Wendy Williams: Sacrificial Lamb of our Simulational Age
My Wendy Williams Chronicles
Wendy Joan Williams was born in a middle-class family in Asbury Park, NJ in 1964. With its beach, stores, restaurants, theaters, and amusement park, Asbury attracted numerous visitors—at least up until the 60s. Thanks to the building of highways like the Garden State Parkway, major shopping centers like the Monmouth Mall, and mega-amusement parks like Six Flags Great Adventure, Asbury headed into a downward spiral, leaving numerous residents jobless and desperate—which eventually gave way to rioting in the 1970s. It wasn’t until the turn of the millennium that a cadre of business- and culture-savvy homosexuals came in and brought the city back to life.
Williams’s career, much like her hometown, is caught in the midst of a collision course of a variety of forces: bureaucratic concentrations of power and the bent toward monoculturalism, the allure of artificial spectacles and the mass-uprooting from the real, cultural populism and the queer camp sensibility—a peculiar combination that perhaps one can only find in the Land of the free and the Home of the brave. America prides itself on the freedom it allows its citizens, the unique blend of ideals and endeavors it holds space for, and the opportunities it allows people to reach proportions of success and satisfaction that seem larger than life itself.
But just as the events of 9/11 dramatically demonstrated, its demise is inevitable. Lady Liberty must topple over and crumble, and public figures like Wendy Williams who will do anything for the sake of fame and notoriety must collapse—her infamous fainting spell on air while dressed like the Statue of Liberty on Halloween serving as an eerie harbinger of what was to come.
That matrix of spectacles, artifice, and lies that undergird this great nation’s cultural ethos—like the conjoint forces of spandex, wigs, makeup, and cosmetic surgeries that (attempt to) conceal Williams’s real appearance—can only suffocate the truth for so long, before it explodes through the veneer of “Liberty” and surges to the surface for air once again.
Wendy and I go way back
Back when I was in middle school, my grandma would drive me down to her shore house—just one town over from Asbury—on Friday afternoons. We would often venture over to take a walk on the dilapidated boardwalk in Asbury (this was back in the early 2000s, before its renaissance), passing by crackheads, boarded up buildings, and the few shops that remained open—hanging on by just a thread. There was something utterly enthralling about roaming around a ghost-town, its former glory haunting the sea breeze and its future revival looming in the clouds.
On the drive down, we’d listen to The Wendy Williams Experience on WBLS, the NYC-area’s R&B and classic Soul station. Williams had made a name for herself for interspersing the songs she played with insider gossip about the artist. Before playing a Mary J. Blige record, she’d mention overhearing that MJB got into some erratic antics at a club in the city the night before. Wendy would go on to interview celebrities—many of whom (most famously, Whitney Houston) would berate her for flagrantly “getting all up in [their] business”—as Mariah Carey once sang. She would also invite listeners to call in for advice.
Wendy’s public persona was marked by its campiness—taking both her fashion and rhetorical cues from gay men and drag queens. Having been raised by a grandmother who was a decadent camp queen in her own right, I was enthralled by Williams. I would go on to watch her daytime talk show religiously, watching it every night after watching Mo’Nique’s short-lived primetime talk show (though Williams’s show aired every morning at 10 on Fox’s NYC syndicate, it would air again at 12 midnight on BET, right after the channel aired Mo’Nique’s show).
I became so obsessed with Williams’s show that I once recorded a spoof of the show with my Sony Vaio webcam, playing the roles of Williams, some celebrity guest (I forget who), and an audience member—and uploaded it on my YouTube channel.
One family member happened to run into her in the elevator at a doctor’s office and, knowing how devoutly I worshipped her, stopped her and said: “Wendy!?!? Hold on…I need you to talk to my nephew,” and proceeded to call me from the elevator. I awoke from a mid-afternoon nap to my phone ringing. “Hello??” I grumbled. “Stephen, I have someone on the phone who wants to say hi to you.” “Umm…ok?”
“Hey Stephen. How you doin’?” Yes, it was Wendy—who went on to recommend her plastic surgeon to my relative, saying “whatever you need…a little nip here, a little tuck there—he’ll have you covered.” A year later while studying abroad in Seville, another relative who works in broadcasting called me on Skype with Wendy next to him. I gushed, fumbling over my words, to express my devotion to her.
