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Punishment for Emotion

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Clarissa

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At the gym (where I now spend more time than at home) I discovered that the popularity of TV shows where a severe and condescending person with a British or Australian accent chastises hapless Americans and teaches them how to run their restaurant, bakery, hairdressing salon, spa, or pizza joint has not diminished. Just the opposite, these shows are mushrooming.

A staple of such shows is the moment when an American says something very American (like, “I just wanted closure”) and the strict Brit/Aussie clamps down on this outpouring with “I don’t believe in closure. You need to get over this.”

Every American business owner in these shows is losing business and facing bankruptcy because of an emotional issue he or she is experiencing. The severe Brit / Aussie humiliates and scolds the business owner and gets him/her to renounce the inconvenient emotion. This is done in a signally cruel and insensitive way.

These shows are an exercise in collective self-chastisement using a symbolic (as opposed to a real) outsider who is helping to keep a tight rein on people’s emotions. I’m not surprised they proliferate at the time of economic crisis. The lesson each such show strives to teach is that there is no place for sentimentality or emotion in business. The collective psyche has decided that sentimentality is to blame for the crisis and is castigating itself for it.

16 responses to “Punishment for Emotion”

  1. Tim Avatar
    Tim

    What does closure mean in this context?

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is from the episode i watched today. A couple has let their bakery go to seed because they dont know what happened to their adult son who disappeared years ago. A severe Australian lady comes to the rescue of the bakery.

      But it is always some emotional issue or another: death, divorce, sibling rivalry, etc that prevents these businesses from functioning.

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  2. good enough professor Avatar
    good enough professor

    Interesting. Shows like that are one of the reasons we don’t have cable: I would watch them All The Time. Punishment for emotion? No, I experience them differently. There are so many contexts in my life (teaching, childrearing, relationships) where my response to other people’s ineptitude has to be measured and supportive. Consequently, there is something deeply cathartic about watching Gordon Ramsay just cut loose with a profanity-ridden and honest rant directed to an incompetent restaurant manager.

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      This is actually my reason for not having cable. 🙂 I’m very besotted with chef Ramsay. 🙂

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      1. cliff arroyo Avatar
        cliff arroyo

        Gordon Ramsay seems to be on a mission to validate Tolstoy (who I thought I disagreed with) for me.

        I find the first half or so of the shows where you see how dysfunctional everything and how miserable everyone is to often be really interesting. The second half when they begin to See The Light and become better functioning (for a time) and Turn Things Around to just be kind of tedious….

        Happy restaurants are all the same, each unhappy failing restaurant is unhapy in its own way.

        What I’ve seen of the original British series doesn’t go so overboard with the emotions and seems to be much more about business models and finding a dining niche.

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    2. twicerandomly Avatar
      twicerandomly

      I think that Clarissa’s theory is supported by the fact that it is always a British or Australian person who is the authority figure. It could never by someone who is French, or Italian, even though they have reputations of being food experts.

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  3. el Avatar
    el

    Interesting how it influences behavior in private life (for both sexes).

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      el: This link is for you, I know you will find it relevant: http://glavnoe.ua/news/n170652

      What’s going on over there??

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  4. musteryou Avatar
    musteryou

    Just get over your idiotic stupidity and chasing closure!

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    1. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      It’s not the same if we can’t hear the accent. 🙂

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      1. musteryou Avatar
        musteryou

        ah, I can prepare a scolding video. Maybe even scaudlingly scolding.

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  5. cliff arroyo Avatar
    cliff arroyo

    On the other hand a thought just occurred to me.

    I think the reason for the general popularity of these shows is that they (at least in their American versions) are redemption narratives which Americans (and only Americans AFAICT) can never get enough of.

    They also sell the idea of small scale entrepreneurship(sp?) as some kind of higher calling, almost a religious vocation.

    A former student of mine was interested in comparing different national versions of Dragons’ Den. One thing he noticed (and thought deeply weird) about the American version was how many contestants talked about their business ideas as lifelong personal dreams (there’s basically no way to do that in Polish without sounding like a idiot). None of the other versions seem to have that (not sure about Canadian, if there is one).

    Also interesting. The Wikipedia page on Narrative Identity doesn’t have links in any other language. The spelling in the page is American so I’m thinking that this a peculiarly American idea.

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Narrative_identity#Athletes

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    1. Shakti Avatar
      Shakti

      Small business owners are mythical unicorns who embody American Values ™. Everyone loves “small business owners”. Just look at the endless stream of nonsense about “small business owners” come election time. Small businesses generate the most jobs, give you autonomy (“you can be your own boss”), are run by families or are like “families”, have owner-entrepreneurs who build it from the ground up, are completely original and creative, you should have own small business if even on the side, blah rainbow fart Horatio Alger blah.

      Incidentally the British version of Ramsay’s show is more informative if you will. The American version is just more emotional histrionics on the part of everyone. Yes, so and so is incompetent — I don’t need to see the B roll of this guy’s temper.

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    2. Clarissa Avatar
      Clarissa

      Yes, there is a Canadian Dragon’s Den and I vastly prefer it to the American version. I can barely watch the American version, it’s so obnoxious. I don’t know if they choose such annoying contestants on purpose but the show ends up turning the idea of entrepreneurship into a joke. Most of these contestants choose a completely ridiculous and nonviable idea, get attached to it in a bizarre way, invest everything they have into it, and keep repeating like zombified parrots, “This has always been my dream. It will make me rich. I know it will work because I want it to work.”

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  6. sugs Avatar
    sugs

    Regrettably, British TV is inundated with these shows too. We get the UK versions AND the US and some Aussie versions too, it’s exhausting! We’re told what to do by the Hotel Inspector, GR and his ilk on how to cook, eat, sell food, people telling us how to decorate our homes, an American woman tells us how to sell our homes, Gok Wan tells women How to Look Good Naked – by inserting every inch of flesh into compressible undewwear apparently… it goes on. Completely bizarre! As for Dragon’s Den, the whole idea is terrifying.

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  7. Jones Avatar
    Jones

    I can’t watch this horrid stuff, no matter whose accents are featured.

    It seems to me that many of these shows feature people who would never put up with a public bollocking themselves, yet that’s where they attempt to draw most of their strength in front of the viewers. It’s horrible, it’s awkward, and it makes for absurd drama.

    I get the feeling that if I watch too much television, I will transform into an even more harsh taskmaster than Charlie Brooker when it comes to showing these outbursts of power-mongering flatulence for what they are.

    I can already imagine “Five Noisiest ***** On American Television” and that sort of thing — if you have yet to encounter Charlie Brooker’s shows, I suggest getting started with “How TV Ruined Your Life”:

    There are six of these, which cumulatively will cost you three hours of your life.

    [sinister grin]

    “Don’t say it didn’t … it DID.” 🙂

    Here’s a radical view: what if this kind of television is meant to be punishing for the viewer, and that it is sought out so the viewer can perform ritualistic acts of penance?

    Why split the difference between the Marquis de Sade and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch when you can have them both served up in the form of an overly bossy know-it-all who tells you how you’re screwing up the wonderful life you could have joining him and his army of bossy know-it-alls, mostly by ham-handed implication?

    But … don’t you feel awful already? Catharsis will be delivered before the end of the hour.

    Oh … crap. The transformation’s already starting, isn’t it — this has already corrupted my imagination and inflamed my blood … 🙂

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A conservative literary critic and college professor

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