(theatrical introduction) 1. WHO S THAT GIRL?
Hey everyone. Today we re once again discussing the strange ways that hit sitcom New Girl
envisages the connections between interpersonal relationships and capital. Sorry for that
overtheatrical intro, by the way it seemed like a good idea when I was planning this video out, and,
well, sunk cost and all that but yeah, it s been a hot minute since that first video went out.
This time though we re talking about a different moment, between different characters,
in a different season. Season 4 and episode 14, Swuit, specifically. But we re not talking
primarily about that episode s A-story, in which Nick and Schmidt develop and pitch a
bunch of wacky products, like the titular swuit no, we re talking about the secondary plot,
which sees Winston and Coach invest in CeCe. In case you re not familiar, here s the basics:
In Season 4, Cece s decided to go back to college and get her degree. But Cece is an ex-model and
current bartender. She s not exactly Scrooge McDuck. Her money problems come up every now and
then, but maybe never so much as here, in Swuit. Cece s best friends with somebody named Jess,
who s not so important here, but two of Jess roommates, Winston and Coach, notice Cece s
problems paying her tuition, and concoct a scheme to help. The basis of this scheme is,
essentially, a loan, a loan Cece will repay after graduation, plus 10 percent. And we ll go into
how this is more than just a loan shortly, but first, it s important to bear in mind that Cece,
Coach, and Winston are friends. This whole deal was born of altruism of Winston s genuine desire
to financially help a struggling friend. But this goodwill was balanced by Coach s well,
avarice is the wrong word, but Coach wants to remain financially secure,
and that s no bad thing, but he and Winston agree to try and help a friend while also profiting
from her. They think they can do both and the deal is sealed with this little exchange which
doesn t seem to realise how ominous it is. It isn t long before this loan gets kinda
predatory. Coach and Winston start checking in on Cece at school, and start getting uneasy when
they realise the classes she s taking won t lead instantly to high revenue employment. Because here
s the thing these two don t understand their loan as a loan. They ve been calling it an investment.
They ve invested in Cece and it hasn t taken long at all for that action to displace completely
the sense of altruism which initially prompted the idea. This is a sinister disruption of the
interpersonal relationships of these characters and New Girl seems to partially recognise the
weirdness here, but never fully digs into it. That s what we re going to do here but before we do,
we need to talk about commodification. 2. COMMODIFICATION
Commodification, in the Marxist sense, is basically the process by which things become
trade goods. Dino Felluga s definition of the concept starts by describing commodification as
the subordination of both private and public realms to the logic of capitalism and that s
more or less it the way stuff gets flattened from a sort of 3 dimensional existence to simply the
role it plays in the free market. We re not going to get super theoretical here. Commodification is
complex, and it s just a small part of the Based Beard Man s wider economic models and theories
so we re going to keep it simple, but imagine a bottle opener. A single bottle opener has a use
you open stuff with it. It s handy. Maybe it even has a cool design that you like looking at.
But that usefulness, those individual qualities become unimportant from the top-down perspective
of the capitalist system. It s reduced to it s value, it s price it s now only worth what it s
worth, on the market. What it can be exchanged for. Exchange value comes to dominate use
value and this is a shift facilitated by markets, money, and the profit-oriented
mindset of the capitalist individual. So far, so straightforward. And the
stuff we ve talked about above isn t, like, a criticism of the capitalist system, or anything.
This theory of commodification isn t Marx saying capitalism bad , so much as it is him saying
this is how capitalism works, this is a theoretical outline for the process by which
individual things and the marketplace interact . The thing is it doesn t stop at bottle openers.
Let s return to Felluga s definition, which we talked about earlier. This is the rest of it.
In this logic, such things as friendship, knowledge, women, etc. are understood only in
terms of their monetary value. In this way, they are no longer treated as things with intrinsic
worth but as commodities. (They are valued, that is, only extrinsically in terms of money.) By this
logic, a factory worker can be reconceptualized not as a human being with specific needs that,
as humans, we are obliged to provide but as a mere wage debit in a businessman's ledger.
Commodification doesn t just transform items into their exchange-value, their profit-potential it
does the same to people. By now, I hope you can see where I m going with this. The dynamic we see
in Swuit, the strange way Winston and Coach s investment warps their relationship with
Cece is analogous to commodification. Cece is reconceptualised not as a human being,
their friend, but as a walking, talking financial asset an asset which needs to be nurtured,
guided into maximising their investors ROI. The thing is, though, this commodification
is more twisted than the original Marxian idea we discussed. Because this isn t an
employer visualising a worker as mere financial data this is friends doing it to each other.
So, this isn t normal commodification. This is.. advanced commodification. What we see here is
commodification at play under late capitalism. We ve talked a few times on this channel about the
ways that, in the world of today, the dominant logic of global, all-encompassing capitalism
is so ingrained in every one of us that without realising it we can apply this capitalist logic,
these market principles, to areas of our lives which, once upon a time, would have been separate.
Family. Friendships, relationships. The technical term for this phenomenon is, of course,
capitalist brain worms. And that s what we see here. When it comes to Cece, Coach and Winston
slip from friends to greedy investors without even realising it trying to remould her education,
her interest in learning about culture and widening her worldview, into a glorified corporate
training course, to guarantee their profit. Being commodified by your employer, being
commodified by the market was maybe the extend of things back when working a stable job was
enough to get by but it isn t anymore. Adults have to share flats. Side hustles have to be developed.
In such an economic climate, even friends become marks, targets for commodification.