Campy Queen, Populist Hero: Wendy’s internal conflict
Wendy’s transition to daytime went on to launch her career to newfound heights, while also putting her in a bit of a pickle: her mix of down-to-earth informality, fun-loving and warm personality, penchant for spilling tea, and over-the-top style won her way into people’s hearts. Her viewers found her relatable, and actually liked her…as a “friend in [their] head.” How to square this away with her fakeness and rep for talking smack about people behind their back? How could she pull off simultaneously being a down home girl and a mean girl? Gossip is a double edged sword that can both bind people together and divide them.
Williams’s persona is rife with the internal paradoxes that make up both the camp and populist sensibilities she embodies, which is in part what makes it so hard for the public to celebrate her current downfall–as deserving of it as she may be.
Through its exaltation of artifice and falsehood, camp points us to the real and the true…its amoral replacement of ethics with aesthetics highlight the truly ethical, and its readiness to sell its soul for the sake of fame and spectacles forces us to acknowledge the reality of the soul’s existence. What separates the evil of camp from genuine evil is that it does not mask its wickedness. Its willingness to be truthful about its lies is what enables us to access truth obliquely, “through the back door,” as did decadent turn-of-the-century dandies like Dorian Grey and Des Esseintes.
Before dressing like Wendy for my flop of a YouTube channel, I dressed like Donald J. Trump for Halloween. I gave at least three presentations about him when in school. I was the proud owner of TRUMP: The Board Game. There’s a reason why Williams had Trump on her show so many times, why he was a natural at giving advice to her audience members, why Celebrity Apprentice recaps became a main feature of the show. There is something unmistakably campy about this penchant for iconoclasm, for breaking taboos, for calling it like it is, for performance for performance’s sake—which Trump and Williams share in common.
Like Trump, Williams is a populist hero of sorts. Her fans adore her–not only for humbling our society’s elites, but for being unafraid to expose her own humanity. She’s one of us: she complains about traffic on the Turnpike, farts out loud, offers cough drops to her guests when they won’t stop coughing, adjusts her wig in front of us when its crooked and pulls notes out of it, and frequently directs the camera to pan to her side as she banters with her producers and asks them to bring her slippers while on air when her heels start irritating her feet.
During her “Ask Wendy” segment, Williams proves she is a true voice of the people. In spite of her numerous cosmetic surgeries, she never fails to keep it real when it comes to giving advice to her fans. Whether offering her counsel on friendship, dating, childrearing, or sex, one gets the sense that this is the actual Wendy, and not a persona curated by corporate managers or an algorithm. When watching her interact with her fans in the audience, you can’t help but feel that Wendy’s on-screen personality is exactly the same as her off-screen one. Unlike that of Oprah, Fallon, Kimmel, or the infamous Ellen, she is not “trying” or “putting on.” What you see is what you get.
The populist sensibility assumes the posture of being “of the people,” it is earthy, rooted, uncouth, raunchy and real…devoid of the genteel, affected style of the establishment elites. Populist leaders are unafraid of being “based,” calling a spade a spade, even if it’s politically incorrect to do so, as it has no respect for the hypocritical standards of elites who mask their hunger for power with the veneer of respectability and care for the downtrodden.
Yet the populist sensibility–like camp–is tricky. Its disregard for propriety risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. In the attempt to challenge “fake” ethics and kindness—to “speak the truth” by throwing shade and calling a spade a spade—it tosses morality, charity, and truth out the window, thereby rendering their efforts to bring the power back to the people more vulnerable to being overtaken by dangerous forms of authoritarianism. As much as they can serve as inadvertent paths to the sacred—camp and populism are not without their consequences.
Spilling Tea with the Devil
Put frankly, Wendy Williams has become a Baudrillardian simulation. She is an absurdist caricature of late phase consumer capitalist decadence, a hollow replica of a woman, an uncanny mirage divorced from reality. From her body whose proportions surpass the limits of biology to her trepidation in saying things that most of us think but fear saying, Williams’s career is enshrouded in an uncannily diabolical aura.
They say gossip is a sin because it denigrates the sacredness of people’s privacy and of their good name. The gossiper further sins when boasting about her knowledge about people’s private lives and casting judgment on them as she presumes the omniscience and authority of God himself.
