Online fame can be taxing. For one new show, that’s a clever excuse to pay even more attention to a famous family.Back in January, Vogue posted a video documenting a day in the life of a TikTok star named Dixie D’Amelio. Inside her antiseptic luxury apartment, D’Amelio, then 19, scrambles eggs, applies eye shadow and delivers a monologue sprinkled with false bravado. Dixie drafted to fame behind her younger sister, Charli — but while Charli has reigned on TikTok, dancing for 126 million followers, Dixie has assumed the role of whipping girl, earning her own 55 million followers in part by absorbing the public floggings regularly directed at her family. When the Vogue video dropped, commentators diagnosed her as talentless, boring and “a bratty white girl who has leeched off her sister’s fame.”Then, last month, a different document of Dixie’s life appeared. Her family had acquired a Hulu reality series, “The D’Amelio Show,” and its first episode culminated with the fallout from the Vogue video. A hand-held camera navigates the hallways of the D’Amelios’ home, a modernist slab wedged into the Hollywood Hills. A flatlining noise suggests the chaos of a medical emergency. We find Dixie crumpled on a bed while her parents, Marc (more than 10 million TikTok followers) and Heidi (more than nine million), comfort her. “I’m trying to do anything I can to better myself, and it just gets worse,” she says through jagged sobs, lifting her crimson face to the ceiling. “Everyone just picks apart every single thing.” “It’s going to get better,” Marc assures her. The screen goes black, and a message appears: “If you or someone you know is struggling with mental-health issues, you are not alone.”A new celebrity mode casts mental health as an appealing badge of vulnerability.This disclaimer soon becomes a refrain. “The following episode tells a real story of people who have struggled with mental-​health challenges,” the next episode begins. Framing the family’s social media rise as a psychological crisis makes it seem both relatable and acutely serious, even important. If Dixie is tortured by the idea that her fame is undeserved, filming her suffering presents a solution: Now the intense focus on her raises awareness for a cause. The show has found not just a dramatic crux but an excuse for existing. It can justify paying even more attention to this family by revealing how all the attention affects them.Not long ago, signs of mental distress in young female stars — Britney Spears’s shaving her head, Amanda Bynes’s spiraling online — were milked by tabloids in lurid, exploitative ways. But a new celebrity mode casts mental health as an appealing badge of vulnerability. Demi Lovato has starred in three documentaries addressing the subject. Selena Gomez’s cosmetics line promotes mental-health education in schools. When Naomi Osaka and Simone Biles exited competitions, citing mental-health concerns, they were praised. Now Dixie can document her breakdown on her own terms, fashioning it as not humiliating but redemptive.Yet this rising awareness can also flatten a constellation of medical and social phenomena into one blandly ubiquitous buzzword. “The D’Amelio Show” gestures at “mental-health issues” or simply “mental health,” a phrase Dixie deploys as though it means its opposite. (She says her boyfriend is inexperienced in dealing with “people with mental health.”) To say “mental health” is to not say “mental illness,” eliding specific diagnoses and more stigmatized, less marketable symptoms. An incisive TikTok by a 16-year-old underlines the point: “Let’s just make clear the difference between caring for mental HEALTH,” her text reads, over images of thin women blending juices or journaling on a lawn, “VS. caring for mental ILLNESS” — waiting rooms, paperwork, medications. The self-care narrative, with its air of drama and resilience, has an aspirational quality. Prioritizing mental health becomes both a brave accomplishment and a luxury. It all encourages more investment in social media, not less.On “The D’Amelio Show,” Dixie and Charli each seek professional help. In addition to (offscreen) therapy sessions, Charli enlists a dance trainer for sessions she says are “like therapy without words,” and Dixie consults a doctor of osteopathic medicine to treat her anxiety. But the dance instructor has a TikTok following of his own, and the D.O. is also a Lululemon ambassador. They blend easily with the rest of the family’s entourage — the vocal coach, the A.&R. woman, the president of D’Amelio Family Enterprises.No matter how many times they are burned, the D’Amelio sisters return, mothlike, to TikTok.