Frank, Vern, Hilda, ... and Ken?: A Burkeian Analysis of Trading Spaces
Richard K. Olsen, Ph.D.
Catherine Wells
University of North Carolina at Wilmington
Presented at the 2003 Southern State Communication Association Conference
in BirminghamAlabama
Inquiries:
Richard K. Olsen, Ph.D.
910.962.3710
Frank, Vern, Hilda, ... and Ken?: A Burkeian Analysis of Trading Spaces
TLC, cable TV’s The Learning Channel has been on of the more dominant cable destinations for America’s channel surfers. Early TLC programming centered on animals and big machine documentaries. However, as cable has matured and National Geographic and others began to saturate us with profiles of animal life, TLC has integrated more “life unscripted” programming such as A Wedding Story and A Baby Story and some unique competitions such as Junkyard Wars and Robotica. Yet one TLC show eclipses them all and brings both men and women together to see what happens when neighbors decorate a room in each others houses with the help of a professional interior designer: Trading Spaces. It has consistently provided a 2-3 Nielsen rating and had a peak of 3.2 when Natalie Maines of the Dixie Chicks was a guest (Foege, 2002).
In real numbers that means about 6 million viewers are tuning in to see what Frank, Doug and Ty might create this week in 48 hours with the help of two sets of neighbors. It is consistently the top cable show on Saturday and Sunday excluding premium channels. The popularity of the show does not end with the Nielsen rating. Over half of 25 million daily pageviews on TLC’s website are related to the show. It has also spawned imitation within and beyond TLC. While You Were Out has a similar decorate on a dime and a day or two energy to it. It has also coined a new term for TV lexicon: “the reveal.” This is shorthand for the final segment of the show when the homeowners return to find out what the Trading Spaces designer, with the help of their neighbors/friends, have done to their room.
This popularity might be reason enough to a warrant study by scholars of popular culture. However, if you are still unconvinced realize there is even a website with the rules to a drinking game based on the show. This connection with alcohol is just one of several reasons I found Burke’s method appropriate.
The purpose of this essay is to offer an answer to why this show has gained such popularity. It is not enough to say that it is novelty or that the recurring characters are fairly attractive. Many shows full of attractive people and novel circumstances come and go and never gain the adherence that Trading Spaces has gained. As a rhetorical scholar I am assuming that there are rhetorical features to the show that explain and contribute to the show’s success. Burke’s concepts provide an appropriate set of tools for illuminating those features. I begin my analysis with a brief history and description of the show. Next, I introduce the concepts from Burke I use in the analysis. Finally I offer an analysis of the show and conclude with an implication for scholars interested in rhetoric of popular culture.
An Unlikely British Invasion: From Changing Rooms to Trading Spaces
Trading Spaces is an adaptation of the BBC show Changing Rooms which was launched in the UK in 1994. TLC producer Stephen Schwartz saw the potential for the show and purchased the rights to create a similar program in the United States. The show originally aired as a thirty minute show in the late afternoon along with A Wedding Story and A Baby Story to compete for female viewers. However, Schwartz soon expanded the time to one hour and moved it to Saturday night. Now the show runs frequently on TLC during the week and on weekends. Trading Spaces marathons and back to back episodes are also not uncommon.
The basic format of the show is as follows: “two sets of neighbors swap keys to transform a room in each other's home. They have two days, a set budget, and they're not allowed back into their own homes until the moment of truth. This is how-to with a neighborly twist” (tlc.discovery.com). The budget is one thousand dollars per household. The show pays for the redecorating. Each couple works closely with one designer assigned to the home. Couples can place very few restrictions on the designers and cannot choose which designer they want to work with or want working on their house.
The central characters of the show include host Paige Davis, universally described as perky. She sets up the show and runs between the two projects. She also enforces budget and time constraints and occasionally helps out with a craft or two. There is a team of eight designers (two were added for the third season) that rotate through the show in various combinations. Each designer has a distinct personality and a general approach to design. For example, Doug is considered the most strong-willed of the designers and most likely to break the homeowners’ hearts or thrill them as he pursues his vision for the room. His designs are typically modern or high concept and consequently invoke a high risk/high reward plotline. The personalities of the designers are important to the show success and are a key feature of the drinking game surrounding the show. For instance, one is required to imbibe whenever Laurie says “Amaaaazing” and “splurged on fabrics” (Trading Spaces drinking game).
There are also two carpenters: Ty and Amy Whinn. They support both designers and build TV cabinets, cut headboards and create shelving. They also provide some dramatic tension by complaining about the designers’ unrealistic expectations. They have even been the subject of their own TLC special “Trading Faces” when the got complete makeovers to deliver one of the awards at the daytime Emmy Awards.
