The Comeback for Humiliation is Glamor

The Comeback for Humiliation is Glamor

The Comeback, created and written by Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King, redefined how good television could be when airing in 2005 and almost ten years later in 2014. All other shows immediately entered a creative recession afterwards — the show was meta before the zeitgeist could readily recite the definition of meta-narrative. The season 1 poster encapsulates the show’s interest in the ideas of glamor and humiliation in the setting of reality television. Kudrow and King designed the poster to showcase Kudrow as her character Valerie Cherish: smiling wide, standing in a meat grinder while her dress is being forcibly unspooled to mere shimmered shreds. Kudrow says Cherish is “happily throwing herself in,” and King continues, “She’s grinding herself up to make television, and then we’ve seen that has really happened on every single show. So people know, we will not have to explain a woman who doesn't have financial problems putting herself in front of a camera and putting herself in harm’s way.” Kudrow told The Guardian in 2015 to promote season 2 of The Comeback that “The feedback from that first season was that it was really hard to watch. I think for men especially it was really uncomfortable. I was aware that it was mainly straight, white guys who couldn’t watch it.” I think this is because straight white men are not drawn to The Comeback’s campiness or the humor of being humiliated in order to feast upon a granule of success– just not subjects that they might find relatable. While initial critical reception was negative, The Comeback has achieved cult status in the canon of TV favorites of women and queer people. Kudrow offers why younger people might receive it better as well: “[The Comeback] really hit a nerve with young people. I guess they are so used to everything humiliating, because that’s what the world is. I’d go to college campuses and there’d be questions about Friends, sure, but then someone would be like, ‘Yeah, yeah, Friends was great, but can we talk about The Comeback.” Young people’s humiliation is still in the outer layer of the crest and they have not spent decades burying it in their unreachable molten core. Yet sparks of evidence of Valerie Cherish’s core of vulnerability fly out without warning in the The Comeback, so she must become the centerpiece of this essay that examines the relationship of humiliation and glamor, first through mechanisms in relation to power, then of attention.

With her face-numbing smile and perpetual search for good lighting, Valerie Cherish's desire to be valued is formed around being perceived as glamorous. Valerie thinks as a longtime card-carrying SAG member that this is something owed to her, for glamor has historically been situated comfortably in the dainty hands of the rich and famous, co-opted by celebrities for the better part of a century. Glamorous, shortened to “glam,” was slang first recorded in 1936, then in 1939 when the magazine “Glamor of Hollywood'' was created (renamed Glamour in 1943), resulting in a popularized effort to canonize the aesthetic of glamor. The name shift came with a branding shift from just the subjects of Hollywood starlights to a broader view of glamor for “for the girl with the job,” underscoring that glamor is defined by ambition. Yet the starlet version of glamor is still our primary image of glamor. A star’s ambition can be fast-acting or long-earned in the entertainment industry, which as an industry operates with little concern for conservation of resources or future-planning, reveling in the ability to enact something now. Generally, though, the assumption is that fun is for youth, glamor is for maturity. New Money. Old Hollywood Glamor. Fun requires no industry, but glamor is commitment. Glamor has heft, implies sacrifice, requires money– is title-like in its expectation. Glamor is attitude plus insistence, style plus fashion. The allure of aspiration. These are vocational concepts; they’re kinetic knowledge and occupants of fantasy. The ultimate reward for success in Hollywood is the title or association with glamor, and failure to embody this is just an average association of Hollywood with humiliation.

Beyond presumption, there’s a naivety to ambition, a childishness to desire that kind of breaks your heart when someone announces clearly what they want. The Comeback is catching that on camera: Valerie, with her theatrical accent that aims to signify glamor, announcing her limitless desire to be a successful actress, is actually weirdly vulnerable to witness. Her ushering her co-star of ‘Room and Bored’ and first time actress Juna ‘into the business’ with pet name “Baby Girl” is an attempt to be an authority on success that is like a run in a seasoned showgirl’s fishnet stockings – practiced, but a little desperate in almost an affectionate way that borderlines on pity. The Comeback spotlights the ideas upon which Hollywood is built — Fun and Glamor are unwelcoming and extremely fragile in that they are tethered to humiliation.

