I don't watch t.v. at home; we do have one, but I'm not habituated to watching t.v. That is, growing up, t.v. watching was forbidden, and enforced in the form of a 10" black and white t.v. without cable. The only station I can recall with any clarity is pbs, my mother watching Faulty Towers after having sent us to bed. My bedroom was downstairs, and I would sneak out of bed and lean against the door-frame, listening. All grown up, I have a somewhat fractious relationship to t.v. I don't have the patience for most programs and don't really get the narrative lines of nearly most sit-coms or serials. On the other hand, I will set my alarm to wake up in time to watch World Cup games or the Tour de France.
When traveling alone, everything changes. Something about the dead air in hotel rooms impels me to turn on the t.v. immediately. The illusion of life.
A compelling illusion, I find, as I sit in a semi-trance watching "Going Tribal" and "What Not to Wear." Probably these shows were not intended to be watched in tandem, but that is how it happens for me (see above, in re not having patience). I'm struck by their similarity: both shows tap into the viewer's desire to voyeuristically observe people's most intimate details--the content's of one's closet, the minutiae of tribal daily life. This is a capitalist exchange that depends on the viewers' complicit, if unacknowledged, participation. In the preface to each installment of "Going Tribal," Bruce, the pseudo-anthropoligist explains that he pays the designated tribe an undisclosed amount of money for the privilege of filming them. Similarly, the fashion victim in "What Not to Wear" is given a $5000 Visa card in exchange for exposing the contents of her closet and her psyche to the catty barbs of the Stacey and Clinton. The participants get paid to provide the intimate content packaged for the viewers' eager consumption. Simple capitalist model, wouldn't you say?
But something more insidious is going on in both of these shows. For what pasty Britisher* Bruce promises the viewers is the ability to imagine themselves in his shoes as he "goes native." Just like Bruce, we too can consume the illusion of "being" a member of a tribe, replete with the initiation processes, drug use, nudity, and violent fighting. That these are all taboos in Western society, is, of course, not lost on the producers; they're banking on the exoticism of the forbidden to entrance their viewership. And so certain is it that taboo draws the viewers, rather than any authentic experience of "being" native, that the producers lose little sleep over the Bruce's sham participatory anthropology. It's not just that Bruce imagines he can "know" a community after coasting on the surface of their lives, playing at hunting and stick fighting and interjecting earnest asides to the camera. And, given Bruce's language ineptitude (just watching him butcher French as he attempted to communicate with the tribes in Western Africa whose first language was clearly not French made me want to clutch my head and moan), I have zero faith that he could possibly "know" anything about the people whose lives he purports to share. What is galling about this show, is the presumed "innocence" of the natives: that is, that they aren't intentionally and in full knowledge giving Bruce the "tourist's package," the bits and pieces of their lives that they know, thanks to more than a century of white men imposing themselves as "specialists" to "analyze" the content of their existence, are of interest to these white interlopers. But the producers will never acknowledge that, because that illusion is the most compelling one of all.
And it's the presumed innocence of the fashion victims on "What Not to Wear" that gets my goat too. It's not just that the show prescribes an arbitrary, inane, extremely narrow and completely insipid image of "correct" fashion (And though I'm not a long-time viewer, I'm willing to bet that most of the fashion "victims" are women, and, hence, this "correct" image is really just another way to confine a woman's preferred (personal, outsize, chosen, comfortable, sexy, colorful, loud, flexible, creative, whatever) style.). But what is infuriating is that the show presumes that the women dress the way they do because they don't
know how to: for each time a fashion victim justifies her choice, for whatever fully rational reason she provides, she is dismissed as being damaged goods (she has deep-seated hang-ups) or just dumb (she's ignorant to what is
truly fashionable). In other words, women choose not to look like Barbie because they don't
know better; their choices are not rational, but derive from psychological problems or ignorance.
So what this capitalist model really looks like to me is: under the guise of empathy (I the viewer get to view the intimate details of another person's life and experience our similarity), what is being consumed is a free pass to Be Superior. Go Western Culture!
*I don't know for certain that Bruce is British. I am appallingly bad at identifying accents.
