When Bad Girls Go Good

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When Bad Girls Go GoodAlice Holbrook a & Amy E. Singer ba Syracuse Universityb Knox CollegePublished online: 07 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Alice Holbrook & Amy E. Singer (2009) When Bad Girls Go Good, Journal of Popular Film and Television, 37:1, 34-43,DOI: 10.3200/JPFT.37.1.34-43

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Copyright © 2009 Heldref PublicationsThe contestants of Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School (2007) assemble for a group portrait.34

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Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications

When Bad Girls Go

Good:

Models of the Self and Reality on VH1’s Flavor

of Love Girls: Charm School

by Alice Holbrook

and Amy E. Singer

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36 JPF&T—Journal of Popular Film and Television

Abstract: This article examines the ways in which VH1’s Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School (2007) concep-tualized ideas of reality and the self. Drawing upon interviews, theoretical research, and the authors’ observations, we find that the ideas of reality and the self that Charm School employed rely on very traditional boundaries between reality and unreality, ordinariness and celebrity. These contrast sharply with ideas of the self and reality propounded by Charm School contestants and, ironi-cally, by reality television in general.

Keywords: celebrity, feminism, identity, reality television, scriptedness

ost would agree that reali-ty television, despite its

use of nonactors and relative lack of scriptedness, does not represent reality per se. In that case, what does it represent? Perhaps it represents the ordinary. Theo-rist Graeme Turner writes, “‘Ordinari-ness’. . . has always occupied a place among the repertoire of celebrity discourses. . . . In recent times, however, the use of this practice has grown dramatically. . . . Ordi-nary people have never been more desired by, or more visible within, the media” (154–55). This suggests that the appeal of reality television is not so much in its claim to represent reality, but in its claim to rep-resent ordinary people. However, this claim, too, is problematic, and not only because programs often conflate the two. Although, as Turner notes, reality contestants are recruited specifically for their ordinariness—he cites instances of Big Brother (2000–present) housemates being “evicted when they were found to be already working within the enter-tainment industry” (155)—they do not remain ordinary for long. Nick Couldry observes that reality television ceremo-

nies, such as the eviction ceremony in Big Brother, symbolize the transition of a participant “between ‘ordinary per-son’ and ‘media person’” (60). In effect, reality television destroys the basis of its appeal. Though houseguests on Big Brother are expelled from the show, their lives are permanently changed. Reality show contestants are “granted a highly specified and circumscribed celebrity,” becoming what Turner refers to as “celetoids” (155, 156).

VH1’s Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School, which premiered in April 2007 and ended in July 2007, offered a unique

perspective on the selves of its contes-tants as “celetoids.” Charm School was a spin-off of the cable channel’s popular reality show Flavor of Love (2006–08). Similar to network reality show The Bachelor (2002–present), Flavor of Love sought to find a love interest for Public Enemy hypeman Flavor Flav.1 Charm School recognized that on Flavor of Love, many contestants acted in a social-ly unacceptable manner, particularly when they engaged in physical and ver-bal fights. Charm School host Mo’Nique told the contestants, “The world was not

laughing with you on Flavor of Love; we were all laughing at you, includ-ing myself” (“No Mo’ Nicknames”). In principle, Charm School sought to teach thirteen of the women eliminated from Flavor of Love’s first two seasons skills that would make them successful in “real life.” Each weekly episode involved a task that the women had to complete—for example, practicing public speaking, business organization, good grooming, or table manners—and at the end of the episode, the woman whom Mo’Nique and the other judges or “deans”—Keith Lewis, president of the Morgan Mod-eling and Talent Agency, and Mikki Taylor, Essence magazine beauty direc-

tor and cover editor—determined had gained the least from the lesson

was “expelled,” or eliminated, from Charm School.2 These

lessons sought not only to inform, but also to reacclimate the con-testants to lives out-side of celebrity. In effect, Charm School reversed the real-ity show formula, transforming con-testants from “media people” back into “ordinary people.”This article exam-

ines the contestants of Charm School as both

celebrities and ordi-nary people. To do so, it

draws upon interviews with two Charm School cast mem-

bers, Becky Johnston and Saa-phyri Windsor, as well as interviews

with Chris Miller, one of the program’s supervising producers; the work of media theorists; and the authors’ own observations as avid viewers. It is safe to say that Charm School contestants, having already been on television, will never again be ordinary—that is to say, not “media people.” Nevertheless, the show made an effort to portray them, at least those contestants who achieved some measure of success on the pro-gram, as ordinary. In doing so, Charm School advocated a model of the self and a perception of what is “real” that relies on strict binaries. This position Copyright © 2009 Heldref Publications

