Eileen DiPofi (Not a core post) #2- The Biggest Loser is a neoliberal fatphobic nightmare!

        The title of Anna McCarthy’s piece for this week—“Reality Television: A Neoliberal Theater of Suffering”—succinctly encapsulates the pernicious essence of reality TV. Her argument that reality television, emergent within the industrial, economic, and discursive shifts of the 1990s, essentially mediates and models neoliberalism’s ideal “government of the self” (17)—and the interdependence of trauma and govermentality—could not help but remind me of The Biggest Loser. If you’re not familiar with the show (lucky you!), a weight-loss competition plays out over the course of each season as contestants are put on starvation-level diets and subjected to hours of intense exercise every day. Beyond the clear anti-fatness and physical abuse the show advocates, perhaps most disturbing is how it does so through a neoliberal rhetoric. As in the shows analyzed by Laurie Oullette and McCarthy, the failure of public service to properly address the needs of the citizen are addressed through the neoliberal myth of self-sufficiency and discipline. Weight loss—the “perfecting” of the individual body—is posited as the solution to problems as disparate as grief from the loss of a loved one, unemployment, housing insecurity, and chronic illness, rather than, say, a living wage or universal healthcare. 

        The Biggest Loser provides the affective excess McCarthy describes in the spectacle of extreme exercise/bodily discipline—which induces blood, sweat, and tears—as well as the interviews with contestants as they narrate their various traumas. The show thus combines both the “punitive” aspects of discipline Laurie Oullette sees in a show like Judge Judy with the “reparative” model McCarthy identifies in Extreme Home Makeover; here, it is the literal body of the contestant which is “rehabilitated” (18). Together, these frameworks attempt to generate affective responses in the spectator, from “disgust” and “pity” to catharsis when traumas are “healed” by the season’s end. Trauma is mined not to address systemic problems or to develop interpersonal solutions, but is redirected towards an individual “solution.” Perhaps most telling is when, in the final episode, we return to the finalists who have gone home for six months to continue to pursue weight loss—the real test, as the show frames it, is whether they can continue to lose weight without the supervision of trainers and dietitians, access to equipment, time off of work, etc. The socioeconomic and cultural factors that make this more difficult for certain contestants are brushed aside—the “failure” to achieve thinness is framed as an entirely personal failing. In the final weigh-ins, the juxtaposition between chiseled and fat bodies throw the show’s thesis into stark relief: one’s corporeal shape is a direct reflection of one’s self-discipline and regulation, and the “failure” to achieve a thin body is reason makes one undeserving of the full benefits of neoliberal subjecthood. Through thinness, the contestants earn their access to proper treatment in the workplace, housing and financial security, happiness, etc. The utilization of both spectacles of corporeal punishment and pseudo-psychological rhetoric in this televisual enterprise exemplifies the relationship McCarthy posits between govermentality and trauma.