Let's See What Happens When the Crowns Come Off...
Pageant Place, “After the Fall�—Episode 1:
I found this show on the homepage of mtv.com. I had never heard of this show so I thought I would check it out because it looked perfect for this assignment. I watched the first episode since I had no background of this show.
Context: Pageant Place is produced by Donald Trump and the Miss Universe Organization and is aired on MTV. The target audience is young women in their teens and twenties. The commercials are for cell phones, other MTV shows, make-up, etc.
Content: This show follows the lives of Miss Teen USA, Miss USA, and Miss Universe as they live together in a New York apartment and travel around working for the Miss Universe Organization. This particular episode introduces the audience to the title-holders, Katie, Rachel, and Riyo (who moves in at the beginning of the episode.) We learn about tension between Katie and the Former Miss USA, Tara. This drama becomes important when Donald Trump announces that Tara is coming back to live with the girls as a representative of the organization. There is also drama that surfaces between Katie and her boyfriend when he arrives at one of her photo shoots and sees her posing with a male-model.
Form: The main structure is built on quick “testimonial� interviews where the women can talk about each other and the situations privately, meetings with the organization, organization events such as traveling and photo shoots, and “private� moments such as dates. The music is very melodramatic, adding to the absurdity of the “serious� moments. There are a lot of fragmented shots of the women’s bodies, usually focusing on their waists and legs. There are multiple, flashy montage sequences, usually showing the glitz and glam of a certain class of New York City lifestyle. These are mostly used to indicate the passage of time.
Feminist Analysis: This show is overflowing with stereotypes about femininity, beauty, heterosexuality, and heteronormativity. The whole premise revolves around the glamorous lives of wealthy, beautiful, young women. The show relies on the assumption that these women will create drama and scandal by not being able to get along, thus creating interesting reality television. This drama is often created through the use of humiliation. In the first scene, Katie makes Rachel re-live her onstage fall over and over again, telling her it “looked like [she] had flubber on her ass.� In her article “Humiliation, Subjectivity, and Reality TV,� Myra Mendible brings up an interesting point about the role of the spectator in this humiliation, and possibly representation as a whole. “Are female viewers reassured in this way that they’re not alone in their personal flaws or failures? (…) And does registering judgment empower women by allowing them to participate in the process of validating or rejecting evaluative criteria, or does it further reinforce gender biases and unrealistic expectations?�
Continuing to examine the title and premise of this show, the word “pageant� indicates a very specific type of femininity and the show perpetuates those concepts without fail. The girls are thin, fashionable, have long, flowing hair, and all talk with sweet, southern accents (except for Riyo—she is from Japan and when compared to the other girls, creates the “other�.) They are often seen wearing short skirts and dresses and high heels and there are multiple shots of them applying make-up. No matter what time of day it is, they are showering, primping, etc. The women are constantly represented through their materialism. There are tons of shots of the girls cramming as much as they can into their suitcases. They give a quick tour of the bedrooms in the beginning, describing the hierarchy of the room assignments (i.e. Miss Universe has the largest room with the most stuff). This ideal femininity is further reinforced when the girls try to travel to Indiana for work and Riyo does not bring her passport or identification to the airport. This “reminds� us that the pretty girls are not intelligent enough to function in simple circumstances. Lucky for her, she brought her Miss Universe sash and used that to get through security!
This specific type of femininity is furthered through the use of a masculine gaze. Not only are the girls literally “owned� by Donald Trump, who is watching their every move, but the way in which the show is filmed/edited constructs their existence through a male gaze. We see shots from the waist down, accentuating their smooth, long legs, short dresses you can almost see up, and tall heels that are impossible to walk in. In the last part of this episode, the photo shoot is being run by men who are gazing at the women through their cameras, and then Josh adds another male gaze when he arrives on the shoot.
Heterosexuality/Heteronormativity is another important site of analysis. In the first meeting with the organization, a representative accuses Katie of kissing a Former Miss USA and Katie is left firmly denying such a thing. This accusation surfaces again in a meeting with Donald Trump and her relationship with Tara is called into question. Throughout the rest of the episode, Katie’s boyfriend is in most of the scenes, almost proving to the audience that she is the right kind of pageant girl by being in a heterosexual/heteronormative relationship.