2009 PCA/ACA National Conference: My Paper

The paper, and the slideshow.

Things you should know before you read the paper: The paper presumes a lot of its audience -- not on a theoretical basis, fortunately, but particularly in terms of social politics, so it might be more productive to think of the paper's use of the first-person plural as the royal we.

Things you should know before you view the slideshow: DON'T adjust the volume -- I deliberately decreased the volume on the Comfort and Will solos so that the audience could hear me while I talked over the solos.

Some things that couldn't fit into the time constraints but which I can't let evaporate into metaphysical nothingness.

---

I focus on ANTM and SYTYCD (I originally wanted to include Survivor as well) because of how their formats dictate their respective narrative effectivenesses, which in turn determine how viewers respond to each show. ANTM is an edited show, meaning that months pass after shooting the program before it actually is broadcast, an interim of time which allows its editors to develop narratives of specific, featured contestants. That is, the editors use footage of the contestants in action and recounting their experiences to construct their personae on the show. As a result, certain contestants -- invariably villains -- have been so strongly narrativized and characterized that there's a pretty solid consensus among viewers that that contestant is the one to hate; we all hate Clark, for example.

But SYTYCD, which proceeds in (near-)real time, doesn't have the same lead time to narrativize its dancers; instead, the show has to rely on the interview packages, brief rehearsal footage, and judges' critiques, which are, in my mind, the most important of all, not because they're effective though. Judges' critiques on SYTYCD often take on some ham-fisted, inelegant attempt at narrativization -- Ivan came of age, Danny's arrogance gave way to humility, etc. -- and because we're being told these characteristics instead of being shown them, these attempts don't convince us quite like edited reality programs can.

For instance, in the second episode of ANTM, we supposedly saw ShaRaun making stank comments about Isis during Isis' photoshoot, "or at least the editing makes us think so by adding a terrible overdub to a shot of the girls' backs where we don't see any lips moving" -- in other words, we might suspect that ShaRaun may have fallen victim to dreaded Reality TV Editing. However, when we see her say stuff like, "Isis is over the top. America's next top model is not going to be a drag queen. I'm sorry, it's not," or "This is the funniest thing that's in my head, her trying to be sexy. Reality is, she's a man," then we're happy to conclude that she doesn't need the specter of reality tv producers to make her look bad, she's perfectly happy to do it herself. The key, of course, is us seeing evidence that directly supports how she is characterized on the show.

On the other hand, we rarely see anything so unfiltered on SYTYCD; instead, the dance program only parcels out heavily mediated glimpses into the contestants' non-performance behavior, and any narrativistic elements are usually second- or third-hand talk from the judges. Thus, the show usually stumbles when it tries to manipulate narratives (which the reality genre all but necessitates), which in turn makes a lot of people react against them. Consequently, you see a lot less consensus on whom to hate on SYTYCD -- people hated on Twitch, Will, Joshua, Mark, and hey guess what, they were the top four guys as determined by voters, which means that a lot more people loved them too -- and ultimately, what contributed to hate often involved idiosyncratic biases, pet peeves, and similarly capricious factors.

I would've loved to work in some of the comments from the folks who chimed in with what/who drove you up the wall, from poor deportment (whining, entitlement, racial insensitivity), to falling on one side or the other of the classical/hip-hop divide, and so on. What seems like the commonest reason to hate, though, was when contestants consistently got more praise than we thought they deserved. Disproportionate praise short-circuits our notions of justice and individual worth; if a contestant gets disproportionate praise, then we identify some reason or value that elicited the praise and which we happen to undervalue or outright disagree with, and if it's getting big-upped, then we think bad values are outperforming our own values.

So we have consensus on ANTM, and fragmented and diffuse opinions on SYTYCD, yet despite how differently people react to their contestants, both shows followed the same moral calculus articulated by schadenfreude.

---

I had something I wanted to call the Slingshot Effect that illustrated the dynamics of schadenfreude, violated desert, and justice that I couldn't develop due to time and space, but it goes something like this: imagine a reality contestant who is metaphysically tied to an elastic length of the Rubber of Justice and who starts the competition at a morally neutral position, neither outrageous nor commendable. But every time she does something disagreeable, she pulls the Rubber of Justice towards the Injustice end; the more evil she perpetrates, the more she stretches her band and the more we hate her, at which point, one of two things happens.