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Models of the Self and Reality on VH1’s Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School 37

often contrasted with contestants’ views and with definitions of the self and reality that underlie reality television’s popularity. While Charm School may have advocated binaries, it participated in trends that theorists identify as help-ing to destroy those binaries, blurring the lines between ordinary and celeb-rity, real and fake.

“A Real Girl for a Minute”: The Fuzzy Boundaries of Reality Television

“Celetoids” are a logical extension of the increasing tendency to emphasize what is ordinary about those whose celebrity results from more traditional means (e.g., movie stars, musicians, and athletes). In Claims to Fame, Joshua Gamson notes that in the early days of Hollywood, studios manufactured biographies for their actors that were designed to increase the public perception of cohesion between actor and character (26). Over the years, however, this practice went out of fashion. It became desirable for audiences to witness the separation that had always existed between actors and their roles, as well as between their occupations and everyday lives. Magazine articles began to emphasize the pedestrian aspects of celebrities’ lives over their opulence (29). Accordingly, public rhetoric about stars began to downplay the idea that celebrities had star quality, charisma, or “that special something,” and it played up the idea of celebrity as “an image” created to “pander to an audience” (32, 35). Since celebrities were regarded as creations, the separation between them and ordinary people lessened considerably.

As awareness of celebrities’ images increased, it also became desirable for audiences to witness that a separation existed between actors’ private lives and public personas. Gamson quotes sociol-ogist Todd Gitlin: “Celebrities . . . invite their audiences to revere them for being ‘too hip to be reverent or revered’” (52). Audiences were supposed to mock the artifice while, at the same time, being a part of it. In keeping with this trend of self-awareness, Gamson argues that today’s audiences have

been instructed not simply in viewing the self behind the image . . . but in viewing the fabrication process . . . . Armed with knowledge about the process, the audi-ence doesn’t need to believe or disbelieve the hype, just to enjoy it. (49)

In other words, audiences were trained to recognize that there was a distance not only between themselves and the celebrities they admired, but also within the personality itself—that both celebrities and their audiences have fragmented personas.

Reality television can be viewed as an experiment in the power of celeb-rity creation, proving that anyone can become a celebrity with the proper packaging. Reality programs are, in essence, a representation of the daily work of agents and casting directors as they mold an actor’s image. Audiences witness both the self, often captured in audition tapes, and the image—the final “media person”—with the show acting as a record of transformation. In addition to casting specials or reunion shows, reality programs often make use of behind-the-scenes footage or deleted scenes, giving the audience the percep-tion of understanding the production in a more literal sense. Gamson believes that audiences can put themselves at a distance from their pleasures, deriving enjoyment from them without being duped (52). And given recent trends

that allow audiences to vote by phone or online for reality show contestants, audiences themselves can participate in the creation of celebrity. Thus, while reality television might appear at first to work within traditional, stratified bina-ries between celebrity and ordinariness, it actually deconstructs the binary by making the transition between ordinary and celebrity so visible.

As difficult as it is to define the “celebrity” in the world of reality tele-vision, it is equally if not more diffi-cult to define the “ordinary,” precisely because it encompasses such a wide swath of the general population. It may be easiest to define the ordinary by what it is not—that is, not a celeb-rity—though this definition, too, must be suspect for its lack of specificity. The draw of the ordinary in reality tele-vision has been defined as its perceived unscriptedness and, thus, its theoretical unpredictability (Andrejevic 102). This points to the explicit tie between what is “ordinary” and what is “real” pos-ited by the very term reality television. The use of this term seems to suggest a strict divide between celebrities and ordinary people and, it follows, a strict divide between who can and who can-not purvey “reality,” privileging ordi-nary people over celebrities.

Yet, although the correlation between ordinariness and reality seems clear, it

In effect, Charm School reverses the reality show

formula, transforming contestants from “media

people” back into “ordinary people.”

