America's Most Smartest Model: Night of the Hairy Grizilla Monster
America’s Most Smartest Model is a VH1 show featuring male and female models of various levels of experience competing for $100,000 and a spot in a V05 commercial. The contestants participate in one event geared at measuring their intelligence and one event geared at measuring their modeling ability per episode. The show purports to be engaging in an attempt to discover if the stereotype about models is true: Are they really stupid?
The show seems to be aimed at 13 -35 female age bracket, or thereabouts. I watched the episode via iTunes, but I was able to catch an episode on actual broadcast over the weekend. The commercials were varied, but definitely directed towards women. Cosmetics, advertisements for other VH1 shows, and advertisements for household products were common. The V05 produce featured as the key product sponsor seems to sport an “edgy” image, and I think this is supported by the opening credit sequence of the show itself. It is apparently “edgy” to make fun of models.
In this particular episode, the contestants have a science fair with the help of Bill Nye. The winners of the science fair are given an “edge” for the modeling competition later in the show.
The creators of the show, Mark Cronin and Cris Abrego, have worked on many of the same shows in the past. Their resume includes shows such as Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, I Love New York, The Surreal Life: Fame Games, and Flavor of Love. Ben Stein and Mary Alice Stephenson host the show, with Stein judging the contestants mental capabilities and Stephenson judging the contestants modeling potential.
Because Stephenson is the primary judge of the contestant’s appearance, interesting questions are raised about the overall, controlling locus of the gaze on the show. The contestants are forced to please the gaze of Stephenson. Still, Stephenson’s gaze is not entirely her own – the bodies within the context of the competition, and most of the bodies within the fashion world, are similar in their adherence to dominant beauty standards. Given the complexity of the gazes and the concept of control throughout the series, interesting questions are raised regarding whether the gaze is always male, which is a debate we visited when discussing The Piano in the work of Laura Mulvey and Diana Saco.
In the specific episode I viewed, Night of the Hairy Grizilla Monster, normative bodies are used in a different way. During the modeling competition portion of the show, the contestants are broken into teams of two. Each group is given a “nerd” who has been sitting in basement playing World of Warcraft for a really long time. The “nerds” are really pale as a result and the groups have to make their respective “nerd” appear tan using regular household items. One group has won the privilege of using sunless tanner on their “nerd.” The regular show contestants make various rude comments about the “nerds.” Examples include complaining about body hair, complaining about the way the fake tan looked (like the “nerds” had acquired a skin disease), and never referring to “their” respective “nerds” by name. One model suggests that the man her team is to be photographed with does not usually get to hang out with people “of her caliber.”
The contest is intended to be funny and recalls Schick’s notion as introduced Myra Mendible’s Humiliation, Subjectivity, and Reality TV in which gloating over the humiliation of another person is an integral part of a given process (336-337). The “nerds” are humiliated before both the contestants and the viewers, both of whom have the chance to gloat and be glad they are not one of the “nerds.” The bodies of the “nerds” are additionally used to boost the image of the bodies of the models as ideal.
In checking the Wikipedia page for the show, it seems that the most outwardly intelligent contestants have been eliminated along with the really ditzy contestants. This, to me, speaks to what the show is selling. The contestants on the show are already models. The concept of the show is supposed to encourage finding America’s “Most Smartest” Model. Why then is the only model that was able to correctly answer most of the simplistic questions posed in the pilot episode eliminated? The message is clear: Being intelligent and academically accomplished is okay, but it is not as important as being pretty. Furthermore, the show exalts the fashion industry’s most normative standards of beauty and reassures us as viewers once again that no one is as pretty or successful as models (or people who look like them).