Core Response #2 -- Dan Hawkins

 

Core Response #2

I really appreciated McCarthy’s essay on Neoliberal reality TV, which articulated something that I felt and was disturbed by watching various makeover shows. In the span of time after I graduated college and was at home with my parents and unemployed, not sure of what I was going to do with my future, I watched two seasons of Netflix’s Queer Eye over a period of perhaps three days. At first, I enjoyed the show’s positivity – it was about growth and self-improvement, and I was searching for both at the time. However, by the end of the show, its true philosophy was clear: growth is a makeover and self-improvement is home improvement.

While Queer Eye is more active in its participants’ transformation than Random 1 as described by McCarthy, much remains the same: The “Fab Five” arrive at the home of the episode’s subject in a black SUV, affecting the image of a team of government agents. If McCarthy characterizes “citizen in the neoliberal state as a fundamentally infantile position” (36) then Queer Eye is the epitome of the neoliberal state: for the week’s duration in which the cast conducts their makeover, they are the subject’s adoptive parents. They buy them clothes, bring them to a salon, decide their style, teach them to cook and decorate their house. The participant cedes all control over to the cast.

An episode of Queer Eye follows a static formula of moving the participant from being pathetic to cosmetically dignified. When the cast tours their home, there are cutaway interview clips or offhanded comments remarking on the sad state of the place, the wardrobe, the kitchen, the decorations, etc. The solution to all of these, is, of course, purchasing. In a true neoliberal fashion, the Fab Five improve the life of the episode’s participant by buying clothes and furniture, wrapping them in a veneer of class ascendancy that is untouched by their actual economic status.

The “Theater of Suffering” that McCarthy identifies as being the driving force of reality TV is augmented in Queer Eye, which instead opts for a theater of shame in which the pitiable is gilded. Are the participants emotionally improved after the show? They’ve received a pep-talk and a TV appearance. Are they economically improved? They’ve been gifted expensive tailored clothes and a redesigned home – then they are gone, and the cast moves on to the next “miniature, spectacle-oriented relief effort” (37).