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is unstable. Reality is cited in moments of spontaneous self-disclosure, moments of emotional vulnerability that are tra-ditionally kept private. Miller, the pro-ducer, refers to reality as what is revealed in contestants’ “weak moments,” such as Becky’s breakdown during one episode: “We’ve all seen her reach a limit where . . . her heart was just hurting . . . she broke down and she cried, and she was a real girl for a minute” (interview). State-ments like this suggest the binaries that persist in reality television in general. Media girls are occasionally “real girls,” evidencing a split within the self. This duality is necessary because of the nature of reality television, an umbrella term, which, according to Miller, “is used to describe a massive genre of television programs” (interview) with widely vary-ing conditions. If every contestant on a reality program either becomes a media person, or is already, either reality can-not be exclusive to the ordinary, or no one can be entirely ordinary or entirely a media person. Reality shows offer viewers the opportunity “to see, thanks to technology, what would otherwise remain hidden from view” (Andrejevic 74–75), but what we see cannot easily be categorized. Ultimately, despite appear-ances to the contrary, reality television relies on very flexible definitions of ordi-nariness and celebrity and loose correla-tions between ordinariness and reality.

“It Wasn’t Just a Show Anymore”: Charm School’s Reliance on Binaries

Unique among reality shows, Charm School made explicit the conflict between its participants’ celebrity and their ordinariness. Charm School was part of VH1’s “Celebreality” series, a set of programs like Celebrity Fit Club (2005–present) and The Surreal Life (2003–06) that chronicle the lives of B-list celebrity participants. On one hand, it implied that the women on Charm School were a step above ordinary. Before they appeared on Charm School, all had been on Flavor of Love, and many had been on other reality television shows.3 On the other hand, none of the girls was known for any particular skill, unlike Flavor Flav. They were, in the words of Daniel Boorstin, “well known simply for their well-known-ness” (qtd. in Holmes 111). Further, the participants had widely varied backgrounds. Saa-phyri was homeless at the time of taping and Schatar, another contestant, was a graduate of the University of Pennsyl-vania (Tanimura). The vast majority of the participants in Charm School—nine of the thirteen—were ethnic minori-ties, with eight African Americans and one Filipina. The contestants’ personal histories alluded to their representative-ness, and this, according to Rebecca L. Stephens, contributed to the perception

on the part of the audience that the show represented reality (197). That the cir-cumstances of the contestants’ lives may have been unfamiliar to viewers only bolstered their seeming ordinariness.

The renaming ceremony during Charm School’s first episode, “No Mo’ Nicknames,” sought to resolve an assumed conflict between the contestants’ ordinariness and their celebrity by transforming them from celetoids back into ordinary people. On the first episode of each season of Flavor of Love, Flavor Flav gave each contestant a nickname by which she was identified until her elimination. Becky was called Buckwild, Larissa was called Bootz, and Brooke was called Pumkin, to name a few (see table 1). During the premiere of Charm School, each contestant received a name tag with her Flavor of Love nickname. Mo’Nique then asked the contestants to burn these name tags and rechristens each girl with her birth name. By being a part of a reality television show, contestants underwent a change in their identity. Charm School utilized naming and renaming to both make literal and reverse this change. Naming and renaming are particularly potent strategies because names signify a person not only as a body, but also as a personality or a self. Often, parents choose names for their children not merely based on personal preference but on the name’s meaning—in other words, for the characteristics the name embodies with which they hope to invest the child.

In the case of Charm School, each contestant’s “ordinary” self was symbol-ized by her birth name, and each contes-tant’s “media” self was symbolized by

TABLE 1. Partial List of Flavor of Love Contestants’ Names

Flavor of LoveBirth name nickname

Becky BuckwildBrooke PumkinCourtney GoldieCristal SeriousHeather KrazyLarissa BootzLeilene SmileySchatar HottieTiffany New York

Reality television can be viewed as an experiment in the power of celebrity

creation, proving that anyone can become a

celebrity with the proper packaging.

