Are you fierce? I'm feeeyuhs.
My analysis will focus on an episode of America’s Next Top Model titled “The Girls Who Crawl,� which I watched during its original broadcast on CWTV this month. I also went back to re-view the episode online at cwtv.com.
Executive producers of the show include Ken Mok ("Making the Band"), supermodel Tyra Banks and Daniel Soiseth ("Hell's Kitchen"). The series was created by Tyra Banks and developed by Mok and Kenya Barris. "America's Next Top Model" is produced by 10 by 10 Entertainment in association with Bankable Productions.� (From cwtv.com)
The target audience includes teenage girls up through young-to-middle-aged women. The commercials featured are for the promotion of Cover Girl cosmetics, the teen soap opera Gossip Girls, or women’s apparel.
Thousands of girls apply each year to become America’s Next Top Model. The judges narrow it down to select finalists who get to spend the rest of the season competing in various modeling challenges until finally a winner is chosen and given a modeling contract. One girl is eliminated each week and forced to leave the show.
The episodes go back and forth between shots of the girls competing and shots of the girls being interviewed separately about their reactions. Scenes are edited for the optimal amusing and entertaining effect on the audience. The music is relatively upbeat and modern – flowing well with the ambiance of the program.
ANTM “gives real people an opportunity to prove that they can make it in the high-stress, high-stakes world of supermodeling,� the website declares. Perhaps “real people� is not the best choice of words due to the fact that the average U.S. woman is 5'4 and weighs 152 pounds – measurements which are never that of the ANTM winner.
Tyra tries to communicate that skinny girls are not the only beautiful girls, but her claim loses strength each time a plus-size model is voted off the show. Instead, the ideal of being stick-thin is communicated much more intensely to the viewers. The fashion industry itself is being sold through ANTM by constantly emphasizing that “There are different sorts of sexy, but model-sexy is the sexiest.�
One article states that “any attempt to be like the models in advertisements results in eating disorders. Although advertisements do not depict models vomiting or downing a massive amount of some laxative preparation after they eat, viewers learn that to look like models and to eat like models appear to eat means that some purging activity must take place off camera (Hood 239). This claim is clearly evident during a scene where a contestant named Heather passes out during the shooting of a music video in which she models. She tells the camera, “I hadn’t eaten since breakfast and it was 8 o’clock at night.� This is clearly not helping smash the stereotype of the starving model. Women viewers see Heather getting rave reviews from the judges despite (or maybe because of) the fact that she “forgets� to eat, hence supporting Orbach’s aforementioned analysis.
Another article on the issue of body image mentions a study in which “the subjects took a self-esteem inventory, then browsed through popular fashion magazines for thirty minutes. At the end of the half-hour, the subjects took the inventory again, with a majority reporting lower scores of self-esteem in the wake of their fashion mag perusal (Sarbin 241).
An incessant display of low self-esteem is portrayed throughout the episodes of America’s Next Top Model. A shot zooms in on a model named Lisa standing on a scale: “I gained a whole pound,� she proclaims. Another model asks what size she is. “These are a zero....but I can wear up to a size three.� Three of them then stand side by side in front of a full-length mirror and stare at each other’s bodies. The plus-size model Sarah comments on her reactions to being around “all these skinny girls� throughout the day: “So maybe I go to bed not feeling as good as when I woke up…� she laments.
Despite being these beautiful women who were hand selected by the supermodel Tyra Banks, they still find endless things wrong with their bodies – implying to viewers at home that if these models have a few imperfections, then I have a million imperfections. Well, except for Chantal: “I get in front of the camera and I have this natural talent for modeling…I’m not nervous at all because I know this is what I was born to do. God gave me this body and face.�
At the end of the episode, Sarah the ‘plus-size girl’ is kicked off the show. The judges say that she has lost weight and that “you have to be the size to be a plus size model.� So now, Sarah is too skinny to be plus-size, but too fat to be a model-model. So, bye-bye to Sarah, and as Miss Jay comments: “Do we ever have a plus size model in this competition?� Sarah later tells the camera, “I’m glad they chose me, I think it’s a step, next time, maybe someone that looks like me will win.� Let’s keep our fingers crossed.
And finally, “Remember, just be beautiful and use your loveliness.� Love, Tyra.
Comments
hey tayra its me meluissa lopez nice to meet you what wanted to tell you is that your so pretty and i hope i can be a model which is my dream i really want to be like you and and my mom she was a model in mexico but big to but in her 17's but wish you the best bye
Posted by: melissa lopez | December 11, 2007 3:01 PM