Trauma Offer
Everyone, everywhere seems to want us to describe our trauma in discrete, describable ways.
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I have decided that this blog will be primarily about music. It’s what many of my readers (fancy!) have come to expect. But culture is a slippery thing these days and the border between forms and influence seems to be ever shifting. This is all to say: allow me this one post about reality TV. It will make sense on this platform I swear!
I have begun to think about how some of the ideas I’ve explored here, primarily how mood is understood by algorithms and in turn how consumers begin to internalize those concepts themselves, is applicable to other ideas in the zeitgeist. And the other night, when I was watching my favorite show, Survivor, something clicked for me. While watching an awkwardly-edited scene where contestants were sharing their respective traumas (for seemingly no narrative reason), I thought: If mood is becoming the central framework through which algorithmic musical recommendation systems are operating, then trauma, is becoming the central framework through which we understand ourselves. It occurred to me, that the simplifying of artform into mood-inducing tools seems to mirror the simplification of ourselves into discrete, legible narratives of trauma.
Ok, now allow me to defend and expand upon why Survivor is relevant and indicative here.
On top of my formal study of music and algorithms, I am an informal, yet deeply dedicated scholar of reality TV. And Survivor, the long-running CBS reality show, is my holy text. I return to it every year, taking in every season with the rigor and passion of the truly devout. To some, what may be a relic of reality TV’s past, an irrelevant social experiment where ordinary people are put in the extraordinary circumstance of having to survive with a tribe of strangers in the Fijian jungle while voting a member off every week, is to me, an ever expanding, ever-enriching cultural text. How the show has shifted in its 42 seasons is a pet project of my analytical mind. I believe the show tells us something vital about the zeitgeist.
Survivor, in their post-40 era, has made a noticeable shift in its editing and casting. The show was off for the beginning of the COVID pandemic and thus the height of the BLM uprisings, so when they came back, they had a mandate to improve upon a shaky, often deeply problematic record in regards to diversity and equity. And we have seen that; the past two seasons have been much more racially and sexually diverse, which is a great thing for the show for so many reasons. A diversity of experience only helps to improve the show’s fundamental dynamic as a social experiment. Unfortunately though, Survivor seems to have gotten another mandate that, to me, has really hindered the narrative benefits of this much needed shift.
Survivor, it seems, has gone to the Brene Brown school of “vulnerability is power.” Brene Brown, a pop psychologist, motivational speaker and emotional guru for an emotionally alienated generation of knowledge workers has become incredibly important in our culture and has helped to popularize terms like “vulnerability” and “trauma” in the popular vernacular. Brown, in her series of Ted Talks and specials, has a real gift for selling the idea that “vulnerability” is the balm to our many problems. Centuries of a patriarchal stance towards emotion has made us reticent to be open and transparent about our struggles, to cry, to admit we’re feeling defeated. In this context, she argues, there’s a power, a radicalism, in transparency and openness. There’s a power in “telling our stories.”
I don’t want to fully shit on this idea because contextually and in many instances, it is a useful concept. It is good that we are opening up. It is good that we are not bottling up what are often private struggles and thus normalizing them so those that face daunting challenges don’t feel as if their experience is singularly difficult. But “vulnerability” or “opening up” as an unambiguous good on it’s own has always struck me as odd. I mean, sometimes surely, but as a universal value? Why? Isn’t there some Aristotelian ideal here where certain situations call for a comforting openness and others a certain stoicism? And aren’t certain experiences, certain feelings, too difficult/nuanced/overwhelming to open up about in clearly legible terms? With the rise of Brown’s ideas, I have sensed an overwhelming rise in the amount that “vulnerability” is asked for. In dating. At the workplace. Whole shows like Red Table Talk, are premised on the idea that being “vulnerable” is always the ideal value to aspire.
On Survivor this shift has meant that during each episode, the show cuts away to two or three contestants and they tell us their “story,” or rather, their trauma. Its a move so predictable this season that these segments even have their own music and filter; suddenly everything is sepia, old photos flash by, a gravely voice-over takes center stage. But what’s even more jarring than these sudden tonal/stylistic shifts is that you can literally hear the rote, narrative motions of the stories as the contestants tell them. And there is a sense that they are actively and maybe even forcibly being asked to package their lives into neat packages of struggle and overcoming.