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her nickname. Charm School took for granted that these ordinary and media selves also corresponded to a certain set of characteristics: the “ordinary” self symbolized the contestants’ ability to be well mannered and capable, and the “media” self symbolized the inability of the contestants to do anything but make a scene on television. Charm School’s entire season worked to effect the trans-formation performed symbolically by the burning of the name tags. Just as, in Couldry’s analysis, reality show par-ticipants are not “media people” at the beginning of taping, only at elimination, we must read Charm School’s contes-tants as “media people” until they leave the house and successfully reemerge into the “real world.” According to Miller, the renaming rit-ual was intended as a step away from the contestants’ media personas:

On Flavor of Love, all the characters came into the house and they all got . nick-names that Flav . . . gave to them, and whatever those names were, it doesn’t really mat-ter, they went on to act . . . like urban degenerates. (inter-view)

The renaming ritual was viewed as “liberating” and “a clean slate” by Charm School’s producers, part of a general effort to make a more positive, socially responsible pro-gram. And through the show’s effort to transform contestants, Miller believes, it transcended the limitations of its genre: “It wasn’t just a show anymore by the time we got to the end of it. . . . This is, like, real. . . . It was a massive, changing experience” (interview). Just as the con-cept of Charm School requires the sanc-tity of the ordinary, holding it opposed to celebrity, Miller draws a thick line between what is real and what is false and considers television, the traditional place of celebrity, as being handicapped in expressing truth.

The model of the self that Charm School relied on has been defined by Su

Holmes in her analysis of the type of celebrity afforded to participants on Big Brother. Holmes defines three models of the reality show contestant’s self, which fall in a continuum. On the two ends are those who “reject their onscreen self by complaining about their representation” and those who “claim . . . a seamless continuity between their on- and off-screen self” (131). In the middle are contestants who “neither fully [reject] the on-screen self, nor ‘[bear] witness to the continuousness of the self,’ but rather [showcase] and [embrace] the ‘celebratised’ self” (132). The latter

type of contestant identifies herself by her Flavor of Love nickname, but she acknowledges a fragmentation of her identity and a choice to identify in the way that she does. The media self is privileged. This is in keeping with Gamson’s contention that, although modern celebrity asks us to witness the separation between actor and role, the public self remains “the most true, most real, most trustworthy” precisely because we are privy to the details of its construction (54). This group of contestants propounds a view of their

celebrity that suggests a malleable self bu nevertheless relies on binaries. The rhetoric used by these contestants to describe their changes resonates with an interpretation of makeover programs advanced by Gareth Palmer. Rather than evidence a belief in a fundamen-tal, relatively stable self, Palmer finds that makeover programs, by tying iden-tity and consumption (174) and appear-ance and identity (184), posit a model of the self as project (185). During Charm School’s final episode, “Ghettin’ Phabulous,” Leilene and Saaphyri, the two remaining contestants, are given makeovers. At first, Leilene frustrates Dean Keith by picking clothing that is too revealing, leading him to admon-

ish her: “That’s not who you are anymore.” But when Leilene

emerges from the dressing room in her new gown, he

proclaims, “The trans-formation is complete!” This language is echoed by Mo’Nique during the final elimination when she tells Leilene, “You’ve made a great transformation.” Here, transformation is an appropriate word for the action applied

to Leilene’s exterior, which, it is implied, is

a direct reflection of her interior. The interior self is

constantly changing; any base is eradicated by development. However, some contestants

resisted categorization. Saaphyri, Charm School’s eventual winner, is an anomaly in the naming ritual and Holmes’s models. A participant on the second season of Flavor of Love, Saaphyri had a physical altercation with another participant within hours of entering the Flavor of Love house and was expelled from the show before Flavor Flav could assign her a nickname. As a result, during Charm School’s renam-ing ritual, while the other contestants wore name tags featuring their Flavor of Love nicknames, Saaphyri’s featured her birth name. The burning of the other contestants’ name tags symbolized a transition back to a pre–Flavor of Love

got . . .

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self, but Saaphyri’s burnt name tag symbolized a blankness, a clean slate, an erasure of any self at all. She had no proxy, no “media self.” Unlike the other contestants, Saaphyri could not blame her poor behavior on corruption by Flavor Flav and reality television in general. Indeed, during the “No Mo’ Nicknames” episode, Saaphyri explains to Mo’Nique that her outburst on Fla-vor of Love came as a result of difficult childhood experiences. In most cases, Charm School purported to act as a sort of rehabilitation from Flavor of Love, but in Saaphyri’s case Charm School represented a more straightforward ver-sion of the makeover programs dis-cussed by Palmer, without the compli-cations of media self and ordinary self. Because Saaphyri began from scratch, her eventual win speaks less to the ability of the show to change her from a celebrity back into an ordinary per-son, complicating its goals.