Finally there are two teams of homeowners. Typically the pairs are husband and wife but there have been mother—daughter teams and unmarried couples as well. The homeowners must wear the same outfit—including color coded “Trading Spaces” shirts—for the two-day shoot so to facilitate editing. Typically couples have been young and affluent enough to have the minimum 14 by 14 room (so crew can shoot the activity) and blood relations—most often sisters—are also common.
Tools for the Job: Critical Concepts of Kenneth Burke
This analysis uses five of Kenneth Burke’s most central concepts to illuminate salient features of the show and to connect those features to its success as a rhetorical artifact. These five include: form, the pentad, mystery and identification, rhetoric of rebirth. I will briefly define them here and then clarify their connections with Trading Spaces in the analysis that follows.
Form, for Burke is the way in which an artifact accomplishes its rhetorical effect. As Blankenship, Murphy and Rosenwasser (1993) summarized “Form is a way of uniting motive and symbol, situation and act” (84). Blakesley (2002) distills four types of form from Burke’s writing: syllogistic progression, qualitative progression, repetitive form and conventional form. Syllogistic progressions rely on reason—that one thing follows reasonably from another. Qualitative progressions are also sequential but based on the establishment and expectations of particular qualities and emotional states. Repetitive form is not merely repetition but establishing a familiarity and revisiting it in different ways. Conventional form relies not on an emerging familiarity within the work but a set of expectations established before the particular work. A film genre is an example of a convention that must be addressed when interpreting a work.
The pentad is a familiar tool for critics: act (what occurred), scene (where/context), agent (who), agency (what instrument), purpose (what is accomplished) have all been thoroughly defined elsewhere. However, it is important to remember that pentadic analysis does not end with the assigning of the pentadic terms to various aspects of a rhetorical artifact. Rather that is the beginning of the analysis so that perspective by incongruity can be explored through novel labeling efforts or key ratios can be identified that sharpen analysis around key dynamics that best essentialize and express the rhetoric dimensions of the artifact.
Burke’s concept of mystery is tied to hierarchy and allows a hierarchy to be maintained. According to Foss, Foss and Trapp (1991) in their insightful summary of Burke, mystery can be “used as an instrument of governance, cohesion, and preservation of the particular nature of a hierarchy” (193). Identification, on the other hand, seeks to limit hierarchy and division. Identification is an attempt to find commonality or consubstantiality with another with whom we are naturally (biologically) and perhaps culturally separate. Both mystery and identification can be the power base for persuasion and both are evident in the dynamics of Trading Spaces.
Finally, Burke borrows from religious drama and suggests that rhetoric can take us through a secular temporary rebirth. Foss, Foss and Trapp offer the clearest summation of that cycle. The first step is to identify and define the pollution. This pollution is closely tied to guilt, hierarchy and perfection for Burke. This awareness of pollution gives rise to a need for purification. Two strategies for purification are victimage and mortification. “Victimage is the process in which guilt is transferred to a vessel or vessels outside of the rhetor” (196). Mortification is process by which “we make ourselves suffer for our sins” (197). Once literally or symbolically taken through the purification process one can then experience a redemption or symbolic rebirth. This redemption can be “found in a change of identity, a new perspective, a different view on life, or a feeling ‘of moving forward, towards a goal’ or better life in general” (197).
A Burkean “Reveal”: Analysis of Trading Spaces
In this section I apply the critical terms above to the artifact of Trading Spaces. I identify three key pentads as a means of describing the dynamics of the show that correspond to the three stages of rhetoric of rebirth. While discussing the purification pentad, I address the specific interplay of identification and mystery in the show. I conclude the discussion with the issue of form to demonstrate how the dramas arouse and fulfill expectations.
Key Pentads of the Rebirth Drama
Burke was fond of beginnings and endings. The two pentads I will explore reflect this priority. The first pentad is the pollution pentad. This segment follows the introductory segment of the show where the couples are introduced and briefly interviewed and the rules are discussed. In the next segment the neighbors discuss the flaws of the room with the designer they will work with to transform the space. The pentad might be labeled as follows:
Act: Evaluation of the space
Scene: The “other” house
Agent: designer and neighbors
Agency: commentary
Purpose: clarify nature of pollution
The key ratio for this pentad is the act/agent. The home has become (if it wasn’t always) an extension of the self. As summarized in Time magazine the show “plays off the tensions between neighbors, our emotional investment in our homes and our insecurity in our tastes” (Poniewozik, 2002). To have the self/home/tastes evaluated by others and be found unworthy at some level is a key source of pollution and guilt. This evaluation and subsequent pollution is amplified because it is confirmed by both the neighbor and the designer. The designer—as shall be shown throughout—functions as priest/expert and thus operates from a power base of both identification and mystery. Hugh Duncan (1969) elaborated on this role. “The paradox in the priestly role, Burke points out, is that the priestly mediator “not only proposes progressively to ‘absolve’ from guilt; [but he] also serves circularly to intensify the very sense of guiltiness (or ‘conscience’) for which [he] provides the solution.” And even without the priestly intensification of guilt, there is cause enough in the socio-political conditions of life to keep men in fear and anxiety” (418).
