All Each Other Has

Ellie and Carrie explore the first five episodes of season 2 of "The Real Housewives: Ultimate Girls Trip" (Ex-Wives Club) through a postfeminist framework that emphasizes neoliberal values like individualism, self-reinvention, femininity as a bodily property, conspicuous consumption, and spectacular selfhood. Key works cited are Evie Psarras' 2020 New Media & Society article "Emotional camping: The cross-platform labor of the Real Housewives," Beverly Skeggs and Helen Wood's 2012 book "Reacting to Reality Television: Performance, Audience and Value," and Rosalind Gill and Christina Scharff's "New Femininities: Postfeminism, Neoliberalism and Subjectivity" (2011).

One question we forgot to ask: You hoofin'?

In part two of “Camp,” Ellie and Carrie apologize for being “pick me” girls in their previous discussion of Camp Vega, recall socials (the Cedar Bowl) and the horror of grinding culture, and explain outlets for hormonal urges (the Bunk 7 casino, the removal of the tetherball pole). They explore camp as a total environment apt for trying on new versions of themselves, the liberation of skinny dip, camp as a sapphic eden (where one might fall in love with the lead in a 2005 production of “Bye Bye Birdie”), the camp bubble bursting when news broke that Michael Jackson died, grieving the end of childhood, and squaring personal politics with the prohibitive privilege of a place that made them who they are.

Ellie and Carrie introduce their own formative experience at an all-girls' sleep-away camp in Maine by discussing the cultural history of camp and its role in the American imagination. Works cited include "'The Ego Ideal of the Good Camper' and the Nature of Summer Camp" by Michael B. Smith (2006) and Abigail Ayres Van Slyck's "A Manufactured Wilderness: Summer Camps and the Shaping of American Youth, 1890-1960" (2006).

In this episode, Carrie recounts to Ellie a learning experience in which a parasocial relationship morphed into an unnatural in-person one. Enabled by Carrie's loneliness and lack of boundaries, "Meredith's" visit to Mom's house in East Hampton during the second major COVID surge left Carrie feeling entrapped in a cycle of panoptical performance (see Jon Mckenzie's 2001 work "Perform or Else"). Ellie helps her sister understand what she did wrong in the situation and stresses the importance of communicating clearly, even when it feels awkward or cruel.

Ellie and Carrie discuss the darker side to matrilineal fame, including some of Mommy's cancellations. Also explored are Carrie's desire for fame in her own right versus Ellie's need for privacy, and how an extended period of isolation and an altercation with a neighbor in East Hampton prompted Carrie's quest for Internet celebrity. Other topics include wanting to "be good," building resiliency skills at the Child Mind Institute, mosaic wart clusters, and the fame revenge fantasy at the core of Taylor Swift’s 2010 hit “Mean.” Works cited are A. Giddens’ “Modernity and Self-Identity in the Late Modern Age," Christopher Lasch’s “culture of narcissism,” and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham’s “metalanguage of race.”

In the premiere episode of All Each Other Has, sisters Ellie and Carrie delve into what it was like being raised by their famous mother Katie Couric during her time at the Today Show (when everyone loved Mom) and at the CBS Evening News (when everyone hated Mom). Citing C. Kurzman et al.'s 2007 article "Celebrity Status," they explore the four kinds of privilege afforded celebrities: interactional, normative, economic, and legal. Carrie and Ellie reflect on whether their desire to be "perfect," particularly in high school, stemmed from a need to prove they were more than their mother's daughters, and how others' recognition of Mom's fame can unmoor their senses of self. Some important concepts cited are Marcuse's performance principle, Berger's "Ways of Seeing," Skeggs & Wood's "spectacular selfhood," and Andrejevic's "the work of being watched."