Makeover Culture: Becoming a Better Self

Abstract

Cecily Mwaniki’s self-help book Becoming the Better You hit the shops in 2009 to fight for a share of an annual $13 billion US market. It jostles for shelf-space among a host of other titles enticing readers onto the path of becoming a better parent, lover, friend or Becoming the Best Version of Yourself – the title Matthew Kelly’s (2002) motivational CD recording. Like the others, Mwaniki’s book facilitates the process of becoming a better you through encouragement and an expertdesigned action plan of visualisation, practical steps and rules. It’s clear that becoming better requires work and a campaign strategy. These points are most dramatically underscored in Gael Lindenfield’s (2000) Self Esteem: Simple Steps to Develop Self-Worth and Heal Emotional Wounds, who encourages her readers to ‘survey the enemy field’, ‘fly the flag and declare war’, ‘sharpen your weapons’ and ‘lay plans for victory day’. These battle rally–cries indicate something of the heroic effort involved in becoming a better you, and of course, it’s the skirmishes of these battles that make up most Lifestyle TV programming. Shows, in particular the makeover show, are filled with often unflinching detailed commentary on the labours of becoming thinner, uncluttered or fashionable. What Not To Wear, for example, devotes more airtime to the trails of becoming appropriately fashionable than it does the end result. What these lifestyle shows and self-help books share with the Fat Face buttons discussed in the previous chapter is the conviction that ‘being’ is not enough; but they also suggest something else: they celebrate and promote the importance, vitality and heroics of a project of becoming.

Self-improvement is a continuing process that lasts a lifetime. Be good to yourself. You deserve to be the best you can be.

Thompson (1999, p. 1)