Fear and Trembling in Flavortown
“The greatest danger, that of losing one's own self, may pass off as quietly as if it were nothing; every other loss, that of an arm, a leg, five dollars, a wife, etc. is sure to be noticed.”
Søren Kierkegaard
I started following Guy Fieri on Instagram a few years ago after jokingly considering the premise of doing so as a means of practicing empathy. I wanted to follow someone who seemed to exert a fairly opposing energy in the world -- or at least one I perceived as such. I was hoping consuming tidbits of someone else’s quotidian routine would help me feel more connected to them even when they seemed so different. Spoiler alert: it worked! But that’s for another article.
This social exercise not only opened my eyes to a whole new flavor profile of cuisine and flame-embroidered possibilities, but it also made me begin considering the inner life of Guy and what he was like before the hair and everything it has come to represent. Had Guy always wanted to be a chef? Did he go to culinary school? How did he get his start? Why am I not surprised he was born in Ohio? Did he really participate in an exchange program to France in high school? (Yes.) As I dug deeper, I slowly realized how naive I was to the man below the snow-cap scalp.
Those unfamiliar with Guy must have spent the last decade living under a George Foreman Grill. The man has become ubiquitous in both American food (or at least our perception of American food) and reality TV culture. He is as much the embodiment of what the rest of the world sees as American identity as Bruce Springsteen was once (and continues to be) an ambassador of working-class sound to those outside the US. I still don’t fully understand the depth of all Guy does -- he is involved with over 40 restaurants internationally; has, to varying degrees, penned several cookbooks and created a long-list of grocery-store merchandise; and is, of course, most famous for his work on a number of successful Food Network programs, including the award-winning Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives. And he does all of this with a positive attitude and an immaculate, salon-made replica of the bleached-blonde hair your Uncle Steve tried out that one summer. It’s arguably one of the most recognizable looks of the modern era. That isn’t hyperbole!
It was in this pursuit of knowledge of the real Fieri that I found myself asking existential questions about Guy’s iconic hair. When did he first dye it? What prompted the change? If it’s how I -- and likely the entire world -- always remembered him, how could he ever change it back? Did this necessary allegiance bother him? Was Guy Fieri imprisoned by a brand identity he had created? Was I holding the key to his cell?
Regrettably, thanks to the Internet and the super encouraging, not-at-all-depressing ability to measure the uniqueness of an idea, I now know I’m not the first to pose such a query. Lance Bass’ Harley-driving stepdad (I like to imagine a universe in which this is true, and by universe I mean elaborate fan-fiction I may or may not have penned on a Reddit subthread) has been asked quite a bit about his hair over the years. His answer? Of course he likes it. He doesn’t care enough about “that shit” to agree to something he doesn’t like. His wife misses his old hair (it was long and dark, and occasionally cut short and dyed strawberry-blonde in the summertime, if you were wondering), so there’s a chance he’d change it back someday soon. Who knows what will happen. Where’s the beauty in life without a bit of mystery?
Guy’s infamous -- some may argue timeless -- ‘do was birthed from the hands of friend and hairdresser Christina Jones on a -- you really can’t make this stuff up -- Friday afternoon when Guy was in what he has described as “one of those moods.” He told Christina to do “whatever she wanted” with his hair, and the rest is history. By the time she finished, it was 6PM on a Friday night, which meant that everyone with a PT cruiser in suburban California was getting ready to sink their teeth into some Sashimi Won Tacos at Johnny Garlic’s (Guy’s original restaurant chain, now closed :( ). This in turn meant Guy had to head immediately to work, Eminem-inspired dye job and all. Supposedly he wore a baseball cap into the restaurant that night. I like to think of this moment as akin to when Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves together in the Garden of Eden once they realized they were naked.
Seemingly, Guy grew more fond of his newfound hairstyle as the years passed and, as aforementioned, has claimed to genuinely enjoy it and remain an active participant in its maintenance. However, although Guy may deflect and refuse a conscious awareness of any pressure he feels to uphold his signature look, I’m not willing to bet he hasn’t at least once spent a Tuesday night crying in his car in the parking garage of Whole Foods after catching sight of those frosted tips in the rearview mirror of his '68 red Camaro. Regardless of Guy’s professed attitude, the truth remains that the Flavortown citizenry would most assuredly be dismayed if he were to get rid of the ivory spikes we have all grown to love.
People hate change. We know this. That’s why so many of us are reluctant to listen to our favorite band’s “new stuff” or react with a little too much fervor to menu changes at that taco truck next to our college house and accuse the place of going corporate. Once we become acquainted with the idea of something, we develop certain expectations for it. When those expectations aren’t met, we’re disappointed. If Guy really did want to dye his hair back, we might kid ourselves and say it wouldn’t bother us, but deep down, we know it really would. We would not only feel like we lost the real Guy, but also like we lost some version of ourselves and who we could be in his bleached-blonde world. An epoch would be over. Something would, almost certainly, be lost. Guy can pretend not to be phased by this, but unfortunately, I don’t think the numbers would stack up in his favor when attempting to quantify how a hypothetical hair change would affect his culinary empire.
It is, of course, (mostly) comical to consider the manicuring motivations of the mayor of Flavortown. However, I think the thought raises some interesting questions about late-stage (warning: I’m about to use the “c” word) capitalism and the perpetually blurring line between brand and personality.
