Rhonda Garelick

Department of French and Italian
University of Colorado at Boulder

 

The scene opens with diet guru Richard Simmons wearing old-fashioned driving goggles and an aviator scarf. He is driving a 1930’s style convertible roadster. Winking at the camera and his audience he tells us that he is on his way to pay a surprise visit to one of his clients or customers, a woman who has overcome serious obesity through his diet program. The roadster, after driving by some pasteboard scenery, arrives at a suburban middle-class home in what appears to be a midwestern state. We witness the woman’s shock and joy as she discovers Simmons at her door. Inside, they sit together in her living room holding hands. Together they weep over an old photograph of the woman, taken when she weighed over 250 pounds. They weep over the pain and humiliation she once felt, lacking the confidence to date, unable to buy clothes. Simmons empathizes with the woman; he too was once obese, he says. Sometimes the woman’s family is included in the scene, but they do not cry. This is a synopsis of a scene routinely played out in television “infomercials” for Richard Simmons’ “Deal-a-Meal” fitness program.

 

I would like to examine Richard Simmons’ camp performance, its relationship to the women he works with, and how this curious blend of queer sensibility and shopping mall culture functions. One obvious and important departure point for my argument will be the marginalized space shared by obese woman and gay men — the space Eve Sedgwick has aptly called the “glass closet,” a prison with transparent walls. Specifically, I’m interested in the relationship between Simmons’ performance and the commercial and sexual economies into which, I will argue, this performance reintegrates the obese woman. (I should add here that while it’s true that Richard Simmons does use some men in his exercise videos and television programs, his main “clientele” is female and his reliance on a mise-en-scène of domesticity and the kitchen codes his realm as female.)

 

As a rule, camp connotes a certain radicalism, an attempt to expose — through parodic theatricality — society’s highly constructed fictions of identity. Camp always “exists in tension with popular culture, commercial culture and consumerist culture,” writes David Bergman, “the person who can camp and can see things as campy is outside the cultural mainstream” (Bergman, 5). And despite its frequent loudness, furthermore, camp in mass culture cannot be discussed; it remains a private, oppositional irony. If we accept this definition of camp, Richard Simmons’ performance and his tremendous success become problematic. How can Simmons be camp when he is plugged directly into middle-American consumerism? What do we do with someone whose camp performance works to reintegrate people into the mainstream? First, we will need to look at how this reintegration takes place. As we will see, Simmons has invented a clever combination of dietary economics and theme park capitalism.

 

Simmons’ elaborately constructed persona is part cheerleader, part father confessor, and part Broadway chorus boy. His two uniforms are striped gym shorts and tank top and the Red Baron-style ensemble of goggles and scarf I just mentioned. With his androgynous look, his bitchy humor, and his exaggerated physical affection toward men and women, Simmons cultivates a very recognizable theatrical style. He is unmistakably camp. We can’t miss his campiness when he sings love songs to Barbra Streisand with “Linda Richman” (a drag character, played by Mike Myer) on Saturday Night Live, or when he announces — as he did recently — that he has commissioned a doll in Streisand’s likeness, which he plans to revere since the real Barbra refuses to meet with him (Letter, 24). We see Simmons camping it up in his newest exercise video, entitled “Disco Sweat,” which is performed entirely to 1970s disco music.¹ During the video’s first several minutes, Simmons struts along the same Bensonhurst street down which John Travolta paraded at the beginning of Saturday Night Fever. This delectation of Travolta’s leather-clad machismo (“I’m a woman’s man, no time to talk,” go the background lyrics), coupled with the uncharacteristic reference to urban ethnicity (Simmons’ target audience is strictly middle-America) make “Disco Sweat” Simmons’ most “out” video to date.

 

But camp is more than just satire. Richard Dyer sees it as “hold[ing] together qualities that are elsewhere felt as antithetical: theatricality and authenticity. . . intensity and irony, a fierce assertion of extreme feeling with a depreciating sense of its absurdity” (Dyer 1994, 143). Christopher Isherwood observes that camp involves “expressing what’s basically serious to you in terms of fun, and artifice, and elegance” (qtd. in Bergman, 4). And indeed such extremes are constantly present in any Simmons performance. Although his tears are real when he confers with his clients², for example, the infomercials and exercise videos also showcase an ironic Simmons doing the cha-cha or tango-ing to 1950’s and 60’s music (figure 1), or doing exaggeratedly serious ballet stretching exercises (in his gym shorts) to classical music.

