In honor of this thread.

I've been watching America's Next Top Model re-runs and it has occurred to me... I know lots of women who are jealous of supermodels and they want to be super models. But when they see this show, wow, they say it sucks to be those women. Well hell's bells, folks, it looks to me like America's Next Top Model is a friggin deconstruction of the real life supermodel lifestyle trope! Glamour, fans, money! BZZZZT! Your ass swims in ice cold water to do underwater poses, you gotta worry about gaining 1 pound, you gotta jump through all kinds of hoops with poses, you have outrageous contests and assignments, and in the end you've got Miss Jay (a dude, folks) over there wisecracking you to death about the quality of your smile and how well you did that sashay down the runway. I haven't even gotten past the surface on how they torture their models. Let's not even get into how plus sized models (translation: anyone beyond a size 1) are almost totally not represented in that world. (On a side rant: I love me some chunk, dammit. Bone is for the dog, meat is for the man! KnowwhatImeanVern?)

It occurs to me... reality TV sometimes deconstructs a lot of real life tropes. I believe I just saw The Bachelor do a brutal deconstruction of romance. That was the show where the dude was about to proposed to one woman who won the series contest, dumped her, and went for the other, right? Yup. Smelled like wrecking ball deconstruction to me.

Then again I could be way off base. But if not... damn, deconstruction is so much fun!

To quote the Spaniard: "You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means."

Deconstruction, as it applies to tropes, is very specifically demonstrating how the trope does not apply to real life. For instance, take the notion that honest man always prevails over one who cheats. A deconstruction of that trope would be to present the unfortunate fact that cheaters very often prevail for exactly that reason: they exceed the boundaries that keep honest men rigorously abide by. Showing that a supermodel's life is not, in fact, glamorous isn't necessarily a deconstruction, it's just the truth. To be accurately described as a deconstruction, I think it would be necessary for the subject to be fictional in some way-- involving superpowers, exaggerated or muted emotional responses, and other things that are generally found only in fiction. Dr. Manhattan, for instance, could be taken as a deconstruction of Superman. Superman is all but a god, yet he always maintains his moral purity and the world overall doesn't even seem to know he exists. But if you threw that kind of creature into our real, politically volatile world, you'd see the kind of upheaval portrayed in Watchmen. That's deconstruction.

Furthermore, literary deconstructionism (according to Wikipedia) goes much farther: it is the attempt to demonstrate that the subject (be it a trope, a genre, a philosophy, or a religion) is inherently self-contradictory. That is, it is the attempt to prove that the subject cannot exist with itself: it is a non-entity. This is an extremely serious thing to set out to prove, and I note that one of the first criticisms of deconstructionism was the idea that it was too readily applied, with its adherents claiming to have discovered a deconstruction on slender bases. So, be careful how liberal you are with the term.

Hehe, shows today suck besides a couple.

"i am an entropy fan!" - George Carlin

Bitter wrote:Showing that a supermodel's life is not, in fact, glamorous isn't necessarily a deconstruction, it's just the truth.

Well, the glamourous life of a supermodel does appear to be fictional. It's not glamorous at all - it's total madness and exploitation behind the veil. But yeah, I understand, the whole experience has to be fictional to begin with.

To be accurately described as a deconstruction, I think it would be necessary for the subject to be fictional in some way-- involving superpowers, exaggerated or muted emotional responses, and other things that are generally found only in fiction. Dr. Manhattan, for instance, could be taken as a deconstruction of Superman. Superman is all but a god, yet he always maintains his moral purity and the world overall doesn't even seem to know he exists. But if you threw that kind of creature into our real, politically volatile world, you'd see the kind of upheaval portrayed in Watchmen. That's deconstruction.

The Watchmen also deconstructed the cape thing, too. Guy's cape got caught in a revolving door, giving someone time to shoot him, IIRC.

I assumed that some things you see in real life that are actually bullshit and are exposed as being impossible by "behind the scenes" perspectives, would count. I mean, you can see what models do now and realize hey, that's b.s., you can't be happy and be doing this all the time and if you put that into fiction and tried to actually demonstrate the self contradictory nature of that lifestyle (you can see the way these women walk on the runway and see how they manage their bodies and know real women don't do that!), you'd get what you see in the reality shows (women being all angsty about their bodies, etc.). It can't exist within itself, the whole reason you see models like this is because they're strictly controlled; lose the control and the charade, and the whole system fails and they become more real. But... it has to be fictional to begin with, so there ya go.

Is it possible that the solution is to write a fictional story about their lifestyle and show how preposterous it is, and show all the cracks and flaws and breakdowns that happen behind the scenes while trying to maintain these illusions?

Woah... Too deep for me. I've been out of college for a decade. In any case. Top model is a train wreck. I mean, none of those women are happy and they're practically all at each other's throats. Who'd want a job like that? If my job was like that, I'd quit.

Jacquelope wrote:

Bitter wrote:Showing that a supermodel's life is not, in fact, glamorous isn't necessarily a deconstruction, it's just the truth.

Well, the glamourous life of a supermodel does appear to be fictional. It's not glamorous at all - it's total madness and exploitation behind the veil. But yeah, I understand, the whole experience has to be fictional to begin with.

I assumed that some things you see in real life that are actually bullshit and are exposed as being impossible by "behind the scenes" perspectives, would count.

I think the point bears repeating that deconstruction, at it applies to tropes and whatnot, is explicitly about fiction. Many things in fiction are given a pass (the "willing suspension of disbelief") because it makes for an engaging fantasy. Deconstruction takes those entirely fictional notions-- which are usually off-limits to criticism, as without them the story just doesn't work; they are necessary to the story's "construction"-- and puts them in as close to the real world as can be managed, in order to show how they don't work in that context. I really don't think Top Model qualifies on that level. Despite the fact that the supermodel's life is not, on average, as easy as it appears, it is actually possible for a supermodel to be good at what they do and live a stable, happy life. (After all, reality television is notoriously overdramatized.) I think a deconstruction would have to show how the fictional supermodel lifestyle is mutually exclusive with reality.

A millionaire whose parents were murdered and consequently runs around punching muggers while wearing a bat costume, in our world, would be a psychopath. There's really no way around it. So, you could deconstruct the Batman story by showing him to be just that. (That same also happens in Watchmen.) Top Model shows that a model's life isn't as good as it seems, but I don't believe that it effectively demonstrates that the idea of a happy model is absurd, hence it is not a deconstruction.