Goop and the Nefarious Glamour of Capitalist Pseudoscience
By Olivia Crandall
Few people would describe Gwyneth Paltrow as chill. But in the new Netflix series The Goop Lab, the actress-turned-lifestyle-guru and her staff of witchy yet incredibly attractive believers act as missionaries for a new era of devil-may-care wellness. Paltrow and team go to great lengths to show that they’re an easy-going bunch, eager to encourage curiosity and action around all that ails us. However, this lackadaisical nature frames something darker. Look behind the facade of girlish fun, and you’ll see Goop for what it is: at best, a bastion of American corporate capitalism, and at worse, a fast track to embracing pseudoscience.
In each of the six episodes, the Goop team explores a different modality, interviewing “experts” and participating in various experimental workshops. Gwyneth herself is typically back at the ranch, watching in awe and shaking her head as the crazy kids go on “ammmmmmazzzzzing” adventures. She jokes about everything from her “baby daddy” to her diet of “caffeine, no sleep, and alcohol,” and even makes quips like “this skirt is inappropriately short for someone old enough to be testing their biological age.” The camera pans down to reveal her star-covered Stella McCartney platforms which scream, “we may cost $895, but you can wear us anywhere.”
In this way, Paltrow has gone to painstaking lengths to prove that, while the Goop team may be a bit “wacky,” they’re still totally chill. Sure, they might be on a perpetual cleanse, but they’re also down to take shrooms. As if to solidify their “wellness, but make it cool” vibe, the team even released a candle called “This Smells Like My Vagina,” which sold out immediately. The entire incident felt less like luxury good scarcity and more like an attempt at ripping off the spirit of the Supreme brick saga of 2016, bucking convention with a wink, a nod, and a dare to customers to dabble in branded absurdity for the sake of clout. On a recent episode of Late Night with Seth Meyers, Paltrow described the candle’s name as “really funny to us, but also a little bit punk rock.” It’s easy to scoff at such a claim — still, maybe Paltrow did, in fact, see the stunt as a way to reject the narrative of female shame by embracing vaginal funk. But at the same time, the candle — which retailed for $75 and contained notes of geranium, bergamot, and cedar — is ultimately part of the same capitalist establishment that the notion of “punk rock” inherently rejects.
For as much as The Goop Lab bemoans our spiritual isolation and lack of agency, it refuses to grapple with the actual root causes of these issues. Perhaps this is because to wrestle with the root of the anxiety, exhaustion, disconnection, etc. discussed by nearly every Goop guinea pig would force Gwyneth and team to reckon with their own contributions to the insidious nature of capitalism.
Marxist thinkers have long understood the connection between capitalist culture and social isolation. Marx mused that capitalism disintegrated all vestiges of tradition or culture, uprooting communities so they could constitute a ready supply of factory workers. Over a century later, philosopher Guy Debord would argue that the advent of modern media created a society of spectacle, wherein images from the dominant culture hinder our ability to understand even ourselves. Modern scholars, too, have echoed this notion, like psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist who noted, “capitalism and consumerism, ways of conceiving human relationships based on little more than utility, greed, and competition, came to supplant those based on felt connection and cultural continuity.”
In the first episode of The Goop Lab, one of the leaders of the psychedelic trip diagnoses our society with a general “spiritual sickness,” one in which we lack connection with anything other than ourselves. Of course, there is no subsequent, deeper exploration as to the source of that sickness. The solution offered is not collective, but merely individualist: slurp down some magic mushrooms. This is the general theme of The Goop Lab, where staffers take it upon themselves to try personal cures for societal problems. They’ll come to workshops hoping to cure things like extreme work stress, a cultural obsession with youth as career currency, and anxiety as a baseline state. By the end of the episode, even the token skeptics are shown the light: with the right experimental modality (and the privilege and financial means to stick with it), control over body and soul are infinitely possible.
But as Goop staffers churn out newsletters, gift guides, and even the in-house apparel line G. Label, they are trapped on an unsatisfying treadmill in the pursuit of self-actualization. If only their article “How to Stop Being So Hard on Yourself” would get more clicks and their Lana Tulle Dress would sell out, they could finally be recognized for their merits — their monetary rewards then filtered back into the Goop multiverse in the form of a three-day anti-aging guided fast or perhaps a $2,500 private energy healing session with John Amaral. Although Paltrow herself may repeat the mantra, “the tenets of wellness are typically free,” at Goop, it’s never about straightforward wellness. The goal is taking full charge of one’s life — the perpetual race toward the forever-moving target of self-actualization.
In a world where we can’t control much, The Goop Lab offers a fantasy, an alternate reality where we can fully control our bodies. Paltrow herself embodies all the good that a pile of money, endless resources, and a bottomless well of masochistic self-control can have on your body. Unfortunately, the Netflix show can’t serve such privilege to the masses. It can, however, grant us free entry to an endless buffet of possibility, one where the closer you get to the carving station, the deeper you fall down the hole of pseudoscience. Much has been written about the “on-ramp” format of the show, which begins with an episode grounded in fairly solid science about the potential of psychedelics like mushrooms and MDMA to treat conditions such as depression, anxiety, and PTSD. From there, it moves on to breathing techniques paired with cold therapy (a bit questionable) and female pleasure (please, someone give Betty Dodson her own show). Then, things take a sharp turn, trading refreshing discussions about the female orgasm for energy healers/exorcists, psychic mediums, and the power of starving yourself to enable your body to “get rid of bad [cancer and autoimmune] cells.”
But even the early episodes reveal the show’s penchant for taking reasonable scientific theory to crazy conclusions. For example, in episode 2, “Cold Comfort,” Wim Hof begins by saying “cold water [and breathing techniques are] a great way to deal with stress,” a claim that few would argue with. He then proceeds to extrapolate like mad, claiming that the Wim Hof method can be used to cure autoimmune disease and paralysis. Even with the in-depth “talk to your doctor” disclaimer that boldly appears at the beginning of every episode, The Goop Lab highlights just how quickly science can be transformed into fantasy. And given the fact that we’re living in a society exhausted by the daily demands of corporate capitalism, these signs of hope become even more insidious. We’re so hungry for a cure for our alienation, it’s easy to look past the questionable proof, order a $249 cleanse kit, and coast down the slippery slope of pseudoscience, all with what started off as a relatively noble quest to regain our humanity.
Ultimately, most real problems are rooted in deeply-entrenched social structures that even the most expensive energy workshops could not possibly heal. But if there’s one moral we can glean from The Goop Lab, it’s that curiosity should be encouraged. (Though, ideally, that curiosity would lead us less down a rabbit hole of pseudoscience and more towards the actual causes of our societal alienation.) Oh, and that we’d all probably benefit from taking a hand mirror to our genitals and truly looking inward.
