What I find to be so enlightening about Brenda Weber’s examples in the chapter “Makeover Nation” within her larger book, Makeover TV: Selfhood, Citizenship, and Celebrity, are all the different ways that a “makeover” can manifest itself. There are lifestyle makeovers, with memorable shows such as Deal or No Deal and Who Wants To Be A Millionaire. Physical makeovers can be seen on shows such as What Not To Wear or Extreme Makeover. And then, there are makeover’s of the more abstract kind, perhaps a variation of the lifestyle genre; American Idol and Extreme Makeover: Home Edition being notable examples of this. Weber zero’s in on American Idol as a specific example to use within the vernacular of makeovers by saying it:
“documents and contributes to a process of transformation that results in euphoric outcomes coded with celebrity and since the self acceptance rhetoric built into the crafting of the American Idol persona so fully corresponds to makeover logics, I consider it a significant makeover text, particularly in its enunciation of citizenry values predicated on a shared understanding of the American Dream.”
So basically what she’s saying is that the American Dream represents the epitome of Neoliberal Ideals. The everyone is in it for themselves and that’s terrific! mentality. The quintessential pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps rhetoric that conveniently leaves out the multiplicities of people who may not have these metaphorical “boots” to begin with. Distinctly American.
So with this in mind, I would like to put this relationship between the American Dream and Neoliberalism into conversation with our current cultural obsession of personal profiling, and who’s a greater offender to this than the good old dating app?! And, as not to get overwhelmed by the thousands of dating apps that now exist, we’ll just stick to the O.G: Tinder.
What Television has promoted for so long through these makeover programs has now fallen to us, the average citizen, on a much more individual level. We create a dating profile that incorporates six photos of our choosing and a small space to write something about ourselves, ranging from what we like to eat, hobbies we engage in in our spare time, all the way down to what types of people we would prefer to not “swipe right” on while we attempt to connect.
The space to advocate for yourself and showcase who you really are, to those who are supposedly interested in you, is left almost entirely up to the photos you have chosen to represent the best of you, and basically nothing else. Tinder and its dating app companions thrives on superficiality, not on personality. A classic tale of “I like what I like because I have preferences,” which ultimately predicates racial and gender biases, allowing us to continue living and profiting off of our prejudices. It simple reeks of Neoliberalism.
Another attribute of Neoliberalism is its incorporation of capitalism into the structure of functionality. The evolution within dating applications is the option to pay Tinder for more opportunities to “Superlike” someone. Or, maybe you accidentally swiped left on that fuckable face who just might be your soulmate. Well, no worries, you can pay to erase that mistake. Just make sure you swipe right this time. This incorporation of capitalism into this type of citizenry and constant remaking of self assumes a lot of agency and alienates anyone who does not possess it.
This kind of Neoliberalism, attached to our historic understanding of the false equality of the American Dream, equates self-worth and self-work as congruent with one another. Makeover culture and the agency that it requires in order to be successful, fuckable, beautiful, rich, and any other variation of these values provides only one solution: that the more self-work you partake in, the more valuable you will become.
It’s an exhausting experience to engage in such an unending cycle of self-work. There are significant cultural ramifications that arise from this. There will always be more that can be improved upon, always more of the self to correct and edit. And the delusion of self that makeover culture instills in all of us is that we are bettering ourselves as a whole, when in fact we are actually just engaging in a systemic devaluing of who we actually are. We believe that the harder we work on ourselves the closer we are to achieving the final product we seek. When, in actuality, the final product is unachievable, the work will never be enough, and our worth will never not be directly correlated to the work that we did not partake in. Satisfaction becomes impossible and a culture of dissatisfaction with the self becomes our reality.
