The Makeover: Reality Television and Reflexive Audiences

6. Mirror, Mirror: The Reflexive Self

136 > 137 hierarchies of representation, parsing out necessary shaming from exploitative humiliation in order to affirm the shows’ project: to get the self to see the self as if from outside. In chapter 5, participants used their critiques of the empirical realism of the shows in order to affirm their emotional realism, with the pleasure of identification that came with this. This chapter draws on these themes of reflexivity to consider how the people in this study mobilized the shows as a resource in an extended conversation about what it means to be a self. As I mentioned in my introductory chapter, I was initially surprised by how prevalent references to interiority, the inner self, and the problem of its manifestation in the social world were in the survey and interview data. Returning to the shows, I found many instances of these types of references too, although there were differences among the four shows in terms of the frequency and types of address of an inner self. Audiences drew on the shows’ self-reflexive motifs, narratives , and rituals to cultivate an intimate and intense engagement with the self. Contrary to contemporary scholars of reality television who argue that reality television produces a new mode of rational, self-governing subjectivity, I argue instead that the self-reflexivity encouraged in makeover programming invokes a much older, Romantic model that values interiority, authenticity, and expression. The contemporary self is reflexively produced as a moral and mediated accomplishment, for which makeover shows are one of a number of resources. So fundamental is the idea of an interior self to a Western, contemporary mode of being that we tend to see it as a natural and historically continuous fact: “We in the West still take it for granted that we can talk about an inmost self and conceive of it as an inner world, a sort of private interior realm where we are most at home and most ourselves. Many still find this concept indispensable, as if we human beings would lose sight of some important part of ourselves without it.”1 Yet this sense of the self as having interiority has developed historically . The Greek injunction to “know thyself” was, in Roy Baumeister ’s words, “purely functional,” concerning how to “appraise one’s talents and capacities accurately so as to be able to carry out one’s [civic] duties effectively.”2 In the fourth century Augustine conceived the self as an interior space as a solution to a theological problem: how to know God. Augustine imagined the inner self as a 138 > 139 precipitate a crisis of the self that candidates must resolve through appropriate ways of appraising (and shopping for) the self. Keeping My Door Open inside of Me Many of the people in this study were highly invested in the idea of the interiority of the self that could be investigated and articulated. One example comes from this Starting Over survey respondent, who said that the show reminded her to “keep my door open inside of me [and] know that I am the artist of my life.” Another wrote that “there is generally something about each of the housemates that will make you explore within yourself.” A Biggest Loser participant wanted to nominate her friend for that show because “she is overweight and I think this would give her confidence to deal with issues within.” Another surmised, “When you lose weight you gotta change your insides first.” A What Not to Wear viewer commented that what she liked most about the show was “to see the people make the transformation internally, even if they didn’t mean to. They’re like, ‘Gosh, I’m so surprised.’” Another respondent wrote, “I like that the physical transition tends to affect the person on the inside as well as how they look on the outside. Some of these people don’t know how beautiful they are, or how professional they look.” Queer Eye participants were less forthcoming about the inner self, which may reflect the show’s emphasis on male makeovers and the presumption that, with men, “what you see is what you get.” With the other shows, the frequency with which participants referred to an inner self as a taken-for-granted reference point suggests that makeover shows give a vocabulary for and orientation toward this inner self. A frequently repeated character that Starting Over audiences invoked to describe the inner self...