Though Holmes introduces a continu-um of media selves, Charm School’s rhet-oric limited contes-tants to the changeable, “celebratized” self. This is logical given the aims of the program. After all, if Charm School were to have allowed that any of the contestants’ nicknames repre-sented their actual selves, as some of the contestants believed, it would have implied that such a contestant had no ordinary self to which she wished to return and thus that she was beyond help. Unlike Saaphyri, who was without an ordinary self but whose willingness to shed her identity also indicated a will-ingness to change, the other contestants’ personas did not suggest any disunity that had to be mended. To admit that a contestant’s media self truly represented her would have been to be admit that the show included a contestant subversive to its purpose. If the judges felt a contes-tant was clinging to her media persona, this was cause for expulsion; the media self is a delusion, not a valid identity.

Most expulsions were explained by an inability or unwillingness on the part of the contestant to submit to the program, often expressed as “an unwillingness to grow.” In Cristal’s case, her expulsion followed complaints by other contestants that she was exhibiting the same failings as when the show began. During the “Master Debaters” episode, Mo’Nique says Cristal is expelled because “[they] hadn’t seen where she’d improved any-where.” Similarly, if Charm School were to have allowed that a contestant truly identified as her ordinary self at the beginning of the program, and that her

media self was only a misinterpretation, that contestant would not have needed the behavior modification provided by the program. Not needing the program, too, was cause for expulsion. At Court-ney’s elimination during the “Big Stink at Charm School” episode, Mo’Nique, referencing the school bus used to trans-port contestants to and from activities, states, “You know that little yellow bus out front? You don’t belong on that bus.” Alhough other judges criticized Court-ney for her lack of growth, calling her “a seat-warmer,” Mo’Nique’s comments

implied that Courtney did not need to grow, not as much as some of the other women. She instructs Courtney: “Let the ladies who really need it, get it.”

The renaming ritual itself, with its implication that the contestants did identify themselves by their nicknames, viewed the contestants as “celebratized” at the show’s outset. The ritual did not allow that contestants may not have identified with their nicknames, nor that the nicknames may have represented them. The ideology of the naming ritual insisted that the nickname had no real connection to the self of the contes-tant and that her media and ordinary selves both existed but were completely

opposed. If the contestant was complic-it in her nicknaming, it was merely

self-delusion. When introduc-ing the ritual, Mo’Nique

announces, “Now, before we go any further with this process, there’s something you ladies need to lose, and that is those dis-gusting nicknames.” At various points, Mo’Nique calls them “foolishness” and “a joke” and says, “That represented

something ugly” (“No Mo’ Nicknames”). By

trivializing the nick-names, Mo’Nique and

Charm School distanced the contestants from their

media identities, viewing them as a hindrance to the women’s per-

sonal growth. Accordingly, Charm School vilified

Flavor Flav for his role in the corrup-tion of the contestants—as the giver of nicknames, the show suggested, Flav was the author of the contestants’ new, unhealthy media selves. During Charm School’s opening credits, cartoons of the contestants are shown throwing pies at a television displaying an image of Flavor Flav’s face. In the “Tore Up from the Floor Up” episode, when contestants are taught about functional relation-ships with men and instructed about the four types of men to avoid—the player, the professional, the pushover, and the

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parolee—images of Flavor Flav are shown over the verbal descriptions of each. If the nicknames did represent the contestants, there would have been no need to vilify Flavor Flav; the contes-tants would have been the perpetrators rather than victims. Contestants like Larissa, who clung to the nicknames, were viewed as stagnant and as failing to complete the symbolic burning of the name tags, although they may have tech-nically agreed with the program’s defi-nition of their selves. In her postshow confessional, Larissa remarks, “I’m not going to change for no-[expletive deleted]-body. I’m Bootz, I’m back, and she [Mo’Nique] can kiss my ass” (“It’s Mo’s Birthday”). Bootz, her media self, would remain her primary self. Larissa thwarted the purpose of Charm School by leaving the fragmentation between her two selves unresolved. However, a solid sense of a fundamental self, as held by the two extremes on Holmes’s continuum, could not be accommodated by the renaming ritual or the program in general. The perception of a duality was key to the program’s rhetoric. The assumption of a unified self was not accepted in Charm School as a precon-dition, only as the final product.