 

Figure 1 (3.2MB Quicktime clip)

 

The study of camp has become something of a political battleground, with the main issue being whether camp is exclusively queer. Since its beginning — arguably around the turn of the nineteenth century — camp has been associated with a male gay sensibility and counter-cultural discourse. With the goal of uncovering culture’s constant, insidious process of naturalizing normative desire, camp puts on a grand show of de-naturalized desire and gender. Since 1964, however, when Susan Sontag published her now-famous “Notes on Camp,” the term has expanded to include a broader, less politicized meaning. Sontag’s essay seemed to authorize the use of “camp” as an adjective for objects, artworks, and styles seen merely as ironic — to be appreciated for their retro-charm, their nostalgia or their flamboyance — but not necessarily as political gestures. “Notes on Camp,” it has been argued, allowed camp culture to shade off into Pop culture. In a recent, manifesto-like essay, Moe Meyer has lamented what he calls “Sontag’s appropriation” of camp, which “banished the queer from discourse, substituting instead an unqueer bourgeois subject under the banner of pop.” “It is this changeling,” writes Meyer, “that transformed Camp into [an] apolitical badge” (Meyer, 10). Meyer, and others,³ want to reclaim a politics of camp, to establish it as an agent of “the production of queer social visibility,” specifically as a performance (not an object or a style) “used to enact queer identity, with enactment defined as the production of social visibility” (11).

 

Meyer’s article takes up many other important and polemical issues, (there’s an argument against Andrew Ross here as well as against Sontag⁴) but for my purposes, I’d like to borrow from him this one essential notion: that camp or queer parody is a performance that lends or produces social visibility. I focus on this issue because Simmons’ audience — persons usually at least 100 pounds overweight — share (paradoxical as it may seem) this powerful need for social visibility. The paradox of the obese is that they are hidden in plain sight, all too painfully visible but not “perceived” properly, not absorbed properly into the social, sexual and commercial economies. But there is little in the way of a style of performance that could restore visibility to the obese (heterosexual) woman, while remaining particular to her. There are, of course, political groups of obese women which are fighting for the right to remain fat and be recognized, but in many cases the public performances of these women are perceived as camp — perceived, that is, as belonging somehow to a queer, male sensibility. Furthermore, obese women in middle America do not really yet comprise a political entity; they are, rather, stigmatized and isolated — pressured constantly to transform their bodies.

 

(IMAGE)

 

Interestingly, in Simmons’ television talk sessions, the process of bodily transformation, of losing the weight, is referred to as liberating the thin person hidden within the fat person. The thin person is waiting to “come out,” to proclaim her true identity (figure 2). And so, while Simmons’ campiness may well announce his queerness, when the camp performance lends itself to the obese women, the goal is reversed. The woman’s identity is not affirmed, this is not her liberation. The fat woman’s “coming out” can only be accomplished by rejecting her current body. (She does not come out in her body; she comes out of her body.) Her social visibility depends upon her becoming less literally visible, and, as we will see, upon her becoming less a visually obvious “consumer” and more of a smoothly circulating element in the capitalist machine.

 

In writing this I realized that I’d been having a hard time coming up with the right word for these women — are they Simmons’ audience? his clients? his customers? his patients? his congregation? The reason for this difficulty is that his relation to them comprises at once the theatrical, the commercial, the medical and even, the religious. When Simmons leads the women through the narrative of their overeating and subsequent weight loss, he is physician, priest, and shopping consultant. But in all cases there are secrets to be told. And the secrets belong to the women, never to Simmons, for although Simmons’ queerness is immediately apparent through his camp performance, it remains nonetheless an unspoken and unacknowledged matter. His sexual persona, while openly celebrated in his non-diet industry appearances (such as on the David Letterman show⁵), is never alluded to in any way in his Deal-a-Meal performances. Unlike, say, Paul Rubens’ erstwhile character Pee Wee Herman whose television program featured a “playhouse” of campy friends (including a macho, bare-chested cowboy, and a drag-queen “genie” in a magic box), Simmons plays his gayness straight, leaving it in plain sight of his middle American target audience without ever pointing it out. The overt “coming out” is done by the women. His performance leads them to thinness, their confessions obviate his.

