I don't own a television (one of many area men I approximate), but with the advent of Hulu now my wife and I watch an episode of some reality cooking show nearly every evening after the kids go to bed. I've seen nearly every episode of the Gordon Ramsay vehicles Master Chef and Hell's Kitchen. In both shows twenty or so people compete with one another in inventively designed cooking contests. One loser is thrown off every episode until the lone survivor emerges victorious at the end of the season. The ginned up drama is fun and there's lots of interesting food.
Recently though Ramsay's schtick has started to wear thin. Before throwing people out at the end of every episode of Hells Kitchen, he makes two or three people tell him why they deserve to stay in Hell's Kitchen. What follows are desperate platitudes about how they are a fighter and getting better all of the time. It's infantalizing. Then Ramsay strings it out dramatically, telling one person to step forward and starting a sentence where you might think one thing will happen and then ending it by telling them the opposite. It's frankly obnoxious. And of course he yells at and belittles the contestants in the manner of an abusive father starting to lose his temper. And nearly every episode has the obligatory bits where the contestants gush at length about what a wonderful person this obnoxious man is. It's Orwellian.
Consider so-called "structural unemployment." Whenever the news media lets on that monetary and fiscal policy are structured so that unemployment does not get below 6% (and remember, this doesn't even include the imprisoned and those not looking for work) the reporter makes the risible claim that the number needs to be this high because a healthy system will have people in between work as they move on to better jobs. But even freshman economics textbooks let out the dirty secret: structural unemployment must be at 6% because if it gets lower there is a danger of wage inflation being higher than the return on capital. And this kind of engineering has obviously worked at an macroeconomic level in the United States and most of Europe as real wages have stagnated for over thirty years now (when you add this to the lower tax rate on capital gains, you get something positively sadistic).
So we have a system that creates a reserve army of unemployed to keep wages down, and simultaneously we have these meritocratic norms by which you must have done something horribly wrong if you are unemployed and/or poor (does academic employment and the way we treat one another up and down our hierarchies work in these ways?). This drives a lot of people crazy.
As now, as much as I like the cooking and drama, it's impossible not to watch Ramsay's reality shows as anything but an almost perfectly distilled instance of the reigning ideology and its material base. If you haven't seen Hell's Kitchen, check out an episode on Hulu after reading this and it will be very obvious. Also reflect that all of the contestants work in the food industry, where the hours are long and pay and benefits very bad for all but a very few superstar chef/owners/celebrities. So these shows are a microcosm of a microcosm.
Strangely, Iron Chef America reflects a very different possible social contract. In this show a single cook challenges one of the Iron Chefs, and they have one hour to cook five courses with a mystery ingredient unveiled at the beginning of the show. Like all reality shows, it's a bit of a work, with stuff off camera contradicting what's happening on camera. But the contradictions here are very interesting. In story-line the challenger and Iron Chef are supposed to be seeing the mystery ingredient right at the beginning of the hour. But they clearly aren't, as their respective teams start cooking immediately with no communication whatsoever. In common with many cooking shows such as Chopped, in story-line they are supposed to stop when the timer stops and serve the unfinished dishes if they didn't manage to finish. But unlike Chopped, the challenger and Iron Chef teams always finish perfectly right down to the wire. It's blindingly obvious that they edit the tape to make it look that way. Finally, note that each team only cooks one plate of each course during the competition. But when they serve the food to the judges there are four plates per course. At no point is this obvious contradiction explained away.
The thing is, according to the ethos of Iron Chef the victory isn't really worth anything unless everybody has done their best. While the off camera cheats on Ramsay's show work to make the losers look like bad people and the winners like good people (they ask very leading questions and then heavily edit footage and interviews after the season has been filmed to insure this), in Iron Chef all of the off camera cheats work to ensure that the challengers produce a worthy meal. This is a radical difference, reflecting fundamental differences of world view.
Years ago a much younger Bobby Flay embarrassed the United States when he went on the the original Iron Chef. At the end of the meal he threw his cutting board in the air and jumped up on his prep table. Putting one's foot on the table like that is really, really rude in Japan. Then after he lost, he told an interviewer that he thought the judges voted against him because he was American. What did the show do? They invited him back for a rematch. Flay, young cad that he was (by all accounts he is not this way any more) did his schtick with the cutting board and feet again. But this time the judges voted so that he won.
Here's the weird thing, on the second competition his food was pretty clearly worse than that of the Iron Chef's. On rewatching it's clear that everyone involved with the Japanese show would have rather lost than have even the suspicion that they'd been unfair to Flay. So it was a pyrrhic victory for team America (again, by all accounts Flay took the lesson to heart and now is a lot less self-centered, as I've argued before a pretty hard trick for people at that level of success).
Among other things, this difference in ethos between Hell's Kitchen and Iron Chef explains why professional wrestling is so phenomenally popular in Japan (I would love to hear a similar anthroplogical explanation for its role in Mexico). While the characters' story-lines involve titanic struggles of good versus evil, there is a distinct moral code outside of story-line that fits very well with the Iron Chef ethos. Whether their characters are heels or baby faces, the actual performers are only as good as they make their opponents look. Ric Flair the character was the classic heel (arrogance, vindictiveness, insecurity, and sometimes cowardice) but Ric Flair the performer could wrestle a crash test dummy and have the dummy look like a formidable foe. So called "smart fans" in America appreciate this, but I think nearly every Japanese fan get this much more clearly.
Unlike Ramsay's shows, I don't know if Iron Chef/Professional Wrestling are microcosms of anything. In Hell's Kitchen (as in life) it is predetermined that a percentage will fail, and there is a kind of vicious moral posturing vis a vis the failures. In Iron Chef and Professional Wrestling the winner's victory doesn't mean anything unless the loser has achieved something worthwhile. So you get the reverse of the Ramsay moral posturing, and you even get a kind of reverse cheating, where things outside of story-line are rigged in ways inconsistent with the story-lines so that the contest is exciting and ennobling. It would be interesting to try to imagine a social reality where these institutions formed illustrative microcosms. I'm trying to think of real world analogs, and sadly I can't.
I any case, please consider the following Dusty Rhodes promo in this light. The best wrestling baby faces take the out of story-line norms and put them in story-line. Here Rhodes takes Ric Flair the character to task for failing along the normative dimension that Ric Flair the performer instantiates so well. Professional Wrestling is nice in just this very way. In the fictional world that it exist in, it is a microcosm in the same way that Ramsay's shows are a microcosm of the real world. That's nothing to be sniffed at I think.
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