One, she could get her comeuppance, i.e. the slingshot is released and flings her away from Injustice and into the realm of Justice. Accordingly, the farther she goes towards injustice, the greater the recovery of justice (and our pleasure) when she gets her just deserts -- call this the First Law of Reality TV Thermodynamics: our hate is a direct function of how much contestants violate our notions of justice, and the longer they stay in the competition, the more they get to defy justice and earn our resentment, sometimes simply by still being in the competition (i.e. "so-and-so should've been eliminated weeks ago").

A perfect example of the First Law is Robin from the first cycle of ANTM, whose performances in the challenges were consistently dire, rude, or simply non-existent, and who behaved with sanctimonious and venal zeal to the other contestants, and whose figure and age really weren't suited for modeling, and who yet made it as far as the top 4, where she certainly didn't belong in an objective, performance-based estimation. Of course, when justice was restored, it was restored with spectacular relish. The more despicable a contestant, the more spectacular their downfall, and the happier we are.

Or two, she evades punishment and thereby stretches the Binds of Justice so far that they break; that is, she ends up winning the damn competition. (See Whitney from the 10th cycle of ANTM, or Richard Hatch from the first season of Survivor, and so on.) Call this the First Corollary of the First Law: the longer a contestant stays in the competition (thereby stoking our hate more and more, see the First Law), the greater the chance she has of winning it. The First Corollary then is the ever-present shadow to the First Law and gives the moral struggle the precarious edge and danger that makes the stakes seem real and therefore thrilling.

Indie rating: Yeah Yeah Yeahs – "Shame and Fortune"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 11) - 11x12 "Good Times and Windmills"

It's that time in the cycle again where my favorite goofy girl on ANTM is penalized for being goofy. I actually expected Marjorie to be eliminated after what would've been an atrocious CoverGirl commercial, and even though we were all spared (or denied the pleasure of ogling) that disaster, and even though by now anyone who's watched the show for a couple cycles and been exposed to the smallest dollop of Top Model discourse knows that carving out a modeling career doesn't necessarily involve winning this competition (e.g. we've only seen three former winners on the "Top Model in Action" spots they show during commercials), I'm still disappointed when my favorite contestant invariably runs into the irrational caprice of Tyra and company. But why should I? She has as good (probably better) a chance at working in the real world getting eliminated early than she does if she won the competition. At a certain level, I probably just want to see as much of Marjorie on tv before she fades away from mainstream pop culture. But at a more aesthetically fundamental level, I think that reality shows so effectively convince us (or is it just me?) of their own realities (related to but ultimately distinct from the real world) even as we consciously remind ourselves of how constructed and artificial they are.

In the specific case of ANTM, Tyra's world operates under its own morality where winning is ostensibly and inextricably tied to individual worth (no matter the platitudes she offers the departing girl each week), so if you're eliminated, you're deficient in some way; of course in the real world we know that we're all winners. However, ANTM presents such an engrossing Reality that try as we can, viewers can't always rationalize how we approach the show -- I might know that Tyra has kicked off girls who've been taking off in the industry, but that doesn't mean I wanted to see Marjorie eliminated any time before the final episode or that I wouldn't have been thrilled to see her win simply because ANTM is a different, quasi-fictional world. In a dramatic sense, Marjorie's tv existence depended entirely on how much Tyra liked her.

Anyway, some useless handicapping: Sam isn't sufficiently high-fashion and is too bubbly, which reads as unsophisticated, leaving the top two to be McKey Brittany and Analeigh. Analeigh seems a lot more comfortable in front of a camera, which will give her the edge over Brittany (plus, Analeigh has come off like a saint -- saving Marjorie's virtue, offering moral support when Isis was taking her shots).

Indie rating: The Raveonettes - "Aly, Walk With Me"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 11) - 11x03 "The Ladder of Model Success"

Good news for those of you who hate me: I'm helping out someone who likes SpongeBob and The Wire, and my project is likely to take up all my free time, so for the immediate future I won't be able to spend much time blogging. That said, I've already got a few lingering thoughts and lazy photoshopped effects to share for the non-discerning haters.

---

Remember what I said last week?

Clark, meanwhile, will probably settle in as the designated villain and as such will happily accumulate all the bad karma that's due her, and once she gets eliminated, we'll all cheer -- unless Elina has by that time seduced Clark into some decadent tolerance.

That didn't take long.

