ANTM: being green is not equal to easy, and issues of reality television in general

Q: So Nora, do you ever get tired of picking apart the "green" cycle of ANTM for its general half-assery?
A: Not when they're jetting off to China with nary a mention of "carbon footprint."

No no, y'all--China, like Old Navy, gets a pass when it comes to the larger questions of sustainability and general environmental consciousness. Oh, La Banks, why did you open up a can of worms that you could never hope to...consume? Put back in the can? Utilize? (What does one do with an opened can of worms? You probably shouldn't store them in the can, so you'll need to transfer the surplus worms to a plastic or glass container before you put them in the fridge...). I accept that the "green" commitment of this cycle is less, ah, of a commitment. My feelings make the following part of the episode even more delicious: our Hopefuls drive out into the desert and are left behind by their biodiesel van in a landscape that is likely to become more familiar and common as the "light green" actions like the things in which ANTM is dabbling fail, and weather patterns become more extreme due to climate change exacerbated (at best...) by human activity. Get used to the heat, friends, because we're all in this kitchen together.

In panel, our guest judge from the design school challenge offers that Lisa isn't the freshest of faces, the youngest or dewiest of the lot. Tyra fires back, musing "why is the modeling industry so obsessed with women looking like children?" Like her chastisement of the poor misguided man-judge/robot (he was a little metallic, no?) would ever make us forget the way they threw Renee under the bus last cycle on account of her not-so-fresh feeling! I'm not saying Banks and her hangers-on have to pick one line and stick with it, I'm just saying they should at least show a little bit of reflection about the things they say, cycle after cycle. Though it is this lack of reflection that gives us one of my favourite things about ANTM: the completely contradictory critiques from one girl to another! We haven't stumbled into it yet this cycle, but I hold out hope. Two cycles ago, the Panel chastised one girl for not ignoring how sick she felt, not pushing through to deliver the shot. Only a handful of eps later, they berated a different Hopeful for ignoring what her body was telling her, for pushing to hard to get the shot. Are girls supposed to sacrifice their health or not? Are they supposed to lose the weight or not? Are they supposed to look "men's magazine" or just regular sexy/available? It's only a taste of the contradictory messages that all women get all the time from all media, but it's stark as hell on ANTM.

Speaking as we were of worms, maybe Tyra et al should have opened up a can of those red worms, for composting. That would have been green. Composting isn't even that hard--and surely, given the amount of food I've seen the Hopefuls eating, there must be some scraps of not bread, not meat, not fat to churn up into some rich, dark compost. In fact, tonight's ep showed Bianca and Heather breaking bread, possibly pasta, together. Sometimes I almost buy the normalcy, you know? Thank the lo' for yet another (shamefully thrilling! I am ashamed by my cheap, cheap thrills!) shower scene. Unfortunately, we are on the receiving end of a dramatically edited, possibly fabricated fight between the previously docile Heather and Bianca. Now, I have it on good authority that it *is* all in the edits, and it's not like we actually get--or expect--reality in our reality television. We like broadly drawn conflict; we want good girls, bad guys, bad girls, good guys, familiar stories, and situations in which we can imagine ourselves and what we'd do differently and better. With reality television in general--and ANTM in particular, filled as it is with young people still learning how they fit in the world--all of the analysis that the "characters" (who are real people, actually) do about their actions and themselves is externalized: the viewer takes part in review, judgment, assessment. Reality television highlights the inability of its participants to immediately and correctly perceive their situations while they are in them and invites the viewer to engage in the introspection that the participant does not or cannot. We get the gift of edited vignettes that give us all we need to make the right decision; we get to instantly compare characters' reactions to similar things, picking them apart for inconsistency. We get many opportunities in this ep, as Bianca (again) gets to go on about how Heather (again) just needs to get over something or other, when just recently we've seen Bianca's inability to get over something. We can see the things she cannot, grow in a way that she seems to not, and use those judgments to feel superiour. It's the same all over reality television and is, I think, what lies at the core of its endurance: we're all comparing ourselves to the participants and coming out ahead. Since they are real people, we think, we're demonstrating our superiority over our peers, and this makes us feel pretty good about ourselves. This is the danger of reality television--this false comparison--because the people aren't people. They are the pastiche of people, people that make good entertainment. This should remove them from the reasonable range of people to whom we, the viewers, should contrast ourselves and ought to keep us humble when we think "I totally could have done that. I totally would *not* have fux0red that Cover Girl commercial. I completely understand this situation and I would have come out of it with much more self knowledge." This comprises my emergent Theory of Reality Television and Viewer Identification and Transference. It is possible that I missed my calling.