 

Richard Simmons did not begin his career as a camp diet consultant. His first break in show business came in the late seventies, when he won the role of a male nurse on General Hospital. That this soap opera connection remains a part of Simmons’ persona will become clear if we consider for a moment some of the factors peculiar to the genre. Soap operas are a unique form of entertainment in that they incorporate themselves into the daily, domestic lives of their primarily female audiences. Tania Modleski sees the soap opera as melding with and mimicking the daily stop-and-start rhythms of the housewife at home, accompanying her throughout the day as she performs her various tasks.⁶ I would add that, more than film or nighttime television, soap operas also blur the line between fiction and reality. It is soap opera viewers who write to their favorite characters as if they were real, warning them of impending disaster or congratulating them on their marriages. Soap fanzines easily blend the characters’ onscreen stories with the private lives of the actors. And the fantasy that a “star” will visit you in your own living room and make you famous is much more powerful in daytime television’s mythology than anywhere else in mass culture.

 

Simmons’ modus operandi clearly recalls this easy crossing over from screen to domestic space. He continually stages himself striding right into the living rooms, kitchens, and high school gymnasiums of his viewers. This is a soap opera move and the connection may help us understand the relationship between Simmons and his confessees. Writing of confession in mass culture, Modleski has pointed out that, unlike the confessional scenes of classical melodrama in which the revealed secret sets the plot right and ends the narrative, the confession of the soap opera depends upon on a continual re-encoding of secrets (Modleski, 107-109). Soap operas rely upon their non-teleological quality for their survival; they must, by their very nature, continue endlessly. No revelation, therefore, can set the plot right, because that would end the story line. Instead, the tell-all moment of the soap opera usually enchains a still more buried secret (“I have amnesia, but what you don’t know is that the baby is not yours”). Soap opera confessions resemble the Foucauldian, medicalized confession, the confession of the doctor’s office or the analyst’s couch. Unlike the Catholic version, these confessions contain no possibility of absolution, they are endlessly repeatable performances.

 

The Simmons confession operates more like the soap opera confession than the traditional melodrama confession. The women confess but he doesn’t, and that enables his domestic entertainment to continue indefinitely. As in soap opera, what subverts total, finite confession is consumption, the need to continue to sell things. Simmons’ secret is still apparent, but never becomes the overt confession that would surely end his diet empire and the domestic drama that is its vehicle. Instead, the confessional narrative draws out endlessly a double discourse. It produces first the performative discourse of Simmons’ sexuality, which is at once provocative and socially acceptable to America’s prurient but homophobic culture.⁷ The second discourse produced is that of consumerism, the extra-narrative determinant that subverts any possible telos to the confession.

 

Female obesity has a longstanding and highly charged relationship with commercial consumption. This is the relationship parodied and exploded, for example, in Percy Adlon’s 1990 film Rosalie Goes Shopping. The film follows the outrageous adventures of the brilliant Rosalie (played by Marianne Sagebrecht) who makes a career of shopping on endless credit, without ever paying up. The overextension of her credit represents a delirium of overconsumption, just as her abundant flesh represents an overconsumption of food. The film’s fascination lies precisely in the unchecked quality of both Rosalie’s body and her spending. And this point brings me to details of Richard Simmons’ diet system itself, which suggests the intimate relation between women and shopping (a relationship that dates to the nineteenth century and the birth of the department store⁸).

 

With “Deal-A-Meal,” Simmons is a pedagogue of corrective consumption. The system cleverly teaches food rationing using a wallet and a pile of stiff-backed coupons or “foodcards,” with the goal of training overeaters to consume restricted amounts. Deal-a-Meal divides foods into their major groups (fats, carbohydrates, proteins, etc.) and offers color-coded cards for each group. Every day the dieter may eat as many servings of a given group as there are cards for it in the wallet. Each portion of food eaten corresponds to a “spending” of one or several foodcards. When she has no more yellow cards left in the unspent portion of her wallet, for example, the dieter may consume no more fats — she has spent all her “fat” cards. The goal is to learn to apportion one’s eating so that one has enough cards to “cover” a day’s “spending.” The system presumes that its built-in rewards and punishments will reinforce its behavior modification lessons, so that the dieter will learn early on not to gorge herself at breakfast or she will be left with no cards to “spend” by midday.