---

On the subject of Hannah and her confrontation with the scary ethnics, I had in mind a longer rant on how inefficacious the term "racist" tends to be in a debate, a rant which would culminate in a hilarious joke about how in a post-racial world, this isn't how we resolve differences, which would disappoint Tyra, and by extension, Oprah and Obama... but I've already made that joke elsewhere, and moreover, I don't have the spare time to give much attention it would require.

---

Finally:




Indie rating: Stereolab - "Daisy Click Clack"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 11) - 11x01, 11x02 "The Notorious Fierce Fourteen," "Top Model Inauguration"

America's Next Top Model is back, and it's bringing more of the same than ever yeaaahhh!




I mean, it's the same as it ever was, better ever so more. Maybe you've been paying closer attention to me and noticed when it stopped being fresh (cycle 2?) and became comfortable self-parody, and this cycle isn't shy about laying on Tyra's brand of excess from the first episode with the pointless Star Trek ripoff, Jay's ridiculous hair (if you ever wanted to know what an orange person looked like when he's melting...), and forcing the girls (the semifinalists, no less!) to work out their open-mouthed bad-acting chops/being amazed at Tyra et al's amazing transporter/post-production editing technology.

Excess even reaches the makeup of the cast, which is already swelling the Top Model's usual quota with misfits and stank bitches. Like, in the space of two episodes, ShaRaun was building an excellent body of work to establish herself as the cycle's villain, yet Tyra was comfortable enough with Clark that she could easily afford to lose the erstwhile Brittney at the earliest possible convenience.

Actually, ShaRaun's elimination shines a light on the show's moral calculus. All reality programs have a moral dimension which most commonly takes the form of who deserves what. For example, ShaRaun seemed to deserve her elimination in large part for her nasty comments about Isis -- karmic retribution, if you will. However, her elimination probably didn't actually result from reality karma since everything we get to see is edited together well after it actually happened and to which the judges presumably aren't privy. More likely, ShaRaun sucked independent of her moral deportment but she also happened to be caught on camera saying a lot of heinous things. Subsequently, the editors decided to tacitly and retroactively justify ShaRaun's elimination by showing her in all of her offensiveness. Clark, meanwhile, will probably settle in as the designated villain and as such will happily accumulate all the bad karma that's due her, and once she gets eliminated, we'll all cheer -- unless Elina has by that time seduced Clark into some decadent tolerance.

Clear on the other side of likability -- well, as I measure likability -- we've got Marjorie, McKey, Isis, and Hannah, in roughly that descending order, and no surprise, each one is some kind of social misfit (or an outsider in Hannah's case) which explains why I've instantly marked them as this cycle's favorites.

Marjorie
French, short haired, cute, and crippingly awkward? Hello, crush!

McKey
I hope that's her mom's maiden name because otherwise it's entirely stupid. But despite that, and despite what looks like some questionable fighting form, and despite her tragic haircut and the crooked set of her mouth, and the likelihood that she'll never figure out how to pose, my god she's gorgeous. Bonus points for her big heart and open mind accepting Isis as a housemate.

Isis
The biggest problem for me is that she's kind of boring; I don't doubt that Tyra has every intent of making a patient saint out of her, thereby draining Isis of any personality.

Hannah
I'm willing to overlook her provincialist bigotry re: Isis because Hannah's a product of actual, literal provincialism (oh god, she'll vote for Palin, won't she?)... and also because she's absurdly adorable.





Strangely enough, half of my favorites have seriously busted teeth. How far I've come since the toothy days of Jenah... In any case, they're misfits, one and all, which is sort of a microcosmic regress of the reality genre: where the show itself takes a small segment of the population some place hyperreal/unreal/reality real, I usually mark out the weirdos and freaks and mentally populate them on my own private Island of Misfit Toys, like this was high school again or something.

So between the villains and the misfits, we have the nondescript non-entities, into which I'm including Sheena, who disappointed me immediately: perhaps she didn't want to rock any boats especially because the contestants were all getting to know each other, but I wish she would have corrected the one girl who asked if she was oriental.


Indie rating: Mogwai - "Danphe and the Brain"

America's Next Top Model (Cycle 11)

Why am I the last person to hear about ANTM news? Wherein one contestant is transgendered. I actually considered/wondered about applying to the show once, but now that I'm getting on in years, and because the show already has its token tranny, I think I'd better look for a real job. Still, Isis has got my hopes up for this upcoming cycle even though my biased favorites (e.g. Lauren, Victoria, Heather, etc.) heading into the competition always get shafted, aka I never learn.

Indie rating: Stereolab - "Fractal Dream of a Thing"