I caught the last fifteen minutes of the last episode (hopefully forEVER) of Unstapled last night, and felt totally justified in abandoning my recaps. The moral to the story is: nobody learns anything, nothing changes, but at least it’s over. Bust out the champers! On the up side, Chynna Phillips (late of Wilson Phillips) turned out, and was kind of a snarky bitch in the best possible way. On the down side, the reunited W-P sang “Hold On” (oh shit, THAT VIDEO, LOLs-a-million) in Carnie’s living room with Rob on guitar, which means I have that damn song stuck in my head even now, try as I might to scrub it clean with the scouring power of Lady Gaga (oh shit, THAT VIDEO, for totally different and awesome reasons — check out the hot fat chicks enjoying prison life with our heroine). There is also a startling lack of Unstapled reruns on the GSN schedule, which would seem to indicate that the show’s not been doing so well, considering they had been replaying it seven to eight times in a single weekend.

But now, Carnie is out of my life forever, so on to the fatshions.

My loves, it is with a heavy fat heart that I must inform you that this will be my final Unstapled recap, for reasons to be explained below. My sincere thanks for all your support, and I’m sorry I won’t be able to follow it through to the bitter end.

Previously: Carnie made plans to pitch a nebulous “product line” to QVC in New York. Carnie got measured by Dallas (with Rob’s help). Rob bought Carnie a bracelet which she may or may not find beautiful, thoughtful, and charming. Carnie still struggled with the pesky alcoholism issue.

We start straightaway with Carnie in confessionial, explaining that Dr. Oz has called and asked her to be on his show. Oh, that should go well. Carnie, of course, said yes, and since she’s also supposed to meet with QVC plus she’s filming this reality show you might have heard about, the whole family’s packing up (well, Carnie, Rob, the kids, and Aunt Dee Dee) and jet-setting to the opposite coast to both “enjoy ourselves, as well as get some work done.” Again, that should go well. We see the traveling through a series of still snapshots of the family at the airport and on the plane, so there’s no discussion of the potential challenges of Flying While Fat, which is disappointing given recent events. They arrive at the Omni Berkshire Place where Carnie & co have a massive suite. We are then treated to some totally gratuitous shots of Aunt Dee Dee wandering through the hotel looking for her room (!!!WACKY!!!), which I gotta say I find a bit insulting, primarily to my sense of humor but to Dee Dee herself as well.
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Last time: Carnie got shit on by Dallas. Then she got shit on by her husband. Then she and her husband went to see a sex therapist, who, luckily, did not shit on anyone.

We start, predictably, with Rob and Carnie goofing around in the kitchen, making plans to go get tattoos from Kat Von D at LA Ink. Oh, wait, that’s not predictable at all. What the hell? Carnie confessions that Rob has a tattoo that “goes all the way from his shoulder down his arm,” making it sound really big and impressive. I assume Carnie has fewer tattooed friends than I do. Carnie asks Rob where he’s going to get his new ink installed, and he says, stroking his t-shirted chest, “Riiiight here, babydoll,” and when Carnie asks him to pull up his shirt to look, she asks, “Did you shave your chest?” Rob answers, “I did a little bit of manscaping.” I hate the word “manscaping,” kids. Always have, always will.

Carnie wants to draw on Rob’s chest. They’re acting all cutesy and playful with each other and I want to be feeling all “AWWW” about it, but it’s sort of icky. Like I need to hit my brain with some Comet cleanser and a scouring pad. Turns out Rob and Carnie are planning to get their kids’ names tattooed on them. Carnie asks Rob where she should get hers — isn’t this something you should sort out ahead of making the appointment to do the deed? — and Rob suggests her neck. Damn you, Rob, I laughed. But this is but a skirmish in the war — this isn’t over. Carnie’s already pre-freaking out about the tattoo. Well, at least things are normal.

Next, the “girls” are going lingerie shopping. The “girls” include Carnie, Carnie’s mom, Aunt Dee Dee, and Owen OMG IT’S CASS ELLIOTT’S DAUGHTER WOW. Sadly, DanielBrian are nowhere in sight. Carnie confessions that she doesn’t know if other people go lingerie shopping with their family, but for her this is pretty typical. Calling this just a lingerie shop is kind of misleading, though — there are corsets and feathery floggers and masks. Also, there are couches aplenty, and the “girls” are the only people present. At one point, putting on a black bejewled mask, Carnie’s mom says, “My husband won’t recognize me, that’s perfect.” We know where Carnie gets her sense of humor, at least.

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“This week, on a Very Special Unstapled….” Trigger Warning: This week’s recap touches on both alcoholism and WLS.

Last week: Carnie is a giant fatass (though she says it like it’s a bad thing). Dallas tore through Carnie’s pantry. Carnie went back to work at The Newlywed Game. There was farting.