“A New and Improved Saaphyri”: Charm School Contestants’ Visions of an Unfragmented Self

Despite Charm School’s contentions, the program’s contestants did not always perceive a neat connection between their “ordinary” selves and their “real” selves and, in some cases, they perceived no separation between their “ordinary” selves and their “media” selves at all. These groups of contestants occupy the two ends of Holmes’s continuum: they either rejected their onscreen selves or saw their on- and offscreen selves as linked. On Charm School, these poles include, respectively, the girls who iden-tified themselves by their birth names, privileging their ordinary selves, and contestants who identified themselves by their Flavor of Love nicknames, privileging their media selves. Interest-ingly, women in both of these groups of contestants, despite the groups’ dispa-rate viewpoints, resisted fragmentation, expressing a belief in a fundamental

self. They merely situated that funda-mental self in different spheres. Women in both groups hark back to early ideas of celebrity—that of the studio-made biography and that of the celebrity who is “just like us.”

For these groups of contestants, the language used to discuss their chang-ing selves in the context of the show is likely to resonate with that used by con-testants on reality makeover programs. In their analysis of shows like The Swan (2004–05) and Extreme Makeover (2002–05), Sarah Banet-Weiser and Laura Portwood-Stacer note the tenden-cy to discuss a contestant’s transforma-tion as “becoming more like ‘yourself’” (268). This is especially applicable to Charm School, where contestants theo-retically return to a preshow, or “real,” self. The makeover on The Swan was primarily physical, although it was positioned as having positive psycho-logical ramifications (267); on Charm School, it was primarily psychological, although the finalists did receive new clothing and hairstyles. In both cases, the makeover served merely to expose what was there all along, hiding under the shell of either the participants’ unat-tractive appearance, as Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer note of The Swan and Extreme Makeover (268), or their insecurity and poor conduct, on Charm School. What is transformed is not so much the self but the self-image, both to the contestant and the outside world (268). As for what the program enacts on the self, transformation may be less accurate than finishing touches.

Just as the renaming ritual is the most explicit illustration of how Charm School viewed its participants, the way the par-ticipants spoke of themselves, with either the use or disuse of their nicknames, spoke to the way contestants viewed their own identities. Of all the contes-tants, Becky seemed the most attached to her nickname. During the renaming ceremony, she wears not only a name tag reading “Buckwild” but a hat with the same name, thus thwarting the sym-bolism of the act. Although Becky burns her name tag, she still displays a vestige of her reality persona and says as much in a confessional: “Mo’Nique gave me my white people name, Becky, but we all

know there’s still some Buckwild inside this bitch” (“No Mo’ Nicknames”). In a personal interview, Becky talked about the persistence of “Buckwild”:

Mo’Nique took away my nickname, but I could tell, like, there were times she was about to say my name, she was gonna call me Buckwild anyway. She would have to pause and think to call me Becky. That’s how people are. They normally call me Buckwild unless it’s like, I’m at work.

Becky seems to perceive a unity between her media self and her ordinary self in which the media self, represented by the name “Buckwild,” is privileged. Becky is Buckwild. Accordingly, Becky states that her goal for the show is to “stay Buckwild, but be a better Buckwild” (“No Mo’ Nicknames”), subscribing to the show’s “finishing touches” rhetoric, rather than its rhetoric of transformation. Her position demonstrates what Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer call “coaxing the ‘authentic’ beautiful self out of the ‘old’ body” (261). It seems ironic that Becky would associate herself with this particular viewpoint, since in her speeches on the show, she overwhelmingly privileged her media self—represented in Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer’s comparison as the ugly, outer shell—by believing in a seamlessness between her ordinary and media selves. Yet Becky perceived herself as having no outer shell at all and perceived Charm School as having refined what already existed. In Becky’s case, there was no separation between the actor and the role.

