivor” was a success “largely because the endless, from-all-corners buzz made viewership seem almost like a cultural imperative.”
Because Pozner isn’t really interested in viewers, she doesn’t have much to say about why they reject some reality shows while embracing others. And she doesn’t distinguish among passing fads, like “Joe Millionaire” (which lost eighty per cent of its audience between its first season finale and its second—also its last); hardy perennials, like “The Bachelor”; and obscurities, like “When Women Rule the World” (which was scrapped by Fox months in advance of its scheduled premiere, though the series was eventually broadcast in the U.K.). She isn’t really interested in the shows’ participants, either, and, despite her attempts to shield them, sometimes they become collateral damage in her assaults on greedy executives. “Producers build on our derision by carefully casting women who are, let’s just say, in no danger of being recruited to join Mensa,” she writes. This judgment, at least, has the virtue of clarity: producers are bad, though probably smart; participants are dumb, though possibly good.
Viewers wanting a subtler verdict should seek out “Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity” (Duke; $23.95), Brenda R. Weber’s strange and thoughtful survey of makeover shows. Defined loosely, this category, built around twinned narratives of physical and spiritual transformation, includes a wide range of reality programming: not only “The Swan” and “What Not to Wear” but also “Dog Whisperer,” which tames rowdy pets; “The Biggest Loser,” a weight-loss competition; and “American Idol,” which is, after all, about the transformation of amateurs into pop stars. (Even “The Real World” is, in some sense, a makeover show, precisely because of its artificiality: having been thrown together in a strange house with strange people, the participants generally assume that the experience will be educational, or even therapeutic.) Weber, a professor of gender studies at Indiana University, takes care to avoid snap judgments. Her approach is informed by the work of the feminist scholar Kathy Davis, who has rejected the idea that cosmetic surgery and other aesthetic interventions are inherently or purely oppressive. Weber quotes one of Davis’s insights with approval: “Women are not merely the victims of the terrors visited upon them by the beauty system. On the contrary, they partake in its delights as well.” The thought of women renovating their wardrobes or their faces inspires in Weber not horror but a tantalizing question: “Why shouldn’t the painful vestiges of class and circumstance that write themselves on the body be not only overwritten but erased altogether?”
Weber sees in these makeover programs a strange new world—or, more accurately, a strange new nation, one where citizenship is available only to those who have made the transition “from Before to After.” Weber notices that, on scripted television, makeovers are usually revealed to be temporary or unnecessary: “characters often learn that though a makeover is nice, they were really just fine in their Before states.” On reality television, by contrast, makeovers are urgent and permanent; “the After-body, narratively speaking, stands as the moment of greatest authenticity.” We have moved from the regressive logic of the sitcom, in which nothing really happens, to the recursive logic of the police procedural, in which the same thing keeps happening—the same detectives, solving and re-solving the same crimes. In fact, Weber points out that a number of makeover shows present their subjects as crimes to be solved: in the British version of “What Not to Wear,” makeover candidates line up in front of a one-way mirror, like perpetrators awaiting identification; “Style by Jury,” a Canadian show, begins and ends with the target facing a jury of her peers.
Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” Weber writes. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.
The transformation, however partial, of a Before into an After usually requires accomplices, who may go through their own transformation during the show, “from cranky witches to good friends to benevolent fairy godmothers (or superheroes),” as Weber puts it. Often, these accomplices, like their fairy-tale counterparts, live outside the social worlds of the people they help. “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” which began its run in 2003, epitomized this tendency: the title implied (and the show seemed to confirm) that the makeover targets needed a kind of help that no member of their tribe—the “straight guy” tribe—could provide. Weber argues that the “Queer Eye” experts, like other gay makeover agents, “function as a foil against which to read the emerging hegemonic masculinity of the made-over man.” But, surely, their marked difference is often related to the authority they project. (Think of Simon Cowell, for years the toughest “American Idol” judge: his British accent and his status as a lifelong non-singer made his judgments seem all the more definitive.) “Mostly male doctors on plastic surgery shows are relentless about the horrors of looking masculine,” Weber writes, and yet some of the same doctors who upbraid “masculine” women playfully defy gender norms: Robert Rey, the celebrity-obsessed star of “Dr. 90210,” is known for his smooth skin, and for the sleeveless scrub shirts he prefers, many of which are equipped with plunging V-necks, the better to display his pectoral cleavage.
Sometimes these agents of change seem purposely to sabotage their own messages. In her book, Pozner reserves special condemnation for “Charm School,” the VH1 program that purported to offer social rehabilitation to ill-mannered dating-show veterans; she protests that the “smug, white, wealthy ‘dean,’ Keith Lewis”—a modelling agent and pageant judge—“offered only condescension.” Weber, more astutely, argues that arbiters like Lewis function effectively as parodies of authority: “the lessons are so shallow, the uptight behavior of the experts so much less engaging than the ebullience of the subjects, that these ‘learn to be proper’ shows in many ways rebuke the very transformations they portray.” A show like “Charm School” is, at heart, an expression of the audience’s strong but mixed feelings about makeovers in general: we like the idea of melioration, but how much change do we really want? Weber returns to this question at the end of her book, when, in an autobiographical turn, she describes a visit to an orthodontist, who offers to straighten her teeth for five thousand dollars. She declines, but finds herself tempted—and she can’t help but notice that the orthodontist might benefit from otoplasty to pin back his ears. And so she returns, implicitly, to the question of whether the body’s “painful vestiges of class and circumstance” can be overwritten or erased. The answer is yes—but not for free and not for good.