So.

On a reality show that's not all that real, with an environmental commitment that isn't all that committed, sending messages as mixed as they are absolute, lead by Tyra's conceit that she might make changes in an industry that has been as unchanged as any in its continual and continuous need for younger, thinner women: what kinds of analysis, what sorts of self-discovery, what critical thinking at all can we make or find, should we expect, might we demand?

None. That's where I come in.

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Tune in for China next week where, if you all clap your hands very very hard, Ms. J. (runway coach extraordinare) might treat the viewership to some race caricaturization not seen on my television since PBS played "Breakfast at Tiffany's" that weekend this summer! "Miss-ha Go-Rightry, I Must-ah Plro-tesht!"

ANTM rides again, and so does this laptop

So.

While we waited for Dell to work a minor miracle—that is, to address our needs on this approximately 2 year old lappy by replacing a hard drive and orchestrating not one but two complete reboots of the system *all while completely under warrantee*—you and I, blog of mine, have fallen seriously behind on the ol’ ANTM recap. Thankfully, Tyra gave a poor sinner like me a bit of a reprieve last week: the mid-cycle recap! Not only did she jog my memory, she gave me one less week through which I need to fly to get up to speed before I dip into tonight’s substantive ep.

I missed the makeover episode, in which they always shear some poor girl’s hair off and she cries and says she looks like a boy (the horror!). Bianca, heretofore known to me only as Queens, was the major target this time, though Ebony also got it bad. Taking off these weaves and wigs is like slash-and-burn farming: nothing grows there for years afterwards. I have some short damned hair, so I don’t get the severe negative reaction they girls have—but as a person with a very stylized look and a specific haircut, hair is a huge part of my identity. And it’s been gratifying to see Bianca toss that wig they fobbed off on her in favour of her eminently better chop job, because short hair does not equal boy. Short hair equals short hair, and Bianca’s begun to own it. I do love a good skull. At the end of the episode, they send the prickly Yalie home. Not a shocker: I still feel like her motivation was about having a conception of what a model is and does, and then enacting that conception. The panel reacted poorly this time, and I read in their reaction the idea that modeling should be from the heart, not the head. Models should be seen and not heard. Unless they’re spokesmodels, as they are in another episode I watched but could not blog. And where, exactly, did Ebony’s personality go? Man, is she a board up there. And that falling on the sword? I called that, on my little couch with my vegetarian dinner in one hand and my remote in the other.

Now, tonight’s episode.

I have wanted so badly for Sarah to do well, not least because she’s a burlesquer and I’ve rolled with my share of the neo-burlesque crowd (holla, Sissy Butch Brothers!). I was not charmed by her audition antics (really, the paper booger trick? That ain’t even vaudeville, honey) and I thought her haircut was very, ah, 1996. It was an improvement over the insipid mop she came in with, but it was not fierce. These criticisms aren’t the point, though. The point is Sarah’s weight.

There’s another thru line to this season apart from the “ANTM goes green” theme, which I cannot help but feel has been summarily dropped. Food and body issues are front and center. But it’s all adding up to me thinking that Tyra, and ANTM doth all protest too much. There’ve been so many references to food, eating, weight, health—and I’m suspicious. “Will we ever have a plus size model” muses Ms. J. You did. You had two last season—did you mean, will we ever have a plus size model that we don’t have to dismiss for reasons totally unrelated to her weight, thankyouverymuch. And, of course, you had this girl, about whom you all lamented: she’s not big enough to be plus, she’s too big for “regular” modeling, she just doesn’t fit. I am not surprised that the industry that Tyra, J, J, and Niles Barker (noted fashion photographer) work in likes a thin girl; I am not surprised that they’re trying to maybe backpedal a bit into “healthy woman” territory. What shocks me is the seeming unselfconsciousness of it all. The recap episode actually had just what I’d been searching/waiting for in my pitch black little size ten heart: a bald demonstration of the hypocrisy that is ANTM’s take on the injustice of (gasp!) sizeism in modeling.