For example, one of my favorite contestants this season, Lydia, happens to also be 22 and has a recognizable Gen Z humor and affect. I enjoyed simply observing her as a contestant on the show, and getting to know her by seeing how she acts as the show throws various challenges her way. I felt like I was getting to see a subtle, interesting picture of a human, and also getting to come to my own conclusions about her. But now in the context of “telling stories,” Lydia had a cut-away section where she relents upon her struggles.
What piqued my interest about her “opening up” was the completely unenthused, prewritten tone of her confessional. In a quick-cut away reflection, Lydia reflects: “You know growing up as a woman, I, of course, struggled with body image. But it’s really cool to be out here and feel like, yeah, I can be out here and do this!” And like, okay, yes, totally! But this had literally nothing at all to do with the show and really did not add any depth to her storyline or anything about her as a contestant on the show. Simply suddenly, we were learning more about Lydia, but not — I don’t know — her passions, or accomplishments, or hobbies, or curiosities. We were getting “vulnerability.” We were getting struggle. But does she want to “tell her story” through this particular lens? Now we will never really know Lydia’s thoughts on the matter, bu the fact that her story was riddled with “you know”’s and “of course”’s signals to me that Lydia conceived of her struggle as universal, and not maybe, the specific core of her being.
The term “trauma dump,” referring to an often intense, and un-consented to sharing of heavy trauma, has risen in popularity in recent years. These little stories though, that can be seen on Survivor and so many other venues, may be thought of as not a dump, but an offer. “Here is my struggle, polished in a blurb.”
The rise of the "trauma offer” ties in well with the recent rise in the notion that trauma, is a constituive, defining aspect of ourselves. In a recent exploration of the rise of “the trauma plot,” Paul Seghal writes:
Trauma has become synonymous with backstory, but the tyranny of backstory is itself a relatively recent phenomenon—one that, like any successful convention, has a way of skirting our notice. Personality was not always rendered as the pencil-rubbing of personal history.
As Seghal writes, the notion that our personality stems from our describable history, our communicable struggles, is a recent idea. In times past, personality was considered intrinsic, immutable. But today, in the squishy soup of experience, of identity, of self-conception, trauma has become an irrefutable origin. In the chaos that is modernity, we grasp onto our trauma as the defining source of all.
But what if 1. we don’t subscribe to the notion that our trauma is The Constitutive Aspect of Ourselves and 2. we feel that “our trauma” is not able to be neatly represented in discernible, quotable terms. The call to “open up” that Brown often alludes to, and is so often practiced on talk shows like The Drew Barrymore Show or on shows like Survivor, is opening up with a time-limit: quick digestible bites. Because I could give you my queer trauma in a neat, little trauma offer. But like truly, my actual sense of how I came to my sexuality is closer to “ummmm I realized I had all these strange desires and urges and ummmm that made me do and feel strange, scary things that really ummmm made me act in a strange, sad ways and ummm I’ve just been grappling with that since!” Not very brandable!
Which brings me back to the connection with ideas I’ve discussed here previously. There’s a dialectic I’m seeing between technology and its limits and in turn how we conceptualize our selves. Instagram, Tik Tok, Twitter, all are limited creative mediums. Instagram gives you a photo and caption to express yourself. Tik Tok, a short form video. Twitter, 240 characters. The rise of the conception of trauma as fundamental to our understanding of self has also risen in conjunction with these limiting technologies. I think that’s where this neat, quick trauma offer partially comes from. Its a form that, on top of being representative of a quick-mind social media era, also works great for TV. And TV simply reinforces and normalizes the trauma offer, the quick story.
So I guess, in messy, unrbandable conclusion: I want us to become more skeptical of these neat stories, to begin to refuse telling them ourselves and uncritically accepting them in others. I could offer you my trauma, but I rather let you know that “shit’s been weird!!” So please, Survivor producers, cultural creators, Tik Tokers! Hear me! Stop normalizing these quippy little catastrophes! With every neat offer, you simply normalize them, and this should not be normal, least of all expected! Let us feel wierd in unspeakable peace!!!!!!!
kudos from one survivor fan to another (black widow brigade supremacy!!)
this is so interesting and something i've also been thinking about! especially in regards to the social media aspect of it and how normalized self-marketing has become--online, we're expected to present aestheticized and airbrushed versions of ourselves. a big, and valid, critique of this is that we're not showing our "true" selves--that everything online is fake. and in addition to being an easy consumer grab in shows/books/other forms of mass-marketed media, i think that the idea that our trauma is the truest part of us has sprung up almost as an antithesis to the fakeness of social media, but neither side is the full picture.