Perhaps more uncanny than Williams’s appearance and behavior is the sight of her numerous public breakdowns due to her aphasia and dementia. We may be tempted to laugh off her public humiliation as karmic retribution for her humiliating countless celebrities. Like Dorian Gray, those who sell their souls—compromising their morals and denigrating the sacred—for the sake of fame and beauty, will inevitably decay and die.
And yet, it would be too easy to dismiss Williams as mere postmodern waste to be tossed out along with unrecyclable plastic and other figures destined for the pop culture waste bin.
WILLIAMS: Rihanna's not the keeper, she's the drive-by girl…This is how she presents herself on Instagram and everyplace else.
AUDIENCE: *expresses shock/disapproval*
Come on you guys! You know I'm not judging. You see exactly what I see! Rihanna is a fun girl but she's not a wife and she's not a girlfriend. Sorry.
AUDIENCE: *more shock/disapproval*
WILLIAMS: Why are you so shocked at that?! What…cuz I'm saying it? That's what I'm here for! I say the things you're thinking!
AUDIENCE: “Yes!!!” *APPLAUSE*
As shady camp queen, Wendy taps into the metaphysical consciousness of gay men, whose penchant for transgressing social norms and fascination with the unnatural enables them to “read” deeply into the truth of society and of nature. The impulse to throw shade, to tell the blunt truth is simultaneously uncharitable and a service to society. Williams may mock people with deformities, divulge information about celebrities’ spouses and children who are suffering illnesses, trivialize the deaths of D-list actors, belittle has-beens and talentless singers, shame sluts and fat people, and remind gay men that they will never be women—but remember, these are the very things you’re thinking.
Offering herself as sacrificial lamb, taking our sinfulness onto herself, she accepts the burden of saying what we know to be true but are too “respectable” (cowardly) to say, thus providing us catharsis. Like Jewish comedians and prophets, she is unafraid of criticizing the high and mighty, highlighting their hypocrisy, their messy humanity, bringing those who play at being demi-gods down to our level where they belong.
Aphasia, Plastic Surgery, and Wendy’s Short-circuiting
Baudrillard himself writes that “if we are today condemned to…cultivate our body, our look, our identity, and our desire–this is not because of an alienation, but because of the end of alienation and because of the virtual disappearance of the other, which is a much worse fatality…This final short-circuiting of the other opens up an era of transparency. Plastic surgery becomes universal. That surgery of the faces and bodies is only the symptom of a more radical one: that of otherness and destiny.” Though not all of us have dared–like Wendy–to go under the knife, we have all undergone plastic surgery in a metaphorical sense. Wendy is just holding up a mirror to what we’ve become as a society.
Upon being ambushed by the paparazzi in her car during an emotional breakdown, she asked for her privacy to be respected, then conceded “I don’t respect people’s privacy, that's why I do the hot topics,” thus invading her privacy is only “fair game.” Wendy may be fake and mean, but she’s also real and lovable. Her humiliating the rich and famous made her rich and famous, thus opening the door to the tabloids to humiliate her. You can call it karmic retribution, but Wendy’s just fulfilling her mission: she sacrificed the false deities on the altar of her hot topics coffee table, and now has offered herself up, allowing others to sacrifice her. Williams has ascended to the rank of high priestess of our age of centralization and globalization, of information and artifice.
Baudrillard later went on to prophesy that America’s intricate highway system would eventually “assume its full dimensions in the electronic field with the abolition of mental distances and the absolute shrinkage of time,” leading eventually to a “social desert, employment desert, the body itself being laid waste by the very concentration of information,” and warning us that “all short circuits produce electric shocks.” Wendy took on the burden of finding out everything there is to know about society’s elites, of testing the limits of how much nature could tolerate technological modifications. Now her mind and body are short-circuiting and collapsing…as did her hometown under the weight of corporate bloat and profit-conscious urban planning.
As evidenced by the comments section of the recording of Williams interview with The Breakfast Club last week, few truly feel comfortable playing the karma card when it comes to her. We love Wendy too much to laugh at her downfall. She’s one of us. She’s done too much for us. We know that deep down Wendy’s a sweetheart who sadly got lost in the sauce. She has sinned. Her life is a mess—one that may no longer be salvageable by the hands of a plastic surgeon or a good PR manager, but is not beyond the saving hand of the Almighty. Like Dorian Gray, Williams’s downfall may be the perfect opportunity for her resurrection from the ashes of the mess that has become of her life–and for our collective resurrection from our age of artificial spectacles and simulations.