During the Tyra Talkback, cycle winner Dani (she of the overly regional accent—that bit of identity had to go, just like those gap teeth, ladeez) favoured the Hopefuls with a very illustrative story. As a working model, which Dani totally is, Dani was told to lose some weight. Tyra interjects: I was mad! I know how thin she is! Those scumbags, telling a thin girl to get thinner, how dare they, and a model no less! Dani would never sacrifice her health or her body and neither would the Hopefuls, they all immediately supply. So Dani did the only thing she could do, when told by an industry that makes unreasonable and unjust demands on the still developing bodies of young women: she told the client to kiss her plenty slim ass. Okay no, just kidding. She ate healthy and worked out and lost the weight. If you’re confused about the moral here, you’re not the only one. It was emphatically NOT RIGHT, per Tyra and Dani and everyone, for MODELING to ask Dani, thin enough as she is, to lose weight. She sure showed them…by losing weight. It isn’t at all outrageous to find this outrageous. But really, Tyra et al, you can’t set a girl down a path, get indignant about the path, and then wish her luck as she skips down the path.

But back to Sarah. I wanted to like her, and her pics were good enough, but given her background, I expected more. I mean, there was nudie-ness in the recap ep (to my, again, shameful delight), and tonight’s challenge was all about the skimpy Video Vixen wear; where was the sass I thought Sarah must surely have somewheres in there? It was nowhere, and she’s headed home. To my state. So Sarah, give a girl a call when you land back in Massachusetts. We’ll get a damned bite to eat. And maybe after you turn 21, we can get a beer—a not light beer. A stout, maybe, built like you and me: shapely in the glass and thick in the hips. And we can talk about how modeling will never be brought down from the inside, on account of the inability of the master’s tools to disassemble the master’s house.

ANTM: In which everyone is challenged, more or less

Thanks to the utter incomprehensibility of computers and their problems, we’re up and running at The House of the Rising Somerville. Technological crisis either averted or delayed; either way, we all win.

On to last week’s (and none too soon in advance of this week’s) episode.

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If tonight’s ep had a theme for me, it would actually be the one I used before, and though I don’t want to repeat myself it really does work best so I’ll say it again: if I can’t have lip service, I don’t want any service at all. In only one hour—45 minutes if you discount the interminable last quarter hour in panel (and of course minus commercial breaks featuring the oddly bloused Jaslene: think matronly pirate as mother of the bride...)—a rather lightweight and ultimately inconsequential television show on a non-network television station is attempting to get on with environmentalism, anti-smoking, and the representation of disability. And all this on top of the eating problems, body issues, facets of female social interaction, and consumerism we always face! Sometimes I wonder how La Banks manages to give so many things such a smooth glossing over in two cycles each year.

First, and most obviously, the girls will be riding in a “green” van. No limo for them! It’s biodiesel all the way for this cycle! I’m always a little peeved when people make huge changes and ignore the small, important, relatively easy, less flashy changes they could be making to be more environmentally conscious. I'm not entirely surprised that ANTM's on this bandwagon, nor am I surprised that their efforts are incomplete at best. (Was that not an eternally flowing waterfall in the Model Home? Wasn't the thrift store challenge from last season more "green" in that it advocated reuse?) Until the Hopefuls are letting yellow mellow; until they're all using non-trash menstrual alternatives (the Keeper, sea sponge tampons, and washable pads); until they're flushing with grey water; until they don't wear anything dry cleaned or tested on animals; until they use dish cloths instead of paper towels and hankies instead of tissues for all that crying I foresee; until they're saving water by showering with a friend (which, to my prurient delight, they kind of do in a brief bathtub riot!)—until they've made and internalized real personal change, I think it's safe to say that the biodiesel van is, unsurprisingly, only a gesture. And with this week's challenge of assembling a "Model" look from Old Navy, I sure would like to hear a little bit about their green practices or lack thereof, their shipping, their materials, and their labour practices! But thanks anyway, Tyra; we do like getting thrown a bone from time to time.