The core connection between humiliation and glamor is that of status, for humiliation is an act of lowering status through debasement of pride, while glamor is an external manifestation of a quality of charm or attractiveness– an elevation of status. Of course, money is rooted in these ideas in that a demonstration of glamor is proof of prosperity while humiliation is evidence of failure to thrive in which access to financial resources contextualizes the mobility of status. Money redefines your capacity for glamor, provides the limitation of achievement, yet does not convolute the sanctity of aspiration. There’s an objectivity to glamor, a recognition of awe, a feeling of being sensationalized, but because of the fantastical nature of glamor, it is a fantasy that is paradoxically subjective and personal. For the subjectivity of glamor too renders aspiration a constant moving target akin to the difficulty of catching a lightning bug to glow in between your enclosed hands. This difficulty borders magic which invokes the natural connotation of crookedness adjacent to glamor that stems from its sixteenth century occult connotation (to cast a glamor, spell-like) – that there’s magic or trickery in the swindling of glamor. The real swindling of present day Hollywood stars is a team of paid professionals (glam squad, if you will) for the star's hair, makeup, and outfit. Yet this elaborate process to transform an actor into an object of glamor, nosedives into comedic disaster in the life of Valerie Cherish. For the ceremonial day of glamor in which she begins her reality show in season 1, the pipes burst in her house, rendering her without hot water. Or at a red carpet premiere in season 1, Valerie wears her custom garment backwards and misses the important photo opts trying to to flip it around. These are just funny scenarios that embarrass her, but her smile is still adhesive applied to her face. In this, The Comeback argues that the demand for the perception of glamor is foolish. But I think it is an important argument to make that glamor can be a form of hope too, that author of Happy Hour, Marlowe Granados emphasizes in an essay about redefining glamor during COVID isolation, she writes: We all have to revert to being a little childish and remember our sense of fantasy. Saidiya Hartman writes in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments that “Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence.” Often, we are made to feel that beauty is out of our grasp and that our pursuit of it is frivolous. But what if it’s exercises in imagination and fantasy that make it all worthwhile?

Granados articulates that glamor as an ideal is belief, a sense of hope in fueling creativity and desire for improvement. That frivolity is life-giving in the abstract sense, that it is purpose-making. This belief in the glamor of success is still the guiding star that informs Valerie’s forced resilience in face of humiliation (for better or worse).

An essential humiliation (and glamor, in a way) text in early American literature is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Hester Prynne, the novel’s protagonist, is ostracized from her small Puritan village for adultery and birthing an ‘illegitimate child,’ Pearl, so in turn she is forced to wear a scarlet ‘A’ on all her garments to immortalize her public shame. Hester, though, is a skilled embroiderer and the town seamstress, so she would sew her symbol of humiliation elaborately onto her dresses, imbuing the letter with a sense of power: “the scarlet letter had the effect of the cross on a nun’s bosom. It imparted to the wearer a kind of sacredness, which enabled her to walk securely amid all peril.” This emblem of intended shame beautifies her relationship with self-security. Yet this power is rigid in its gift, for in association with nuns, Hawthorne repeatedly emphasizes that this power comes from a place of sexlessness, a loss of sexuality in womanhood. Having sex was the catalyst for her public degradation, but the costume of sexlessness is her ticket to power. (Or in Easy A, Emma Stone’s Olive’s costume of shamelessness is Party City lingerie corset tops with a ribbon red ‘A’ hot glued to the chest.)

For Valerie Cherish, sexlessness is a form of powerlessness in the entertainment industry. King unpacks Valerie’s struggle to get booked in Hollywood, stressing that employment is directly tied to sex appeal for women in that, “Most comedy is built on archetypes, and in most TV comedies, the female archetypes were very, very limited. There was the sexy young one that everyone wanted to have sex with, and then there was the kooky, older one, who was over the hill. You weren’t both.” This is a very early aughts outlook on roles for women, but it's a context that informs Valerie’s desire to be seen as attractive; in bringing her poster of a sexy magazine photoshoot of her younger self to show the crew after Juna’s Vogue cover in season 1, her signature busty scoop neck top/push-up bra combo, obsession with the state of her hair, and multiple meltdowns about the drab lighting in season 2. Simultaneously, she fears being unlikable, so she is constantly injecting suggestions that would make her sitcom character Aunt Sassy more likable (i.e. the rewrite of the racist Korean BBQ joke about killing puppies). Throughout the series, the concern to be both likable and attractive is Valerie’s fierce navigator that she believes will lead her into a place of power. Of course, the joke is that all the entry points to access rooms of power are blocked by people who don’t care for her to have power. Her desire for power is the thesis in the pathetic nature of her announcing her own ‘comeback.’ This desperation is so freshly articulated at the start of season 2 with Valerie bursting into the Chateau Marmont without a reservation, only managing entrance after the host inadvertently punches her in the stomach, allowing her passage as an apology so she can option her new reality show to Andy Cohen during his lunch with RuPaul. Cohen is entertained by Valerie’s desperation and mistreatment, nudging her with a “did you make a scene?” after hearing about her run-in with the host, knowing that the tension between the inevitable humiliation and the maintenance of dignity is the essential element of reality TV. (There’s an argument too that that is the daily objective of being alive as well, which is why reality TV is such a good mechanism for metaphor.)

