feb 8 2022 - sustainable accumulation [on cheer and hype house]
my fellow content consumers,
we must discuss two of Netflix' latest releases: cheer and hype house. plus a bonus reality tv sub-crit below. nobody (ok fine, two of you) asked for this content and you can bet I'm here to deliver, jus 4 u xoxo
I bolded my tldr's below. but let's start with cheer,
only slomo could make stiff arms and frozen faces smiling look so romantic, so lushly majestic. cheer follows rival cheer teams in deep Texas: Navarro and Trinity Valley. featuring 4k close ups and wide shots of limber athletes tumbling across probably-not-sprung floors and shooting their arms into high-V's, their eyebrows raised to the gods, the show's first szn selects a half dozen of Navarro's 40 members to send a camera crew back home. there, they capture intimate stories of difficult, impoverished, and/or neglectful childhoods.
all of this is tough and real. I can't say much about that trauma plot essay here (more soon) but the dramatic arc of them making it to the most competitive of college cheer teams and its now accompanied Netflix fame is rather neatly cinematic. and while cheer chooses to let the saviorism/salvation (count the prayer circles) of cheer play out so thoroughly, so convincingly, it offers pretty clear glimmers of uneasy resolution. it's this complexity that makes these shows compelling!
cheer's young adult heros enter an environment where a family in the form of a cheer squad provides abundance of structure. attention and care are offered in the form of exacting expectations. that's coaching! that's a team! but whenever the stars interviews wander in the direction of their post-cheer futures, the hesitation, the anticipatory grief, suggests just how tender these people's lives still are because without cheer, where will they find family? yikes!!
interviews with TVCC/Navarro alums and now retired cheerleaders underscore this point. those who eagerly return to their alma maters are parched for a whiff of nostalgia, that vicarious adrenaline radiating from their successors' still prolific bodies accomplishing seemingly impossible feats.
szn2 replicates the formula, adding select Black members of rival Trinity Valley's athletes to profile more closely but will the spread of attention match or even catch up to szn1's stars?
the all-American white girl stars of szn 1 (Gabi, Morgan, Lexi) have taken off. the show chronicles how Monica's channeled the wave of szn1's attention (i.e. monetized) with Navarro appearances on talk shows and her own run on 'dancing with the stars.' not mentioned are her new book and since szn2, a newly announced tour! remember when Glee went on tour? LOL
but what about La'Darius? La'Darius is hurt that Monica had abandoned the team (while on DWTS and in the aftermath of Jerry Harris' arrest) and quits the team. guess who stands to keep profiting from cheer szn 2? who will not? what about Jada, star of TVCC and for me, of cheer szn2? (sorry Maddy) but look who's on the tour! look who's not!
at the recommendation of a zoomer friend, I also watched hype house on background. I learned that there exists in the world a minor internet celebrity in the form of a white e-boy who goes unironically by the name of lil huddy... is this satire??? #notallzoomers, etc. etc.
if Jada's the emotional center of cheer szn2, Thomas is the emotional and business center of hype house tv show. like many of hype house' and cheer's featured stars, Thomas comes from a difficult childhood where he was forced to grow up early. while hype house' trailer suggests a bigbrother-esque "young, attractive people cramped under the same roof" reality drama, like cheer, the actual show derives its heft from following these people back to the homes that they fled.
hype house' stars are already famous, already monetizing their nouveau-riche lifestyle. they're burnt out and disinterested in doing what's been working. lil huddy wants to make music. nobody living in the content house wants to make social media content. LOL! shocking!
as pressure for Daytona builds in cheer, Monica has her assistant take freshman star and top girl Maddy out of one section of the routine. Maddy's initially upset at Monica because she wasn't given any heads up before just getting brushed to the back of the formation. but in a later confessional, all is forgiven. Monica's the coach. Monica/Mother knows best. that's the structure.
lacking this clear power dynamic or a clear template of any kind, hype house' young tycoons are messily trying to figure out the harder work of actually sustaining their hype and momentum: the relationships that need to be tended to, the expectations that need to be set to sustain sponsorships and content calendars—that's labor too.
these kids are anxious about their wealth because capitalism makes everyone feel like they always need more, that they need to keep doing more and more and more. it keeps people on the hamster wheel with the lie that exponential accumulation is a sustainable rhythm at all.
because while Thomas is portrayed as the big-hearted, if perhaps, too forgiving leader of this pseudo-family, a quick google search reminds me that editing is powerful! mess! going from zero to hero under the guise of family or even, community... yikes! they're living the dream but are also still unsettled. when Alex and Thomas make trips home, it feels like the premise of a few literary novels: protagonist returns home to confront their pasts and leave with an uncertain but still neat resolve about what they must do next.
that these shows exemplify how much stories about class and poverty are racialized; how the narratives and apparatus that distribute these stories are racialized; how virality, monetizing internet fame, and people's economic mobilities are all racialized is hopefully evident. it's all predictable and annoying.
because what mid-00's competition reality show didn't rely on this formula? why did ____ follow contestants all the way home to middle, rural America for a 3-min fluff piece only to humiliate them in front of the judges minutes later? even as its aestheticized for 2022 in cheer and hype house, this familiar formula is still crass. it disguises this exploitative creation of fame as a bootstrappy American dream when really, it's just another exceptional iteration of American individualism. and yet, as all these shows warn: realizing one's dreams is painful and costly too. nobody is secure! surrogate family? flimsy! solitude and scarcity forever!
yes yikes and yawn and yet, my brain in this era enjoyed watching this content from a distance and had fun writing this slushee. happy first quarter moon in taurus!! if you have watched, plz msg me ur thoughts, including if you need me to address nikita dragun in private lmao.
happy aqua szn, happy new year of the tiger!
🐯 benedict
ID1: screenshot of Netflix' Cheer Season 2 Trailer. TVCC cheerleaders stunt and tumble across the practice mat. Caption: Don't come to the Valley just because you wanna be famous.
ID2: screenshot of Netflix' Hype House Trailer. screen split with three Tiktok videos of Hype House stars dancing/posing for camera. Caption: I don't want something that I've worked really hard towards.