 

The most obvious aspect of this system is its twinning of shopping and eating. The whole idea of the “consumer” becomes quite literal here, since the shopper actually ingests what she buys. For obese women, the issue at stake is often not just excessive food consumption but also inadequate commercial consumption. The fat woman, that is, often cannot participate fully in commerce. In Tendencies, Eve Sedgwick discusses the difficulty facing the obese female shopper. She writes:

 

To that woman [the fat woman] the air of the shadow-box theater of commerce thickens continually with a mostly unspoken sentence, with what becomes under capitalism, the primal denial to anyone of a stake in the symbolic order. `There’s nothing here for you to spend your money on.’ Like the black family looking to buy a house in the suburbs, the gay couple looking to rent an apartment . . . this is the precipitation of one’s very body as a kind of cul-de-sac blockage or clot in the circulation of economic value (Sedgwick, 217).

 

The notion that fat women represent the stoppage of the commerce system is perpetuated regularly in mass culture. On television’s Married with Children, for example, hapless shoe salesman Al Bundy finds exceptional personal torment in the number of fat women who come to his shopping mall store. For Al, the fat women, whose bodies suggest over-consumption, paradoxically signify a distasteful and total cessation of the system. Alone in the shoestore, Al waits for a thin, beautiful woman onto whose delicate feet he might slip shoes, but he is condemned largely to catering to fat women, who, he clearly believes, have no business in the shopping mall, and who, furthermore, can never find shoes that fit.

 

In addition to the promise of slimness, then, Deal-a-Meal offers a reintroduction to ritualized spending for those whose culture promotes it heavily, but whose body type can make it very difficult. Using this diet system, the Simmons customer relearns the management skills necessary to negotiate consumption for both the space of the body and that other spending space: the commercial clothing store. She learns to consume less food in order to be able to consume more of the other luxury commodities. The Deal-a-Meal system allows its participant to reestablish herself as part of the flow chart of capitalism while she waits to join the crowds of spenders outside.

 

Furthermore, as if to reproduce more exactly the specific kind of shopping from which obese women are barred, Deal-a-Meal operates as a kind of credit system. The middle-class shopper, after all, rarely pays for food or groceries with credit cards; credit cards live in the domain of the department store. For the obese woman, exiled from the utopic capitalist themepark of the suburban mall, the Deal-a-Meal coupons and the sleek wallet they come in offer a practice model of our credit card-based culture of luxury buying. The coupon cards resemble credit cards both visually and functionally. Looking closely at Simmons’ package, one sees that the coupons fit, like credit cards, into special slots on either side of a wallet. As the dieter “spends” the foodcards, she moves them — just as she might arrange credit cards — from slots on the “uneaten” side of the wallet to slots on the “eaten” or “spent” side. And like credit cards, the Deal-a-Meal cards trade against a future resource, simulating buying on time. In this case, however, the dieter does not trade against next month’s paycheck, but against next month’s future, thinner self, the self who will be less of an embolism in commerce and more of a participant.

 

But Deal-a-Meal is only one part of the multilayered Simmons program. Another aspect is his low-impact exercise system, detailed in a series of videos entitled “Sweatin’ to the Oldies.” The videos feature Simmons leading groups of mostly female exercisers through simple, choreographed movements to music from the 1950s and 60s. The exercising takes place on lavishly decorated sets that recreate amusement parks or high school gymnasiums. Simmons refers to his each of his several sets by the same name: “Sweatin’ Land.” These backdrops (figure 3) typically feature such nostalgic memorabilia as carousels, ferris wheels, bandstands, and colored balloons; and the obvious evocation of other oneiric “lands” (Disney, Wonder, Never-never . . .) cannot be avoided. According to Simmons, Sweatin’Land is a place where no one is an outcast, no one suffers embarrassment because of her weight, and exercise is simple and fun. The various Sweatin’Lands offer a series of fictional, nostalgic spaces, “demilitarized zones” for the persecuted obese. They act as alternatives to the delirious, commercial wonderland of shopping malls — “lands” whose main escapist pleasures are denied to the obese. Sweatin’Land (figure 4) represents the high school gym class revisited, with none of the torment that an overweight girl or a gay boy might have experienced there; it is the amusement park trip for which you have, at last, a date to sit next to on the ferris wheel.⁹

