I love reality TV shows. The current fascination in our household is for Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares: USA and UK versions. These two shows share the makeover convention of the reality TV genre, but if there is a game show element in these formats it's the 'this is as real as it gets' competition that is the market in restaurant-trading.
How do you win? Survive. Accumulate.
But how do you survive and accumulate?
As influxus, commenting on a post at sOmetim3s, writes:
I’m thinking about the Ramsay tv franchise Kitchen Nightmares and the operation of its foodie show status in spreading violent meritocracy, military-style discipline and property-makes-right to the scale of small restaurants.
Ramsay has been called a celebrity change-management consultant in a recent review of his US version of Kitchen Nightmares in The Age. Exactly. Having trouble managing? Let Gordon and his (hidden) team give you a make-over, sort out where the (pyschological or physical) blocks are in your enterprise and make it make money for you. Modernize. Flexibilize. Believe. Win.
Ramsay's neoliberalizing of the scloretic practices of restaurants, like Bonapartes in Silsden, West Yorkshire, is presented in the form of a compressed change-management master-class shown on TV. In order to unblock the barriers to success, Gordon sets out to shock chefs, floor managers, owners with stunts and volleys of vulgarity. One effect of these interventions is to humble and humilate those who work in these places. This is part of the perverse pleasure of watching the show. And yet after the Ramsay-fication of Bonapartes, for example, these media vectors of humilation into the Restaurant's owners and staff didn't dissipate. After Ramsay's salutary humbling there is a danger that others in the local community might jump on the vector and follow Ramsay's lead: after all one lesson from Kitchen Nightmares is that to survive in the lean & modish market-place of floggin' food, you can never get above your customers or too up yourself. If anger unblocks the energy of enterprise then the byproduct of humilation is what consume.
In the song Rise, PIL's John Lydon sang 'Anger is an energy'. This post-punk anthem continues a theme and method that Lydon began his punk career with: that anger is means of negating an unlivable situation. And from such a negation new possibilities might emerge. Ramsay too uses anger to beak-down people and systems to first negate then to re-form the psyches of these broken-down people, and their systems, with the techniques of neoliberal rationality. (see Wendy Brown here - pdf)
Ramsay tears down pride, sloth, and nostalgia and in this space inserts a realism about profiting from restaurant trading. So, in place of Chef-pride we get simple, cheap, local cuisine, quickly prepared and simple to serve; for sloth we get efficiency motivation, and flexibility; and for nostalgia, Ramsay modernizes - often through a physical renovation, nearly always through a menu reduction and alteration, and by often changing the restaurant's name.
Is this a spiritual exercise?
A strange question for a TV show that is viewed in-between advertisements for shirts, cars, other TV shows . . . Yet, Ramsay's motivational visits to ailing restaurants are both times for healing and for imparting the wisdom of the way. But mostly I think that Ramsay's is a spiritual practice because of the meme at the end of the British shows: the lights in the Restaurant are still on, it's night and the last guests are filtering out. Ramsay might talk to that spot just to the left of camera, a last minute piece of motivational-reportage, on the pavement. The camera pulls back, Ramsay's back is to us, as he pulls his jacket collar up and walks off, as if once more out into the desert or the urban jungle: walking the lone path of the way.
Gordon Ramsay, Kung Fu man?
Will the road rise with Ramsay? What happens to all the model citizens that Gordon hot-wires? Is there something beyond restaurant-neoliberalism? Is my fascination with these shows healthy?
RISE
(Lydon/Laswell)
I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be black
I could be white
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be white
I could be black
Your time has come
Your second skin
The cost so high
The gain so low
Walk through the valley
The written word is a lie
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
May the road rise with you
I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be right
I could be black
I could be white
I could be right
I could be wrong
I could be black
I could be white
They put a hot wire to my head
Cos of the things I did and said
They made these feelings go away
Model citizen in every way