We begin this week’s episode with Carnie confessioning that she woke up this morning feeling as though her whole world was “wrong”. And if that weren’t bad enough, Dallas is here, and he’s wearing a shirt with the sleeves still attached. OH MY GOD now I feel as though MY whole world is wrong. Dallas, sleeves? Why?

They head out to the back deck with their yoga mats and begin the pre-workout stretching. Dallas asks Carnie if she’s been doing the workout without him. She says no. In fairness, in my experience, doing that kind of choreographed workout by oneself is boring at best. This makes it an exercise form very unlike, say, putting Lady Gaga on as loud as your neighbors can stand and free-form dancing around your living room in your underwear, which is a workout best done alone. Not that I would know. But following choreography without a leader can be frustrating and seriously unfun. (Here, I almost made a joke employing the word “CHORE-eography” but I have refrained. Be grateful.) At least with a DVD or something there’s a pretend-person there with you, shouting encouragement with a deranged smile.

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Over the weekend, the lovely and talented Joy Nash left a comment on the Kirstie Alley’s Twitter Wisdom post that read, in part:

“Your posts are forcing me to see her humanity and I don’t like it one bit.”

Here, Joy has said something in a few words that would have taken me pages to explain. I want to take a moment to explain my approach to being so hard on fat celebrities, whether it’s via extreme satire, snarky recaps, or simply being a smartass in my usual way, while still trying to recognize that humanity.

The really real reality is that famous people are still people. They’re simply people with an audience, and occasionally with very strange lives. (Not to mention houses with walls around them.) They’re not evil, nor are they sainted; they’re just flawed, conflicted disasters like the rest of us, trying to get by on their love of performance. And that’s not something to be ashamed of, even when the media they make is terrible. They’re following their dreams, and being willing to do so publicly is admirable.

To be precise, I don’t think Carnie Wilson is a bad person. I don’t think Kirstie Alley is a bad person. I am rather made deeply sad when otherwise smart, outspoken women are laid low by body hatred. And sometimes, I have to laugh at things so I don’t cry. Hence: the snark. It’s easy to look at celebrities who frequently spout body-hating garbage and think they’re merely perpetuating a system of fascist beauty standards that hurt far more people than they benefit, and that’s true. But famous people struggle like the rest of us, if not more, because their exposure is that much more dramatic. It’s one thing to have your mother or your significant other give you a hard time about being fat; it’s something else entirely to hear it from TMZ.com, or to have it impact your ability to succeed in your career. Does that mean famous folks get a free pass? Fuck no. I can’t speak for everyone, but they get more scrutiny from me because they have a voice that reaches more people, and thus has the capacity to change things more than the average person. It’s true they don’t have a responsibility to do so, and it’s their right to do whatever they want with their bodies, but I also have a right to be angry with media figures who choose to actively support and distribute ideas that I believe are deeply damaging to the rest of us. It doesn’t mean I hate these people; I don’t know them enough to hate them. It simply means I’m holding them to a certain standard, even knowing I’ll be forever disappointed.

Carnie and Kirstie and a million other nameless women like them are living with blinders on; we all thought there was no alternative to hating ourselves, to deprivation and self-loathing and misery, until one day we discovered otherwise. Some people find new ways of being through friends or acquaintences, on the internet, or by accident. They randomly, or bravely, pick up a book that uses the word “fat” in novel and shocking ways, and lots of other words, in contexts and implications they’d never before considered. Some people see a confident fat woman performing, in a play or a song or a television sitcom, and they suddenly realize she is amazing, and they realize they can also be amazing. And some people see the light on their own; they get so fed up and so angry that one day they open their eyes and where once there was a long, dark corridor running in only two directions, fat and thin, that there is instead a vivid and multifacted three-hundred-sixty-degree universe all around, shimmering with infinite diversity and infinite possibilities, and they see that the fears that were shackling them to sadness and self-loathing are just wisps in the wind. What is the worst part of being fat? Hating yourself. Stop hating yourself, and being fat—or just not being thin, or just being in your body, whatever your body may look like—becomes a routine experience. When you hate yourself, you will always find things to hate; no matter how much weight you lose, you will never be satisfied, because the person you are will not change. It is necessary to accept ourselves for any of us to develop real security and self-esteem. It’s only through acceptance, of all our lives’ changing circumstances, internal and external, that any of us will find our happiness.

So remember this, whenever I’m viciously skewering some fat-hating famous person on the end of my invisible internets-pen: I’m doing it because I expect more from people with this kind of cultural power, because I want everyone on this whole bloody planet to find a peace with themselves that doesn’t rely on a number on the scale. It comes from a place of hope, and not hatred. Think of it as tough love, and I’d do no less for anyone, no matter who they are.

Here’s a shocking confession: I don’t really watch much television. There are but a few shows I follow methodically. Mad Men. Sons of Anarchy (SO underrated). Also, So You Think You Can Dance, when it’s on (when is it on next?). And there are other shows I watch when I happen to notice them. Man vs Wild, because Bear Grylls is completely off his kit and I’m fascinated that someone gave him a television program. The Universe and those crazy Planet Earth series in HD, because they’ve practically got narcotic effects. Sometimes Family Guy. My husband is a huge fan of Metalocalypse so I wind up seeing lots of that — actually, I should say, I wind up seeing it over and over again.