Bones like antismoking messages? Yes, bones just like those. Girls have been shown smoking in previous cycles, and I do assume that as women in a certain industry and of a certain age, it is likely that many of them smoke. But only one girl actually says so: "it's terrible and I hate that I do it." Yep, it's terrible--but there is nothing like a little over-the-top stage makeup to really bring the terribleness home and Take a Stand against something in a very uncontroversial way. Pretty much everyone knows that smoking is bad for you and Tyra is right there, several years into it, making a medium-bold move: no smoking for the Hopefuls. Which is good, and they shouldn't smoke, because that shit will kill them in my opinion. As a photo challenge, though, it was not so great, and it is so early in the cycle that panel is both tough to call and uninteresting. Too bad it's totally drawn out to the point of being painful, with Big T always overexplaining, overanalysing, overeverything. If there is such a thing as Good Tyra, Bad Tyra, then this is definitely the time of Bad Tyra, with the serious eyes and the "the name of the girl who is in the picture in my hands that represents the girl who has the name I am about to call will still be in the running to become America's. Next. Top. Model. Will it be the girl with the *goodthing* who's *limitation gets in the way* or will it be the *limited* girl who *beat that somehow*." But I digress.

Now. When was the last time you remember hearing about Asperger's in the popular media? Right right: school massacres. Non-experts throw the diagnosis around like they're trying to get a box of free kittens off their hands when young people (usually boys) go bonkers and shoot up stuff. So maybe Asperger's isn't all that well understood, by me or by any other casual television viewer. So how unfair is it that this one young woman is pressed into being the Asperger's ambassador to not only the other Hopefuls and the judging panel but also to the entire viewing audience? What a gift, what a gift it is just to be included! Heather already has what I call a Public Body; by virtue of being a woman as well as by virtue of being a model she has a body that others feel free to not only shape for her through their perceptions and opinions but also judge and police when she, inevitably, falls short. Her diagnosis of mild autism moves her deeper into the realm of Public Body, giving everyone but her more power to determine the kind of person she is. Heather is obliged to educate all of them, all of us, each episode about what does and does not limit her, the things she can and does do. The judges get to say all sorts of soft, tolerant things about how brilliant she is and what a great role model for other people with autism. And the other girls get to say broad, offensive things that essentially boil down to "I don't have any problem with her disability, BUT..." and "I'm totally open minded, BUT..." In many edits this episode, it is implied that Heather can hear every sniping thing they say about her, couched as those things are in euphemism or fake magnanimity. The same thing happened last cycle: "I don't have any problem with plus size models, BUT for reasons completely unrelated to her size, seriously, I just don't think Whitney is Top Model material, you know?" The Brain from Yale can say (or imply) what she will about these girls being dumb, but they're smart enough to know how to take another girl down while sounding like generous, giving human beings. And that's a little too close to my middle school experience for comfort, so I'll move on.

Relatedly, I’ll be interested to watch the development of The Brain. Girl has used the word deserve several times to talk about winning the competition, but away from the judges I get two impressions: that she’s entered into this as a gag and that the thing that she’s leaving unsaid is “these other girls are dumb.” Maybe it reflects a bit of my own bias, my own experience, but my version of her thought process goes a little something like this: “I have never been forced to—or been able to—rely *only* on my looks. I am not like these girls because I am smart and they are not smart and the reason they are not smart is because they've been allowed and told to let their looks carry them along.” This dovetails nicely with a little news item from some weeks ago: Miss Teen South Carolina doing a bang-up job of demonstrating why it is dangerous to tell girls that looks are the most important thing in life. When they all tell you to get pretty first, you either don’t get a fair shake at getting smart ("She's pretty so it doesn't matter") or you just don’t get yourself smartened up ("I'm pretty so it doesn't matter"). As a deeper aside, I was a little disturbed at the way the woman was castigated by the public when her stupidity is completely enabled and encouraged by same.

Under the wire, then, with this wrap up of ANTM Cycle 9 Ep 2, ranging through my theory of the Public Body, my distrust of and mild indignation at the "green" fad, and how much I love to disassemble a bit of pop fluff to see what's in the middle.