We joke about our “personal brand” and the time we spend crafting it, whether we’re actually making money off of it or simply playing a role in an offline or online friend group. Some of us are paid actual American dollars to manage social media accounts for the humanized brands of fast food chains (and MoonPie). The conflation here of personhood, and as a result, personality, with marketing, and all of its trickery to make entities appear more human and thus appeal to our human condition in an effort to sell us something, is dangerous. We aren’t supposed to have personal brands -- brands exist to sell a product and advance an agenda, the latter of which we are all arguably trying to do at any given moment but hopefully not to the extent that it is our raison d'être. Because of the increased avenues of perception available to us -- and our awareness of being perceived within them -- our obsession with our presentation, combined with the ability to make money or achieve some type of notoriety or advantage off of those presentations, has resulted in a severe self-consciousness of how we craft those presentations, both on and offline.
A brand isn’t really supposed to change, unless of course it becomes outdated and needs a timely makeover to again woo our spirits (pockets) via trend and social awareness. Mostly, brands are supposed to remain consistent and stable for consumers because we are weak humans that seek familiarity and comfort, and brands are greedy conglomerates that want our money (which we will freely give, often in excess, in exchange for said familiarity and comfort). However, if we are all operating as brands at this point, then we too are no longer as free to change course or deviate from whatever parts of our personality have already been presented to the public, whether that public is our friend group or the entire world. Where is the freedom to introduce arguably the most hated human sensation into the lives of those who choose to interact with us? What happens when we aren’t allowing our friends or ourselves to break free of our own expectations?
Personalities, interests, affectations -- i.e. human conditions -- are meant to change and develop over time. A fun term for this is “growth.” While we want to be consistent and stable for our friends, we don’t want to have to play a part in order to meet perceived expectations that just happened to be created one day because we weren’t wearing a fedora around our friends. What about 492 days later when we want to wear a fedora? Is there room for us -- friends and self included -- to accept that change? (Side note: there is never room for a fedora. This is where I, as your friend, will draw the line.)
In this way, we can all see some of ourselves in Guy’s fluorescent locks, dimly lit by the low-hanging lamps of an Applebee’s. Each of us is imprisoned by our own frosted tips, whatever they may be. Worse yet, we’re likely knowingly or unknowingly enslaving others -- many of whom we claim to care about deeply and consider friends -- to our expectations of them.
People know us for what they love about us. Our long hair. Our love of skateboarding or pretentious postmodern fiction. Our affinity for bath bombs. Originally, we like being known in this way. We feel appreciated when someone compliments our looks or asks what we are reading. We’re excited when, finally, Susan from accounting is the one person who managed to remember how much we love bath bombs and gifted us an entire set at the office Christmas party. Eventually, though, these traits make us one-dimensional. And worse yet -- we fear the effects of losing our identities. As a result, we feel unable to act in certain ways that may be more true of our current selves than some past self allowed room for. Or we just end up accumulating 17 sets of Bath & Body Works holiday-themed bubble bath kits as a result of everyone flattening our personality into one large puddle of fuchsia bath water.
Luckily, no one has ever pegged me as the friend who likes bath products (please don’t get any ideas). Yet, I still feel myself changing my behaviors to uphold whatever sort of brand identity I feel others have come to expect of me. I’ll refrain from tweeting if it doesn’t seem consistent with what I believe others have come to expect of my “twitter personality.” I don’t post photos on Instagram for months at a time because I fear not delivering something that is enough the perfect balance of aesthetic and wit and self-aware cynicism for whatever I believe my “audience” has come to expect. I find myself coveting the social media tendencies of others that seem less curated or crafted so I could just express myself more freely without some self-imposed rule to treat it all as art. Offline, I’m afraid to tell my friends I’m doing something new or share new parts of myself or my dreams and desires if those friends haven’t been aware of those things all along, all out of a fear of how they may receive a deviation from what is known or expected. I worry less about if I like my hair and more so grapple with the possibility that it has come to represent my identity, and I wonder if some fragile and meaningful piece of that will be lost if and when I cut it, somehow unknowingly letting go of what was perhaps the best iteration of myself.
All of this, of course, isn’t just an issue of postmodern capitalism or the conflation of brand and personality. These identity struggles and expectations predate our appropriation of capitalist dialect to describe ourselves and our identities. In Helen Hollyman’s profile of Guy Fieri for Vice, Hollyman references Bruce Springsteen’s book Born to Run and his articulated reasoning behind the classic “American” costume (blue jeans and rolled-up T-shirts) he would don every night while performing. "Those whose love we wanted but could not get, we emulate. So I—who'd never done a week's worth of manual labor in my life—put on a factory worker's clothes, my father's clothes, and went to work." I don’t know whose love Guy has been after with his late-nineties hair, flame-heavy apparel, Hot Topic jewelry, and occasional flip flops. I don’t know the psychological underpinnings of his inspired, awe-striking, and at times confusing sense of style. But I do think it would exist regardless of how he is using social media to perpetuate what has become his personal brand in this age of late-capitalism. Bruce did it in a time before social media. And people still conflated the role he was playing (brand) with his actual identity and found themselves disappointed when they discovered gaps between the two. Social media has merely heightened the instances in which we are confronted with these dissonances.
If Guy Fieri is to teach us anything (outside of the kitchen), then, perhaps it is this: we must allow room for the fullness of ourselves, our friends, and our revered cooking channel celebrities. We must account for the space needed to be free from the expectations of our respective frosted tips and the added meaning that such costumes take on in an era when brands are people and people are brands, when the consistency of such is tied not only to economic gain but to the value we give ourselves and the approval and affection we come to seek from others.
In the words of Walt Whitman,
“Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)”
Guy paraphrased this beautifully at the conclusion of Hollyman’s interview with him:
"My energies and my interests—as much as it will be misunderstood—the bleached hair, tattoos, rock n' roll, and loud cars are just one facet of how I am."
IMAGE BY DAMIEN MALONEY.