Other contestants, like Brooke, expressed their identities in ways that correspond to different points in Holmes’s continuum. Brooke is eliminated at the end of the episode “Tore Up from the Floor Up,” after the relationships challenge. Due to her behavior at the challenge, Mo’Nique brands Brooke “the whore of Charm School” at her elimination. In her postshow confessional, Brooke lashes out, “I love Brooke, I love my tits, and no, I’m not going to spit, America,” referring to her elimination from the first season of Flavor of Love, when she spit on New York. In this speech, Brooke occupies the opposite end of the continuum from Becky: she believes

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in a self that is fundamental, with the ordinary self as primary. She asserts a love of self, implying that to love herself is to love her ordinary self and that this is oppositional to the purposes of the show. Thus, it was Brooke who behaved in a promiscuous manner, not Pumkin, the media self defined by Flavor Flav. To attempt to change Brooke would be unacceptable. She furthers this link between her ordinary self and her behavior at the challenge by identifying the promiscuous self with the physical body. At the same time, Brooke disavows other unacceptable behaviors (i.e., spitting like Pumkin on Flavor of Love). Brooke’s speech resonates with those on Holmes’s continuum who claim to have been misrepresented by reality television. In Brooke’s case, she denies the representativeness of her behavior on Flavor of Love and seems to argue that although Charm School purported to represent Brooke, it misunderstood what that meant and painted her and her intentions as negative. Although Brooke exhibits a strong sense of the fundamental self, a gap exists between her perception of herself and the perception of her by her audience, including the Charm School judges.

Because Saaphyri began the show as a blank slate, her comments about her experience on the show are also worth examining. After her win in the “Ghettin’ Phabulous” episode, Saaphyri states that before the show she was “a diamond in the rough,” but she is now “a polished-up diamond . . . a new and improved Saaphyri.” Saaphyri describes the renaming ritual in similar terms, not so much as an erasure of self, despite the obvious symbolism, but as a rebirth:

The name is going to stay the same, but maybe I’m getting rid of some baggage. . . . The only thing I thought of was, I’m gonna burn this piece of paper and get a new piece of paper with writing on it that’s gonna be more glossy . . . a shiny version. . . . You know, to make a dia-mond, the diamond is the same in coal, or you know, once you shine it up.

Not only does Saaphyri’s speech reso-nate with Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer’s language of “finishing touch-es,” but she adopts rhetoric to describe

her new self that is identical to the rhetoric used by Mo’Nique and the judges. During her makeover, Dean Mikki urges Saaphyri to let them give her a new weave, saying, “I want to see that Saaphyri who has emerged.” Likewise, when Mo’Nique dubs Saa-phyri the winner of Charm School, she describes how Saaphyri entered the program with rough edges, but she says that, in the course of the program, she has “watched those edges soften up.” By modeling the way in which Charm School portrays her in her own speech, Saaphyri shows, on the level of language, not just in her perfor-mance at lessons, that she deserves to win. Mo’Nique credits Saaphyri’s win to her ability to channel her passion and drive into the pursuit of personal growth rather than fighting. It would seem, then, that this “new and improved Saaphyri” consists of the best of the old Saaphyri combined with the les-sons of the program. Because the pro-gram merely shaped what was already there—despite theoretically obliterating what was already there in the name tag ritual—Saaphyri leaves the program with an unfragmented persona.

“We Call It Reality, but It Isn’t Really Real”: Competing Definitions of Reality in Charm School

Clearly, in reality television, where the world of the ordinary (the “real” and unscripted) merges with the world of celebrity (the “false” and rehearsed), the question of what reality remains is contentious. According to the rhetoric of Charm School, reality is, in effect, what the contestants hope to regain at the end of their journey, given the close connections drawn between what is real and what is ordinary. This is in keeping with Miller’s insistence that Charm School was more than just a show. The worlds of the scripted and unscripted remain quite separate in this description: the reason that Charm School could portray a transformation was because it transcended its genre; reality programs in general do not evidence reality. Of some less success-ful Charm School contestants, Miller observes the following:

They had forgotten who they were and that they had . . . a real identity elsewhere. . . . We call it reality, but this isn’t really real, you’re not really Krazy, you’re still Heather . . . you still live in San Diego, you’re not really a celebrity. (interview)

But, he is quick to add, “We’re not making fun of people. These are real people.” The contestants, not the cir-cumstance, control the reality. Simi-larly, he denies the oft-quoted maxim that it is impossible to act all the time: “I think it is possible to act all the time for most people” (interview). While a contestant like Schatar may have been perceived as constantly acting by the judges and producers of Charm School, her unmasking as an actress was only possible the show had higher aims.