Another reason that defines the survival of the connection between humiliation and glamor is attention. Famously, in the film Lady Bird, Sister Sarah Joan questions Lady Bird’s begrudgingly attentive observation of her hometown, Sacramento, asking “Don’t you think that’s kind of the same thing? Love and attention?” Attention is the engine of love. And while Valerie’s relationship with her husband Mark is one of the most important heterosexual couples of all time, the central relationship founded in love is between Valerie and her beloved hairstylist and assistant, Mickey Deane, played by Michael Morris. Valerie’s primary redemptive characteristic is her love for Mickey. Although it's shelled in protective dismissiveness, its core is the vulnerability of care for one another. Mickey is not out yet in season 1; a running gag that an older, femme hairstylist doesn’t think people will realize he’s gay (another layer in the show’s layered relationship with self-awareness). It also articulates the nature of Mickey and Valerie’s relationship in the context of diva worship. The fact that Lisa Kudrow and Michael Patrick King are a straight woman and a gay man at the helm of the show highlights this historically symbiotic relationship. It is important that Mickey devotes attention to Valerie’s success to create a diva worthy of worship, and in turn essential that Valerie has the attention of Mickey to recognize her own worthiness. The show proves that Valerie is a very talented actress in her comedic prowess in season 1 and grounded dramatic performance in season 2, so she is a worthy subject of praise. In the season 1 premiere of The Comeback, Valerie hosts her own premiere party which Mickey attends with his longtime partner, Robert, as a public coming out, to which Valerie replies, “Well, now that’s out of the way.” This is a big moment for Mickey that coincides with Valerie’s mortification of the edited version of herself featured in The Comeback premiere. In this, the existence of celebrating Valerie’s premiere is an occasion for celebration of Mickey’s true self, but in her debasement, he is still comfortable in himself. In his controversial 1996 article,“The Death of Camp: Gay Men and Hollywood Diva Worship, from Reverence to Ridicule,” Daniel Harris represents the dependence of humiliation and glamor on one another in context of reliance of diva worship in the gay community:

Given how integral the star's aura was to the homosexual's sense of power and masculinity, the humiliation the celebrity experienced in public was something the gay man, as her idolator, experienced in private, on the level of his self-conception. In addition to old age, a second factor led to the actress's devastating loss of credibility. If glamor is a hoax just waiting to be exposed, the very camera that exalted these women was also the agent of their downfall, the instrument of their torture, the divinely sanctioned method of punishment for their pride.

Harris definitely articulates the emotionality connected between fan and star during a period of failure, but fails to consider the moment of retrospective reclamation. In her desire to be loved publicly through committing to her own reality show, Valerie is punished for her self-importance with her unlikable depiction in The Comeback, mainly through her punching a writer in the stomach (after they edit out his cruel treatment of her). But the audience is even more entertained by her villainy than her relatability, because audiences love that they are let in on the Hollywood secret that glamor is a hoax, or that glamor has been redefined to be contingent on humiliation via the vessel of Valerie as a reality star. We need an underdog, we are programmed to crave vulnerability as recompense for success. The success of Valerie’s reality show feeds her ego and fulfills our TV diet, but in season 2, she comes back hungry for more. I think it is easy to illustrate the cynical, cyclical nature of disgraced stars and adoring fans, but I think there is kinship in shared feelings of rejection. We watch reality TV to feel superior to the humiliated, or to be inspired to a superior sense of self in the celebrated– it is ultimately an interest in ourselves. This attention is a positive feedback loop of acquired attention that is both self-involved and hopeful. These bonds tie divas and the LGBTQIA+ community (and fan community), because through loving a diva, there is recognition in the capacity of joy in the costume of woven humiliation and glamor that gives an individual hope to move towards community from a place of isolation. I think we need our divas to fail in order to wear the garment of reclamation as a part of their public power of glamor. Of course, The Comeback embodies this idea in a meta sense in its arc from the quick cancellation of the first season to its current status of a cult classic with continuous fan support.