“The D’Amelio Show” positions mental-health concerns as part of the human condition, but this family’s woes seem inextricable from social media. (Even the most resilient teenage girl could be brought to tears by a public humiliation involving millions of Vogue consumers.) And yet the prospect of Dixie and Charli’s solving this problem by abandoning fame — with Charli returning to what she calls “normal high school” — is treated as a sad outcome, akin to letting the haters win. Charli expresses gratitude for the “opportunities” she is afforded, like internet stars’ joining her for dinner or Bebe Rexha’s singing at her birthday party. Many of these rewards seem engineered for the show, but they unfold with frightening realism, as the family’s life becomes a march of stage-managed events.Like Hansel and Gretel, the D’Amelio sisters have been lured into a house of treats only to discover that it is a prison. But instead of burning the witch and escaping, they remain; they are, in fact, desperate for the witch to keep fattening them up. In this they are not unusual. Recently a Facebook whistle-blower revealed the company’s research on Instagram’s worrisome psychological effects, especially on teenage girls. One finding was that many teenagers thought the platform would make them feel better, not worse. This is part of what makes social media so insidious: If it makes you feel awful, the first solution to present itself is to post and consume content about how it’s OK to feel awful, making the experience seem meaningful and dramatic — much like a reality show.No matter how many times they are burned, the D’Amelio sisters return, mothlike, to TikTok. Even when Charli takes a week off the show to care for her mental health, she still posts. By the series’s end, she has abandoned her dance lessons; she struggled to find time, and dance had ceased to make her happy. “I think social media really robbed me of that,” she says. In the Vogue video, Dixie reveals that though she was accepted to a college, she decided against attending, in part because of a TikTok comment that imagined her being mocked at a frat party. She explains this in a casual, self-effacing manner, but it is gutting: The world is at her fingertips, but she cannot imagine life outside TikTok’s cloche of fame.When Marc D’Amelio tells his daughter “it’s going to get better,” he echoes Dan Savage and Terry Miller’s decade-old “It Gets Better Project,” which assured bullied L.G.B.T. kids they had rich adult lives ahead. Now that a focus on mental health has supplanted bullying, there is also a shift in agency. It’s no longer clear that “it” will get better; it is the young person who is expected to improve. Later, Dixie is again dragged on the internet, this time for a video in which she and Hailey Bieber decorate sneakers. Her doctor notes that she is making progress: The comments do not seem to bother her as much this time. “You’re doing a ton of great work,” he says. He could be referring to her work on herself. Or just her work on TikTok.Source photographs: Screen grabs from YouTube and TikTok.

AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookThis Is Your Brain on PelotonThe exercise bike company’s virtual classes represent an intense new genre of content: a total curation of the mind.March 16, 2021, 10:00 a.m. ETI think I’ve discovered the key to an active lifestyle. His name is Cody Rigsby, and he looks like a piece of Disney fan art — the kind where cartoon princes are rendered as photo-realistic living boys.Today our prince sits alone in a dusky blue exercise studio, thighs pumping atop a gleaming black stationary bicycle. He wears a precise haircut and a Peloton tank top that reveals the Mickey Mouse tattoo inked into the muscle of his upper arm, which is very large. Over the next half an hour, he will lead a virtual spinning class, curate a playlist of early-aughts pop songs and deliver an extemporaneous speech on topics including: Oprah’s interview strategy; the merits of the British girl group Little Mix; historical dramas (“I have tried to watch ‘The Crown’ so many times and I just can’t, y’all”); multiple sclerosis awareness; women (“thank you for being fierce”) and Ashlee Simpson’s 2004 single “Pieces of Me,” which moves Rigsby to lead the class in a nostalgic meditation.“It’s 2004,” Rigsby tells us. “You just bought a studded belt from PacSun. You’re feeling different and cool. Resistance: 40 to 50. Cadence: 75 to 80. Hands out long, hips stay back, rise up.” Rigsby jogs atop the bike and stares deeply into the camera. “You aren’t like the other kids,” he continues. “You didn’t shop at Abercrombie. You shopped at PacSun. Because you were unique.”Before I met Cody Rigsby, I thought Peloton, the bourgeois exercise bike company that employs him, was about a slavish devotion to a techno-religious sect. I didn’t realize that it could also be about celebrities, accessories and the reimagining of the high school social hierarchy. Suddenly I was interested. I dislike exercise, so when I do it, I want my brain to feel as anesthetized as possible. And after I signed up for Peloton’s 30-day free trial of virtual content and hopped on the dusty Schwinn in my in-laws’ basement, I was zonked.Logging on to one of Rigsby’s sessions feels like syncing up with a human iPhone, always swiping toward some new distraction. It keeps me just stimulated enough to alleviate the monotony and discomfort of exercise without prompting me to do any of my own mental work. Peloton is known for selling its ludicrously expensive bikes, but you don’t have to buy one to stream its classes. The company’s more significant offering is this: the total curation of the mind.Exercise-as-entertainment is an American institution. See: Jack LaLanne, Richard Simmons, “The Biggest Loser.” The fitness guru’s sphere of influence has typically been centered on the body, with some wiggle room for related self-help psychobabble and musical appreciation. Now