So time functions in this reality show as a way of distorting realism. On one show, for example, a participant, Anthony, overtaxed his body and passed out. In clips leading up to a commercial break, the viewer sees him fall several times.
Anthony is recovered in all of 20 seconds and soon shown headed for lasik eye surgery. On Extreme Makeover, time and pain are ever present, yet easily managed through the powers of plastic surgery. And even here, the promise is not that psychological pain will be eliminated, but that it will be alleviated. Time still passes but it signifies differently on the body.
The same holds true for pain. The teasing, the sneers, the jokes may give way to psychological disorientation and potential alienation from friends, but this new pain is better than the old.
Extreme Makeover largely takes up an opposite view, celebrating the idea that the good makeover is the everlasting makeover. There is a sort of stability built into this makeover that both ups the ante and seems to satisfy the objective of doing makeovers at all—the body is fixed, no longer able to be transgressive or resistant. In this configuration, ugliness becomes a social danger that validates forcible intervention.
The body still erupts, resists, and operates according to a set of codes or no codes at all that are baffling and largely mysterious.
In some ways, then, the tacit promise to perform the impossible, to solidify the liquidity of the body, reminds us of our anxieties more than it soothes them. This anxiety, in turn, serves a powerful role in legitimating and making the viewer desire beauty systems that promise a cessation of worry. Their interiority comes from the sadness and lack of self-esteem that result from emotional trauma. But this relentless emphasis on surfaces also effaces a whole spectrum of complexity.
For instance, what about the actual health of these subjects? The persistent attention to surfaces prevents the possibility of both physiological and psychological interiority. Indeed, though Extreme Makeover occasionally lists a psychologist, Dr. Catherine R. Selden, in its credits, she has, thus far, only once been depicted on screen. For part two, enter Dr. In his down-home Texas way, Dr. Phil underscored the need to make attitude and life-style adjustments in order to assure the success of weight loss.
Indeed, that our psychological problems stem from our aesthetic anxieties? If the outside depends upon the inside, but the inside exists separate from the outside, we are left with incompatible polarities.
Phil is advocating. It is clear, however, that this discourse of inside and outside works to underscore a desire for clear ontological separation between outside and inside at the same time as it collapses the difference between the two. In fact, Dr. Phil says, as if to prove this point. Anthony reverses Dr. The discursive reinforcement of ontological separation heightens the sense that their confusion is frightening. Similarly, the horror that accompanies this threatened breakdown of distinctions, what Julia Kristeva has termed the abject, leads inExtreme Makeover to a full-fledged reliance on and preoccupation with images.
Indeed, it could well be that beauty offers the most direct link to that long-lost and idealized past where the subject was whole and the body stable. What could be more appealing? Though class as cued by grammar, teeth problems, jobs, etc. The underlying crisis is one of beauty and the dire consequences that befall those who do not possess it. The motivation is not to become a lady or gentleman but to alter the signs of the body so that it will be read as what the culture deems most beautiful, a movie star.
Indeed, the fascination with movie star looks in itself functions as a legitimating device—see, the show seems to be saying, celebrities are the people we are most interested in and who must be happiest. Indeed, perhaps to heighten the sense that the participants are the actual celebrities of the show, Extreme Makeoverdid away with its celebrity host, Sissy Biggers, early in season one.
Only a few male subjects have grasped the figurative reigns of that carriage to drive themselves—in one case John showed up at his reveal party in a Lamborghini, a move much more in keeping with James Bond than with Prince Charming It may be one gesture toward gender inclusivity to privilege movie stars over royalty, since celebrity surely incorporates masculine fantasy and American upward-mobility more than do fairy tales.
The fact thatExtreme Makeover features real people undergoing dramatic and envied change means that local papers and television affiliates circulate the makeover stories as a way of generating home-town interest. Since ideals are constructed around the logic of desiring what is statistically least possible, the more plastic surgery brings beauty to the masses, the less beauty signifies as privilege. It seems, then, that the process of turning average people into celebrated beauties takes away the cachet of that beauty.
In order for beauty to mean anything, a good many other people in the world have to be un-beautiful. In order for celebrity to signify, the majority of people have to be unknown.
Even normalizing plastic surgery would not do this. The ideal and rarity of living in a beautiful body is still perfectly intact. Equally intact, however, is something that this prime time programming very much influences—the sense that we must be aware of and concerned about appearance.
Whether scrutinized for our freakish ugliness or admired for our glamorous appearance, we are all objects of the gaze, intensely self conscious that there are seeing eyes or cameras on us at all time, even when those eyes are our own. By rectifying the distance between social ideals and lived experience, Extreme Makeover proposes to make lives happier and participants more powerful.
Why should biology determine beauty? Why should the powerless always remain without power? How is power imagined? For power, being the nebulous thing that it is, quite often evades easy quantification. As with Amy, a form of alteration that strikes the subjects as significant is a new feeling of wholeness. So now, I just feel complete. Again, we see the articulation of inside and outside positions that fuse together, overwritten by a pervading sense of normalcy.
So, for instance, a woman police detective who undergoes an extreme makeover tells Oprah that a younger man had made a pass at her. I had a lovely smile and would I like to go to lunch? They alleged there were uneven floors, bare plaster on the walls, and even a window that was inexplicably painted over.
That was just some of their litany of complaints. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation.
Janaki Jitchotvisut. This woman had to leave the room and cry after "Trading Spaces" destroyed the one thing she and her husband asked them not to touch. It looked like an entire fabric store was placed in a bedroom on "Your Home in Their Hands. This bedroom for a teen looked more like a room for a toddler. This couple's historic home did not get the TLC-treatment they hoped for.
Loading Something is loading. Email address. Half of the respondents liked their overall appearance but would just like help with creating a simple makeover. Her virtual makeover and potential real makeover have been topic for many heated debates. Some people have been cheering on the idea of a makeover while others are adamantly opposed to changing a single hair.
This survey found that three quarters of the respondents thought she should have a makeover and that having a makeover DID NOT in any way detract from who she is. Daily Makeover on Twitter. Daily Makeover on Facebook. With more than 4 million unique visitors, Daily Makeover enables users to see themselves wearing numerous hairstyles, cosmetics and accessory options to create their best looks, which can be saved, printed or emailed.
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