In the season 2 finale, Valerie relinquishes her potential for power for the other intrinsic human desire that renders us pathetic – love, in literally running out of the Emmys before her category is announced to visit Mickey in the hospital after his heart attack. Michael Morris contextualizes that scene in how defining it is for Valerie and Mickey’s relationship in a 2015 interview, “When she gets there and finds out it was the medication and he’s just a frightened mess in the bed — and she’s comforting him for a change — it really revealed the depth of their relationship. A lot of times we skate on the surface, and it’s only when the rubber hits the road that you can plumb the depths of what it is.” The real surprise of the series is the genuine emotion of unstaged reality. Valerie ditches Jane and the camera crew at the Emmys without concern for the reality show. The camera that follows Valerie out into the rain is not The Camera of the show, but this camera is meant to be a disregard of acknowledging the fourth wall, we get to see the scene to complete our television show not to complete Valerie’s. The Comeback resents the binary of comedy or tragedy; in an interview King rhetorically asks, “Is Valerie funny or is she tragic?” explaining, “We realized in the second season that The Comeback is withholding. We show you all the ‘raw footage’ and you have to figure out what you feel about it. It’s a great puzzle for the audience.” The puzzle, though, is not an effort to piece together a single image of the show, but a puzzle to evaluate your own priorities in your reactions to Valerie’s choices– your own moments of embarrassment, of guilt, of triumph.

A moment that embodies all those emotions, and is ultimately the pinnacle of the series, is the infamous scene when Valerie records “I Will Survive” as the would-be theme song for her reality show in season 1. At first, the song choice seems childish, overdone, sanguine, cliché, too obvious of a choice; but the longer the scene continues, and the more Mickey reacts excitedly, you start to question your own sense of pretension. You start to empathize with Valerie and her singing. Leslie Jamison describes this sensation in her essay ‘In Defense of Saccharin(e)” from her book The Empathy Essays as a theory that “If the saccharine offers some undiluted spell of feeling–oversimplified and unabashedly fictive–then perhaps its value lies in the process of emerging from its thrall: that sense of unmasking, that sense of guilt.” This scene and the show as a whole asks you to question your own guilt. In terms of the “I Will Survive” scene, the cringe comes from the knowledge that the Gloria Ganyor classic is steeped in heralded history of being one of the greatest disco songs of all time– an anthem of resilience during the AIDS epidemic of the late 20th century. Yet here is this white woman applying it to her struggles with the dismissiveness of the entertainment industry. Kudrow’s own horror of singing washes the scene with a clarity of humiliation even more present. She’s wearing an artisan caftan, singing with the boxiness of a spirited yet rhythmically challenged middle schooler reading a dramatic Shakespeare monologue aloud in class. Mickey’s jiving and smiling in the sound booth. Valerie starts pointing back, punctuating each lyric with a sharp scolding finger. She gets the note that it’s “too vanilla,” needs to be “more street;” the producer suggests for her to channel the emotion of an unjust breakup. Valerie booms back with simply a louder volume and an emphatically wrinkled nose to portray more energy. She’s screaming and throwing her hands up, “Go on now, GO/ WALK out the DOOR” with the fervor of a soap actress’ climatic exit speech. She’s screeching with shining eyes as the camera zooms in, she’s so in the zone she just exclaims “Sorry, it’s just so good!” She clutches her hot water to relax her throat with a cackle of “Angry hurts my throat.” Valerie is denying her own pain to put on a show for the attention of the fan in Mickey, but also performs it for him on a personal level; this song is their shared favorite song, so it doesn’t really matter what we think.

bell hooks writes in All About Love: New Visions that “The practice of love is not a place of safety,” that is to say that The Comeback does not offer that love is the answer that saves Valerie from humiliation, but it is the reason the she incurs it, she loves acting that’s why she’s willing to fall on her face for it. She visits Mickey in the hospital because she loves him, forgoing the glamor of an awards show acceptance speech. If humiliation and glamor are chain-linked by Hollywood expectation, then love is the barbed wire that carves into your skin after you try to trespass into the territory of success – love as a reality that bleeds and makes you question if you should keep going. Love is not the answer to Valerie’s success or security, but love is the internal voice that asks her if she’s in the right seat.