The middle is more fluff, incidentally. But aren't we having fun? See you tomorrow.

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From our corrections department: Sarah, the burlesque dancer from Bostonland, *is* still on the show. I was wrong last week when I counted her out. Will the girl from Queens have as much holier-than-thou indignation about the burlesquer as she does the exotic dancer? If this week's teasers are any indication, that answer is no, but holy crap, girl loves to put down the stripper's choices!

Uh Oh

A problem with the home computer (whrrrCLICKwhrrCLKCLKCLK *bluescreenofdeath*) will delay our weekly review of America's Next Top Model, in which we place the burden of living publicly with mild autism squarely on the shoulders of one exceptional-looking young woman, and in which it is revealed that it is best to not only not care about what others think of you but also try to find a way to get along (the first of many, many ANTM contradictions).

Thank you for your patience.

In which I blog a pop culture item

America's Next Top Model.

Yes, you heard Nora right, cousins. America's. Next. Top. Model. I've been hooked for years. I think it started when there was a Real Live Lesbian on the show (not a great model, I'll say). After that I just kind of...stuck around. Through the relentless self-focus of Tyra Banks, the totally empty platitudes of guest judge Twiggy, the concerted mugging of Janice Dickinson (lest we forget! The First! Supermodel!), the over-the-top Ms. and Mr. J (up there to different ends, certainly, but still both highly stylized), and the unselfaware, unselfconscious, unworldly, marginally entertaining antics of the Hopefuls--I've been there, cackling away on my couch, drinking beer, yelling, analysing, and trying not to let on to my coworkers that I follow a television show such as this and yes, I would love to talk about my opinions of the ways in which each girl enacts her idea of OBJECT, MODEL, WOMAN and even ADULT.

If you want a first episode recap with names at this point, may I direct you to Television Without Pity? I don't keep track of names until I can tell them apart, and the good lo' knows I cannot yet tell one horse from another (without a program...). To me, most of them have blank faces on which other faces can be writ, wax tablets for the stylus, blank canvas for the paint, empty hangers for the clothes. And isn't that what a lot of modeling is? Being the background frame on which the thing of interest is actually displayed? Apart from the very notable exceptions in high fashion, the bulk of the workaday models are nameless and unheralded. It's a job, I guess.

Now, on to this week's cycle premiere ep.

As with previous cycles, in the first episode we get a stream of "candid" interactions and situations in which the many initial girls size each other up for friendship or competition in completely forced situations like, say, on a cruise ship. And, as with previous cycles, it takes almost no time for the girls to be shown eating and talking about eating. The viewers are shown enough footage of food entering mouths to assure us that most of these girls are okay about food, but the girls' conversations, veering invariably as they do toward the subject of eating disorders, indicate something different to me: these girls are very much not okay about food. Even though they might couch it as competitive trash talk or in an "I'm just playin'" tone, or even "I'm so okay about food that I can crack wise about eating disorders," I see a group of young women who know that what goes in the mouth reflects--badly--on what walks down the runway. A sharp audio edit from tonight's ep gives us a voice, "Does anyone want any more bacon?" up against a few sideways glances from several Hopefuls, as if they're thinking Who does that pig think I am? Her? Of course I want no more bacon, this toast and coffee are plenty for me.

Thirty three Hopefuls begin. First, a quick test of their walk with Ms. J, performing her only function on the show: one, maybe two sessions as a runway coach. This time around, our divine Ms. J (my grandmother's nickname for me when I was a wee pliant thing, by the way) settled for instruction through making fun of the less polished walkers. Not that shame isn't a powerful teaching tool; I just wish Lady J would earn her bread with a more constructive role on the show. One walk, one interview. The interviews are always the real gem: the Hopefuls get to shine or make total fools of themselves. Most of them squeal, and many of them cry. A surprising number, in fact, which is interesting to me. And they open up to Tyra, the Js, and Nigel Barker (often called a "noted fashion photographer") in that way that reality television participants have of speeding through stages of intimacy to arrive immediately at "revelatory confessional" level. This is why people on reality television participants seem more screwed up than our friends and ourselves: they merely tell us much more quickly the things that we would tell each other eventually.