3. FRAMING There s a brief scene toward
the end of the episode where Coach and Winston apologise to Cece. But we never really see these
two realise that what they did was weird or wrong. The show doesn t critique their process it just
suggests that they maybe went a bit far. So the show recognises something isn t right here, but it
doesn t, and perhaps can t, show us the characters realising what this is, and what caused it. And I
think this strangely truncated resolution makes a bit more sense when we consider the ways this
story is framed, intentionally or otherwise, by the show. Because money, making money the quest
for riches is a major theme, perhaps the major theme, of New Girl s fourth season. For instance,
let s talk about Schmidt s arc in this season he sets out to become a millionaire.
Throughout the season he s seeking out business opportunities,
coming up with new products and ideas, and working to elevate his brand, and the Coach,
Winston, and Cece story in Swuit explicitly operates in conversation with this storyline.
This arc resolves with Schmidt abandoning this desire he realises that some things,
like his relationship with Cece, are more important than the wealth and status. And that s
nice, but it doesn t really go any deeper than this. New Girl never actually critiques this
hustle culture, the late capitalist sigma grindset it engages with it just resolves this story arc by
giving us a character who, personally, finds something else more meaningful. The ways this
idealised wealth is generated, and the damaging effects these ways might have on our lives,
on the fabric of our society these never come under any real form of scrutiny. Within this
episode itself, too, there s a number of moments which intentionally or not sort of legitimise
Coach and Winston s behaviour, and work to normalise this breakdown, this spillover,
between the personal and the financial. First, there s the lecturer bit. When Coach
and Winston start trying to persuade Cece to take more lucrative classes,
the speaker butts in we imagine he s going to be upset by the disruption, but no.
Now, this is a solid gag. A certified funny. But let s think about what it s showing us.
A professor, the embodiment of the passion-first, profit-second education Cece s chosen is utterly
unhappy with his lot in life. Cece s making the wrong choices, the episode suggests she
s just going to end up like this old sod. And, more to the point when it comes to capital,
nothing is sacred. A professor will interrupt his own lecture, publicly debase himself,
to follow the money. And the joke isn t on him it s on Cece, and on us, for assuming that the
lecture-hall was somehow exempt from the greed and avarice which drives our modern world.
Similarly, Nick s story in this episode contributes to this wider weirdness of framing.
His rich girlfriend ends up breaking up with him because he s spending too much time hustling with
Schmidt. The episode, though, suggests this is a positive development, glorifying this newfound
devotion to capitalist entrepreneurship as personal growth. And, hey maybe that s true. Maybe
this new epic businessman energy does come hand in hand with a real, meaningful, development in Nick
s character but that s not really the point. Even if this is true, the salient fact here is that the
writers chose to develop Nick in this way, to tie personal growth to a deepening, uncritical
engagement with capitalist ideals and that, like we see with Coach and Winston s commodifying
investment into Cece, the profit-incentive shifts, changes, corrupts interpersonal connections.
4. CONCLUSION So the late-capitalist commodification
effect we see with Cece in Swuit, the way at the drop of a hat her friends are able to stop
seeing her as a person and start seeing her as a piggybank perhaps makes more sense with these
season-wide and episode-specific factors in mind. A blink-and-you ll miss it apology scene from the
would-be investors can t stand up against all this, the ways the show frames these issues more
widely. They were wrong, sure, but we don t find out precisely why they were wrong. Maybe the show
doesn t know. Maybe it doesn t want to tell us. Because when you start pulling on that thread,
when you read this storyline as an example of commodification, of ingrained capitalist logic,
instantly and utterly dehumanising somebody it s kind of hard to reach a conclusion that isn
t a just bit too leftist for mass broadcast. So that s all we get. And, tellingly, Cece s money
problems? Yeah, they don t get resolved here. There s just used to set up one final joke.
I think what we learn from this more holistic approach is that New Girl is a show which likes
to think about business, money, money problems, and the roles these play in our society. It likes
to bring them in, for a story here, a joke there but on a basic level it is fundamentally unwilling
or unable to think about these issues in ways that diverge from late capitalist orthodoxy.
Going too far with the hustle that s bad, sometimes, sure. But the hustle itself?
That isn t. That can t be. But I m sure some of you are thinking
so what? New Girl is a sitcom. It s meant to be funny, and at that it succeeds. It s not a bad
show because it doesn t deconstruct capitalism. And I completely agree. Well, almost completely.
Nothing I ve said in this video has been intended to denigrate New Girl. I love New Girl,
and I don t think it s very productive to turn a reading like this, like mine, into a complaint.
Partially because, y know, it s been off the air for 5 years. But. As a mainstream, mass-market
product, produced by a major television studio, New Girl is a small part of the dominant cultural
superstructure it normalises and legitimises the base, the cultural and economic systems which it
depicts. That s not to say we can t enjoy it but it does mean that, every now and then,
it s probably healthy to look at media like this with our brains switched on, to take a look at
the subconscious messages these things send. And if nothing else, think of it this way - New Girl
is but one of an uncountable number of cultural products churned out under late capitalism,
one which reflects the society which produced it almost unconsciously. All we re doing here
is using this artefact, this simulated reality, to better understand the world it simulates.
Jesus, that sounds pretentious, I m sorry. But I hope you get my point. And I hope you
ve liked this video. (and if you have liked the video, why not like the vide-) But yeah,
if you ARE one of those people who watched that first video way back in December, I m sorry it
s taken this long for me to make a followup but hopefully it was worth the wait. And who knows,
maybe in another few months, I ll make a part three. But until then, let me know in
the comments what you think about all this, and consider, subscribing, if ya feel like it. And
that s it from me, so thanks to all my Patrons onscreen now, especially Kevin Douglas.