The space is officially pronounced unclean through commentary such as the following:
Loraine: “What I would like to do over at Pam and John’s house is I would like to paint the walls, the walls are white, and then the furniture is floral and doesn’t really match and doesn’t really reflect their personalitites. I would like to paint the walls maybe a mocha color, and cover the furniture with something.”
Pam: “And Loraine and Charlie have a sort of smaller rec room, with big pieces of furniture in it, so there are 4 or 5 places to sit in there, but there are six people.”
While this is not vitriolic condemnation, the excerpt does show the connection of the space to the “personalities” (person) of the homeowners and also shows an awareness of both structural and social pollution which the designers often address specifically in the transformation of the space.
In the opening segment where we meet the homeowners and they discuss the room they also help establish pollution but also often offer some attempts at purification. Consistent with Burke’s insights, they often fall into the categories of mortification and victimage. Mortification can be seen in statements such as “we just can’t figure out what to do here” or “we’ve done all the other rooms but haven’t gotten to this one yet.” However, there are also some unique attempts at victimage. It is not uncommon to blame the previous owners or lack of time but Chris from Philadelphia blamed Zeke: “Part of the reason [it looks this way] is that we fixed it up after Zeke, our dog, destroyed part of it.” While there are minor attempts at purification in the opening segments, it is clear that the majority of purification comes during the renovation of the spaces under the guidance of the Trading Spaces designers.
The second important pentad is the renovation pentad. It might be labeled as follows:
Act: Renovation of space
Scene: Polluted space
Agent: Neighbors, designers and carpenter
Agency: Materials and techniques introduced by designer
Purpose: Transformation of space
It is this pentad that is the primary focus of the show and takes up a majority of the broadcast. It is full of microscopic cycling through the rhetoric of rebirth as problems are solved and tensions between designers and neighbors are expressed and resolved (or not!). It is here where we see the interplay of identification and mystery.
Secret Knowledge vs. Local Knowledge: Identification and Mystery
For Burke hierarchy provides both unity (we’re striving for the same ideals) and division (I am on a different level of the hierarchy than you). Identification is compensatory to division. Therefore identification and mystery imply one another and can often exist in tension with one another. The intrigue of Trading Spaces is that the designer is the publicly sanctioned expert regarding the explicit purpose of the show (transformation of space) but the neighbors are the experts on one another. And because design enters into the realm of taste the clashes are not easy to resolve. Cheryl of ArlingtonVirginia was not happy with Doug’s choice to paint the ceiling brown.
Cheryl: “But he’s only done a few strokes.”
Doug: “Give me 5 minutes.” We don’t have the opportunity to sit down and see all he plans. I have done some 30 odd TS rooms and you have to trust that I know what the HELL I’m doing!
Cheryl: “This brown is very dark, what happened to mahogany? I don’t know if they are going to be tickled about this.”
Doug: “By brown? What will make sense is when we do the decorative detail on the floor.”
Cheryl: “No we’ve got to protect the floor.
Doug: “People have paid me 100s of dollars for these floors.”
Cheryl: “Well, they can pay you, but we have to protect the floors.”
Doug: “Well, I can’t continue to educate people on what is good taste.”
Cheryl: “Good taste is subjective, no we have to protect the floors.”
Similar interplay is frequent on Trading Spaces. The “will they like it?” question allows both the layperson with whom the viewer can identify and the designer, who operates from a powerbase of mystery, to be on fairly even footing. For instance, when Trading Spaces designer Laurie Hickson-Smith decided to emphasize the home office function of multi-purpose play room that decision introduced a potential pollution:
Kim: “I don’t know what she’s going to do with those toys. I know she was counting on this space for those toys”
Eric: “I like the color. I would have liked to see a blue, but that’s me”
Kim: “I love the color, I just hope that she loves it so much she overlooks the toys”
Kim’s knowledge of her friend’s priorities challenges Laurie’s design choice. Both concerns are legitimate. Yet the show is structured so that, although compromises are made, the designer generally pursues his or her aesthetic vision for the space. It is only in the Reveal that the viewers find out who was right in such clashes. In some cases it is the designer’s bold choice that wins and we have a triumph for the mystical gnosis of the designer as shaman. In other cases it is the neighbors who are validated and we have the triumph of the common sense of the common man: Identification trumps mystery.