Peloton, which pumps out dozens of streaming classes a day, has introduced topicality and specificity to the genre. The company offers rides themed around Black History Month, Women’s History Month and the life philosophy of the television producer Shonda Rhimes.In the extended Peloton universe, which besides the spinning classes also includes guided meditations, stretches, strength training and more, the instructors have carved out their own microgenres. The luminescent Ally Love is the queen of seated choreography. Jess King has developed a series she calls “The Jess King Experience,” incorporating campy costumes, dramatic camera angles, a DJ sidekick and extreme drama-kid vibes.And Rigsby has the energy of a messy podcast host; as he rides, he might lead the class in a skills ranking of defunct boy bands (“Indisputably, Kevin is the hottest Backstreet Boy”) or break down the previous night’s television event. The day after Oprah’s royal exit interview, Rigsby began his class like this: “I’m bringing Meghan Markle energy into the ride, OK?”Peloton may offer a magnetic trainer in every flavor, but they’re all in sync with the company’s overarching value system. The content is aimed at a class of people who can either afford to own a Peloton Bike ($1,895 or $2,495), or want to take virtual classes ($39 a month) alongside people who do. It tends to promote a palatable multiculturalism without being overtly political. (“I always think of the Peloton bike as a Trojan horse of diversity and acceptance,” Rigsby said last year. “I want to be able to change people’s hearts and open their minds to what a gay man is.”) But above all, Peloton worships at the altar of consumer technology.While yoga blooms from a philosophical and spiritual tradition, spinning is about your relationship to the machine. You become one with the equipment; you literally clip yourself in. If a traditional bike ride offers some thrill from breezing around outside, Peloton represents a total mastery of the natural environment. The Peloton user submits to the uncharted terrain of Cody’s World; he decides when we are cruising down a flat road and when we are huffing up a hill.Though we are isolated in our homes, we are bound together through a shared tactile experience with the product: thousands of legs twirling at the same pace, thousands of fingers twirling the knob just so. Part of the hypnotic appeal of the Peloton instructor monologue is how seamlessly the commentary slips into jargon about cadence and resistance. Through their physical prowess, the instructors lay claim to a broader social and even moral authority, and their classes suggest that the act of using the Peloton itself releases positive energy into the world.On the right side of the screen, a roiling leader board ranks us by our level of physical exertion, and each user’s self-selected awareness hashtag rises and falls based on how hard she drives her body: #PeloForWine, #WilliamsSyndrome, #WearADamnMask. Since I don’t own the fancy company bike, my own hashtag — #FreeBritney — languishes out of view. Every class also functions as an infomercial for the Peloton line of equipment; I’ve found myself lusting after a Peloton bike just to inch closer to the imagined subject to whom the instructors speak.Does this all sound a little terrifying? In most contexts, sure. I would not, for instance, want to be seated next to a Peloton instructor on an airplane. The first thing John Foley, Peloton’s C.E.O., does when he wakes up in the morning is drink water from his hands “until I feel like I’m going to throw up,” and my rational brain is skeptical of this person. But exercise encourages a special kind of mental gymnastics. When I’m working out, I suddenly welcome a parasocial relationship with a sweetly annoying person who can carry on his end of the conversation for 45 minutes straight, and my flowing endorphins ensure that I will be pair-bonded with him when the session’s up.Social media companies work to stratify our personalities, isolating out various impulses and pumping in stimuli to satisfy them: Twitter me is wryly critical, Instagram me is a basic mom, and Peloton me is a capitalist shill in thrall to power. (Twitter me would hate Peloton me.) Recently the frothiest moments from Peloton workout videos have been skimmed off the app and floated to other social networks, where they are read differently. On TikTok, instructors are set loose as memes; on Twitter, they are pinned down and politically scrutinized.I first noticed Rigsby when he went a little bit viral by delivering a sermon on Britney Spears’ longtime conservatorship as her song “Lucky” bumped in the background. Soon after that rant was celebrated on TikTok, another clip hit Twitter that sounded an alarm about Rigsby’s rise: He seemed to be employing Black vernacular, as laundered through white gay culture, while jokingly threatening a cartoon toddler, the “Rugrats” heel Angelica Pickles. This is the kind of absurd cultural performance that raises suspicions on Twitter but, shifted just one tab over, powers an appealingly thoughtless workout. Even when Rigsby is being lightly dragged across the internet, plenty of people are following close behind, demanding a link to the ride.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story