 

Figure 3 (2.4MB Quicktime clip)

Figure 4 (3.4MB Quicktime clip)

 

But the heavily nostalgic component of these videos has other purposes as well. The evocation of the 1950s and 60s is not limited to the exercise videos; it is a consistent element throughout Simmons’ whole system. As I mentioned earlier, in his infomercials, Simmons arrives at the home of his clients behind the wheel of a vintage roadster convertible, the dream date vehicle in countless movies of the 1950’s and 60’s. And just as in those movies, this visit represents the triumph of the story’s heroine and her entry (or re-entry) into marriage and heterosexual society. This is made especially clear in the infomercials when the women’s husbands thank Simmons for repairing their marriages, for “giving them back” newly desirable wives. In a sense, then, Richard Simmons’ de-eroticized television romancing of these women enacts a return to an earlier, idealized femininity: a date in a convertible, a gentleman caller, a high school dance or a carousel ride and, finally, the apotheosis of the heterosexual couple. Simmons just adds one extra step: instead of entering into the heterosexual couple himself, he “delivers” the woman back to her already extant couple via his camp performance.¹⁰

 

Moe Meyer complains about “unqueer appropriation of queer praxis with the queer aura, acting to stabilize the ontological challenge of camp through a dominant gesture of reincorporation” (Meyer, 5). The straight appropriation of camp, he says, “casts the cloak of invisibility over the queer at the moment it appropriates and utters the C-word” (10). Does this apply to Richard Simmons? Is Simmons’ performance an example of queer sensibility selling itself out to straight culture which then appropriates and defuses it? In fact, the answer, I think, is no. But what actually happens is even more troubling. Simmons’ camp works well. It does, certainly, lend him social visibility as a queer; and in this respect it adheres to the most politicized version of the performance. At the same time though, it fulfills a second purpose: its lends social visibility to the obese woman. This form of social visibility, however, is far from radical. Indeed, it may simply be a slightly different kind of “invisibility cloak.” While Simmons’ camp makes his gayness apparent, it reincorporates the obese woman into the dominant ideology. His difference is expressed and dramatized; hers is obliterated. His spectacle is celebrated; hers is erased.

 

Contemporary critics of camp have vilified Susan Sontag as a symbol of straight culture’s appropriation of camp. I would argue that the phenomenon of Richard Simmons proves that Sontag’s understanding of camp may not, in fact, be so destructive to it. In fact, her “Notes on Camp” essay might simply have been registering the degree to which camp can be appropriated by other causes, not itself causing this reappropriation. It may not be straight culture exactly that takes over camp, but consumer culture. Simmons’ performance can at once affirm his queer identity and help bolster the identity of consumerist capitalism. The surprise is that camp–even while retaining its political, sexual valence, even while resisting one kind of naturalized desire — can function as an agent for the renaturalization of consumerist desire, accomplishing this via a reinscription of women into the capitalist culture of suburban life. All of which proves that capitalism is still stronger than anything, even a good camp performance.

Notes

 

1. For an analysis of disco’s camp effect see Richard Dyer’s “In Defense of Disco” in Only Entertainment.

 

2. Richard Simmons’ over-the-top, lachrymose performances lead one to ask whether he is, in fact, only mourning the suffering of the obese. To see a gay man crying so publicly over a disease of too much flesh makes one wonder whether this might be a displaced lamentation over that other disease, the disease that emaciates. To my knowledge, Simmons has never mentioned AIDS publicly or associated himself with any gay political causes.

 

3. Two recent anthologies, The Politics of Camp (1993), edited by Meyer and Camp Grounds (1994), edited by David Bergman, have refocused attention on the connection between gay politics and camp.