I think that’s about it.

This is all to say that my lack of television-exposure is useful in writing these recaps, as I am able to point out and laugh at things that might blow right past those who watch this stuff on a routine basis. But it also has its drawbacks. By the end of the More to Love recapping extravaganza last year, the concept of spending another hour in front of the TV taking notes was almost unbearable. To give a sense of my so-called process: each episode of Unstapled is thirty minutes long, with commercials. Subtract the commercials and you get, what, twenty-three or so minutes of show. It takes me between 90 minutes and two hours to recap, with the resulting post being around 3,300 words. The hour-long More to Love was a horror of even more ludicrous proportions, requiring between three to four and a half hours of watching and writing for each recap (usually spread over two days), which averaged around 5,000 words apiece. I do this for free. Why do I do this for free? I have no idea. I am sick in the head. Also I love writing, for any reason, which itself may qualify as a form of head-sickness. It’s true that if I had an editor (and I’m sure some of y’all wish that I did) the results would likely be shorter, but I’d still write them first in their original long-ass state.

Also in meta news: Unstapled is repeated about twenty times in a single weekend, clogging up my DVR like a dead rat in a drain. It actually caused my DVR to delete a bunch of episodes of The Universe I was saving for the weekend, so to speak. It’s as if Unstapled is forcefully trying to take over my already-limited TV-watching life.

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Previously: Carnie set herself up as the cocaine supplier to a local dealer. Oh, apologies, what I meant to say was Carnie successfully convinced a baked-goods shop to sell her baked goods. See, last week Dallas told us that food is the same thing as cocaine so I got confused. Also, Carnie was harrassed by her manager; she hated the clothes Art the Stylist brought her; she confessed to Dallas about her financial problems.

In a new interactive effort, on Tuesday I put up a poll on the sidebar asking: “Would you frame and display a giant print of yourself on a 1991 cover of Rolling Stone?” It seems most people feel as I do, as the most popular answer was “Maybe, but I’d hang it somewhere ironic, like the bathroom.”

This week, we open with Ren & Stimpy music, which is bizarre and yet appropriate. Carnie is returning from a shopping trip with DanielBrian (whom she repeatedly, both in last week’s episode and this one, refers to as her “bubies”, which… man, I want to find it cute and endearing, but I just can’t). Again, Carnie clarifies that DanielBrian are her “gay BFFs”, which, AGAIN, I want to think it’s cute and endearing, but it’s not. Speaking as a woman who has had a few gay best friends in my life, this raises my hackles a bit. I’ll explain. Anytime I hear a straight woman refer to her gay male best friend as her “gay BFF” it makes him sound like a kicky accessory to me, and not an actual person. If these gentlemen are your best friends, what does their sexual orientation have to do with it? Would they cease to be your best friends if they were straight? Does referencing their gayness make them seem cooler? It’s not as if these men are stealth gays. Their gayness would be apparent from fifty yards away with vaseline smeared on your eyeballs. Also, “Gay BFF”, intentionally or not, sounds to me like a qualifier — oh, these aren’t my REAL best friends, they’re my gay ones! It just doesn’t hit me as cute, though I know it’s meant to be cute; instead it sounds tokenizing. I fully believe that DanielBrian, though I cannot distinguish between them on the TV, really are two individuals with interests and personalities, and are not the one-dimensional caricatures the show seems to want them to be.

Okay, sorry. Pet peeve. Moving on.
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I’ve written about Carnie Wilson, albeit somewhat savagely, before. When I first heard about her new reality show, Unstapled, I immediately thought about recapping it, given the crazy positive response to my recaps of More to Love last year. I was on the fence, however, mostly because it seems to have a clear weight-loss component, and I avoid shows with that sort of vibe. Obviously, I’ve decided to go forward with it anyway. It’s true that avoiding this sort of diet-happy crap is how I manage to maintain my sanity as a self-accepting fat person, but I also think it’s important to look at these pieces of media critically, and to illuminate other ways of seeing our bodies and our world. Thus, I’m once again forging into the breach (much to my husband’s chagrin, my protestations that “it’s only half an hour!” going unheeded) and attempting to provide a funny, sarcastic, but ultimately smart and thoughtful take on a bit of media that is, however subtly, helping to shape how we perceive and understand fatness as a society. This is not about being snarking on Carnie Wilson. Though that will inevitably happen, Carnie’s TV persona is extremely likeable and relatable overall, and I’m not attempting to make her look like the bad guy. That said, she is inviting a nation of millions into her home and her life, so I feel as though my publishing my observations, which are certainly more kind and better-intentioned than many, is fully justified.

But enough of that. The circus is coming to town!

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