In contrast to the producer, who ironi-cally defines reality as a television viewer might—that is, what a given contestant would normally do in their “real” lives—Becky and Saaphyri adopted a more prag-matic definition of the real, one which resonates with that of many other real-ity show producers. For them, reality is what is objectively occurring (Andrejevic 130–31). As one of the producers of the early PBS reality program An American Family stated, “If reactions were modi-fied because of the camera, those reac-tions were still valid” (qtd. in Andrejevic 66). Reality television does not claim to represent what a contestant would do in a situation if they were unmonitored. It does claim to represent what a contestant did in the situation they were given. In a personal interview, Becky states, “At the end of the day, it’s hard to act all the time,” although she didn’t deny the pos-sibility that some other contestants were not genuine, and she adds, “Reality TV shows, I don’t know, they’re really being filmed.” Still, she finds a thin line between what is real and what is acting:

When you have to reexplain something that you already went through, you have to experience that emotion again to the best of your ability. They’re not record-ing it right there at that moment. I guess that’s kinda acting.

From Saaphyri’s point of view, reality shows represent reality not only in a literal way, asking contestants at times to walk a line between being genuine and being scripted, but they also portray

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contestants as they truly are:

I think it’s real. . . . You forget that the cameras are there. . . . What you see on TV, you’re like, wow, that’s crazy, but it did happen. . . . Reality TV is real. It’s gonna catch you at the moments that you might not want other people to see, but you still did it. (interview)

Likewise, Saaphyri contends that acting without a script is impossible. Instead, she uses the term “re-actress” to define the behavior that comes from contestants reacting to unexpected stimuli (inter-view). Like Turner’s “celetoids” are not quite ordinary and not quite celebrities, “re-actresses” are not quite acting and not quite not-acting, but rather respond-ing to artificial situations in ways that may make them appear “over the top.”

As previously stated, viewers, producers, and participants often agree that reality television does not necessarily represent reality, or, if it does, it is a reality as prescribed as the type of celebrity it offers its participants. By self-consciously defining reality as the province of the world outside of television and simultaneously violating this premise, which insists on a sharp demarcation between actor and role, “media self” and “ordinary self,” Charm School often set itself in opposition to the experiences of its participants, who may have believed in a unity between their two posited selves. In this way, Charm School’s participants perceived what theorist Kevin Glynn explores: that in the world that spawned reality television, the concept of reality is increasingly meaningless. In his research on tabloid journalism, Glynn finds that it confounds modernist hierarchies of credibility by self-consciously merging fact and fiction so that it is impossible to tell the difference. In a society in which this is the case, Glynn argues, authority and credibility go to that which is the most mediated (47–48). Ultimately, the reality or unreality of reality television is a moot point or, at the very least, indistinguishable. That which is literally occurring on a reality program is not quite fact and not quite fiction, but rather something in between the two. As a reality program, Charm School participated in the very trends that blur reality while defining a very specific reality for its contestants at the same time. Ironically,

Charm School itself was partially responsible for creating the models of the self and reality that make the reality it defended practically meaningless.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Alice Holbrook would like to thank Professor Amy E. Singer and her inter-view subjects for their help with and encouragement of her research. Amy E. Singer would like to thank Alice Holbrook for pursuing this project and for being such a wonderful collaborator.

NOTES

1. Flavor of Love itself was a spin-off from Flavor Flav’s previous VH1 projects, The Surreal Life (2003–06) and Strange Love (2005), and spawned another spin-off, I Love New York (2007–08), in which one of the girls rejected by Flavor Flav seeks a mate for herself with a similar contest.

2. The winner of Charm School received $50,000.

3. As on Big Brother, involvement in the entertainment industry was often cause for elimination on Flavor of Love. During the program’s first season, two contestants were eliminated once it was revealed they had appeared on Blind Date (1999–2006). Tele-vision appearances and a desire for fame were perceived to reflect poorly on contes-tants’ genuine desire for Flavor Flav.

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Alice Holbrook is currently pursuing an MFA in fiction at Syracuse University. Amy E. Singer is an assistant professor of sociol-ogy at Knox College, where she teaches classes on popular culture and gender.

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