 

4. Meyer takes issue with Andrew Ross’s influential 1989 essay, “Uses of Camp,” which maintains that the camp effect occurs “when the products . . . of a much earlier mode of production, which has lost its power to dominate cultural meanings, become available in the present, for redefinition according to contemporary codes of taste” (Ross, 58). Meyer believes that Ross’s argument “defuse[s] the Camp critique . . . relocating the queer to a past era by defining him/her as a discontinued mode of production” (14). “Situating the queer’s signifying practices in the historical past,” writes Meyer, “creates the impression that the objects of camp no longer have owners and are up for grabs” (15).

 

5. Last year, while appearing on the Letterman show, Simmons asked Letterman to “teach him to smoke a cigar.” The arch banter that followed involved much campy irony about all the implications of knowing the right “cigar-smoking” techniques.

 

6. See Tania Modleski’s Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women.

 

7.”From the Christian penance to the present days,” writes Foucault, “sex was a privileged theme of confession . . . the obligation to conceal it was but another aspect of the duty to admit to it . . . for us, it is in the confession that truth and sex are joined, through the obligatory and exhaustive expression of anindividual secret” (61). In the case of Simmons’ confessions, one bodily secret — the narrative of closeted overeating and the subsequent guilt — holds the place of the other, more explicitly sexual secret of Simmons’ gayness.

 

8. When the department store was born in the late-nineteenth century, the medical establishment was quick to diagnose and identify an attendant female malady: kleptomania. Simple thievery was transformed from a crime into an illness of body and mind when middle-class women succumbed to it. See Rachel Bowlby’s Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola, Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse eds. The Ideology of Conduct, and Michael Miller’s The Bon March: Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920.

 

9. I would like to thank Gregory Bredbeck here for helping me to see the particular significance of Simmons’ stage decor.

 

10. It is not surprising that Simmons achieved his greatest success during the three Republican administrations. The implicit view of womanhood promoted by his system jibes perfectly with the ideology of a Pat Robertson or a Marilyn Quayle.

 

Works Cited

 

• Armstrong, Nancy and Leonard Tennenhouse. “Introduction.” The Ideology of Conduct. Eds. Nancy Armstrong and Leonard Tennenhouse. New York: Methuen, 1987.
• Bergman, David. “Introduction.” Camp Grounds: Style and Homosexuality ed. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1993. 3-16.
• Bowlby, Rachel. Just Looking: Consumer Culture in Dreiser, Gissing and Zola. New York: Methuen, 1985.
• Dyer, Richard. Only Entertainment. New York: Routledge, 1992.
• —–. The Matter of Images. New York: Routledge, 1993.
• Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality. Vol. 1. Trans. Robert Hurley. New York: Vintage, 1990.
• Meyer, Moe. “Reclaiming the Discourse of Camp.” The Politics and Poetics of Camp. Ed. Moe Meyer. London and New York: Routledge, 1994. 1-22.
• Miller, Michael. The Bon Marchè Bourgeois Culture and the Department Store 1869-1920. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1981.
• Modleski, Tania. Loving with a Vengeance: Mass-Produced Fantasies for Women. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1982.
• Richard Simmons DiscoSweat. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. 1995. 60 min.
• Richard Simmons Get Started. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and Stuart Karl. Karl-Lorimar Home Video, 1985. 60 min.
• Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. Deal-A-Meal Corporation, 1988. 46 min.
• Richard Simmons Sweatin’ to the Oldies 3: Tunnel of Love. Videocassette. Prod. Richard Simmons and E.H. Shipley. GoodTimes Home Video Corporation, 1993. 60 min.
• Ross, Andrew. “Uses of Camp.” Yale Journal of Criticism 2, no. 2 (1988). (Rpt. in Bergman, Camp Grounds. 54-77.)
• Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993.
• Simmons, Richard. Interview. David Letterman Show. CBS. 15 February, 1994.
• —–. Letter. Vanity Fair. 58 (January 1995): 24.
• —–. Infomercials for the Deal-a-Meal Corporation. Prod. Richard Simmons, 1987-1995.
• Susan Sontag. 1964. “Notes on Camp,” A Susan Sontag Reader. New York: Vintage, 1983. 109-119.