One Hopeful's literal sob story (not to make light) consisted of a confessional coaxed from her with nearly no effort from Tyra: my mother was, like, a crackhead, I was raised by my grandmother, she just passed away. A second unsolicited breakdown was from my favourite Hopeful, the M-name from Alaska. She had a certain Grace Jones masculine-feminine quality about her to which I responded, and a strong face. But oh! I was so let down last cycle by Jael, another less plain Hopeful whose promise petered out, for me, even a little before 50 Cent shoved her into the pool at the party. Anyway, M-Hopeful had lived a very legitimately hard life, to which she confessed in what seemed, again (after editing for television, I'm sure), about the 40th second of being in the presence of Tyra Banks. I did wonder what might lead a 23-year-old, very attractive African American woman to a life in Anchorage, Alaska, but I'd of course included little details like "summer job on a fishing vessel" or "romanticized the Iditarod as a girl and ran away from home to train sled dogs." The truth is less like a Gary Paulsen novel: rape, molestation, hard times. Hard times revealed for two of our black female Hopefuls. And I hope the edit that followed M-Hopeful was a conscious one, and I cannot decide if it was brilliant or crushingly stupid: cut from a life of knocks to a girl--a white girl--who actually says that her life's been so good, she never cries or feels bad. She tries to keep it upbeat. She thinks crying is a waste of time. A few contestants later, a white girl (from Florida? I think this was the one who announced she was from the horse capital of America--and I thought, "oh, Kentucky," but it was Florida) says she feels like she's had, like, a normal life, her parents aren't even divorced. Ah, television: teaching us that black girls have hardscrabble lives and modeling is a ticket out; while white girls are blessed and, in the case of one particularly odious Hopeful, self-proclaimedly "built inside and out" for modeling. It's definitely interesting to me how privilege plays forward like this.

One Hopeful is from Boston, my current locale. In an interesting turn of events, she is a burlesque dancer in her real life. She's accurately sized, and this creates trouble for the judges: she's too big for a fashion model, but just on the small size for a plus size model. Mr. J opines, "wouldn't it be nice if we had a category for real size women? Like, 'Real Size Models.'" This nets him a hi-five from Tyra who definitely says "I'm Real Size!" How nice, this handout from modeling for women like myself: if we get a label, we must be acceptable! This little interaction follows nicely from last cycle's inclusion of two (two!) plus size models, of whom Whitney was the clear best candidate (sorry, Diana! You started strong but failed to evolve!). Tyra is known for her advocacy for more healthily sized fashion models, adding her voice to the chorus in the industry speaking out against rail-thin models worldwide. Note, however, that last cycle's winner, Jaslene, has a body like a one-by-six, and if you don't know what that is, feel free to leave me a comment and I'll be happy to explain some basics of carpentry to you. Ah, America's Next Top Model: if I can't have lip service, I don't want any service at all.
In a moment of "ahem, this is on television?" one of the Hopefuls gives Tyra a little demo of what she does for a living. The Hopeful performs bikini waxes, and is understandably pumped for the opportunity to simulate one on (a fully dressed but still a little too...ah...expository?) Tyra. The words "cheeks" and "spread" are employed, as are the phrases "kitty cat" and "get in there." This disturbs me. The girl is, however, no doubt well groomed. (I'm sure I'll get the opportunity to discuss my feelings on hair before the end of the cycle, so I'll hold off here. I do hope the make-over ep doesn't take long to arrive, however.)

By the end of the show, we have whittled away twenty girls to yield a field of 13 competitors. The girl with the wicked Boston accent is gone, as is the burlesquer. M-Hopeful did not make the second, critical cut; she put on a brave face. The nerd is in, the bitch from Chicago who looks Eritrean to me, the exotic dancer ("I'm not nude! I wear a bikini!"), the waxer, and a handful of other 18 to 23 year old aspirants to the title of America's Next Top Model, placed in proximity with each other to create tension and good television; worshiping at the altar of Tyra Banks (do we burn our bras here, rather than incense?).

We'll talk next week, friends and neighbours. I do hope you'll come along for the ride.