Culture

The Magical Thinking of “The Goop Lab”


In the cover story of the February issue of Harper’s Bazaar, Gwyneth Paltrow—photographed wearing a Tom Ford fuchsia “anatomical breastplate”—announced, not for the first time, that she will “literally never” star in a film again. How could empty days spent emoting compare to the constant spiritual high of building a multipronged, culturally influential “wellness” empire, in a sun-choked office in Santa Monica? Don’t call Paltrow an actor; she is an entrepreneur. She founded her life-style company, Goop, in 2008, as a recommendations newsletter. Reported to be worth around two hundred and fifty million dollars, it has spawned a Web site, multiple stores, a magazine, a podcast, cookbooks—and now a slick six-episode series, “The Goop Lab,” for Netflix, that is either the apex or the nadir of infotainment: irresistibly self-aware and personality-obsessed.

Paltrow likes to recall some advice she received in the early days of her venture: that the most successful Internet companies have names featuring double “o”s. “Goop” is perfect. Cradled by Paltrow’s initials, it is ditzy, one antic letter from being dirty, and onomatopoeic. The double “o” also activates warm memories of Oprah. As the face of Goop, Paltrow has a slightly sardonic, cool-girl authority, but “The Goop Lab” suggests that she, too, is attempting to inspire the kind of unwavering trust we have in Oprah, even when we suspect that the book or the doctor Oprah recommends is not to be trusted. Paltrow, the daughter of Hollywood stars, lacks Oprah’s story, and her race isn’t on her side. But the woman just sold out of a seventy-five-dollar candle called This Smells Like My Vagina—are you not entertained? She is an interesting guru, because much of her mythology depends on being hated—for being too rich, too blond, too happy to promote the latest trend. Like Kim Kardashian West, but for a different tribe, Paltrow does not hide from what Taffy Brodesser-Akner has called the “cultural ambivalence” she inspires; instead, she has marshalled it.

What does Goop sell? Its physical inventory may include thousand-dollar cardigans, purses embroidered with the names of dead rappers, crystals cut from pink and green rock, sachets of pulverized herbs that, when steeped, promise to alleviate an array of ills, but its real offering is something more ineffable: what Paltrow calls, on “The Goop Lab,” “optimization of self.” “We’re here one time, one life,” she tells her employees as they sit around a boardroom table in the series’ opening sequence. “How can we really, like, milk the shit out of this?” The rampant spread of wellness culture, dusted with feminist messaging, answers real needs sometimes simply by asserting that they’re legitimate. You are overworked, your skin is sallow, your humors are out of whack. Goop, at its core a sophisticated advertising apparatus, often disseminates useful advice; it also has a way of making any advice look potentially useful. In 2018, ten county prosecutors in California sued the company after a consumer watchdog, Truth in Advertising, compiled a report detailing fifty dubious health claims made on the Goop Web site. The most famous involved eggs made of jade and quartz that were advertised as preventing uterine prolapse when inserted into the vagina. Goop paid a hundred and forty-five thousand dollars in fines and had to offer refunds. The promotional images for “The Goop Lab,” which feature a grinning Paltrow floating in a pink vulva, are a funny nod to the brand’s controversial status. (A disclaimer prefacing each episode reads, “The following series is designed to entertain and inform—not provide medical advice.”)

Like other celebrity vanity projects—Beyoncé’s “Life Is But a Dream” comes to mind—“The Goop Lab” is a documentary in name only. Executive-produced by Paltrow, it is propaganda for the Goop company and for its ideas of magical thinking. Every living thing and inanimate object is lit as if from within—or through the Instagram Paris filter. Paltrow’s young, mostly female employees are preternaturally attractive, a well-apportioned mixture of races, sexualities, ethnicities, and temperaments. Montages shot in what we are presumably meant to refer to as “the lab” show them busily brainstorming, typing, and meeting—but never too busily; this is, after all, a healthy workplace culture, an office so clean and so bright that no one would want to leave it.

The boss is most often seen draped over a rose-colored couch, forefinger and thumb forming an “L” on her temple. Beside her is Elise Loehnen, Goop’s competent, oddly affectless chief content officer and Paltrow’s personal consigliere and sometime foil. (“What could possibly be wrong with you?” Loehnen asks Paltrow, mimicking her critics. “You have everything!”) Together they interview experts, often characters familiar to followers of Goop, who tend to form a dyad: one is usually an alternative health practitioner, and the other is a licensed professional, there to buttress the practitioner’s claims. In the first episode, “The Healing Trip,” Paltrow recalls the clarity she attained while taking MDMA “once in Mexico.” Of course, she could not possibly ingest any drugs on her own show, but she can deploy her employees, or “Goopers,” as satellites for the Goop mission. Loehnen is fully on board, ready to display her fealty by flying, with Paltrow’s assistant, Kevin Keating, and two other team members, to Jamaica for a psychedelic mushroom-tea ceremony. “This is a sacrament,” the instructor says, “so we can be with the spirit of the mushroom.” We watch as the employees trip. Overcome by memories of past losses, two of them cry hysterically, while Loehnen naps on a yoga mat. The team emerges clear-eyed, forever changed.

“The Goop Lab,” lowbrow TV with high production values, is the most unsettling kind of sponcon—the soulful kind. Wim Hof, a popular healer who, following the death of his wife, came to believe in the salutary benefits of breathing exercises and immersion in freezing water, teaches a group of Goopers “snowga.” A bodywork expert asks several employees to lie down on massage tables, and then, like a puppeteer, pulls at the air above them as they writhe, moan, and weep. In every episode, the skeptics are converted, and the believers are reaffirmed.

If “intuiting” and “energy fields” are not your bag, you were never going to be swayed by “The Goop Lab”—although I confess that, after watching, I did take one, brief, ice-cold shower. True believers in alternative therapies might be put off by the show’s efficient portrayals of “healing”—breathing exercises on the grass, for instance, that lead to instantaneous catharsis. The show’s queasiest, most Oprah-y moments involve the testimonies of regular people, meaning people who would likely never read or buy anything from Goop. They are filmed, styled and dressed like Goopers, sitting alone, on designer chairs, with the white lab in the background. An Iraq War veteran who for years suffered from P.T.S.D. reports that MDMA therapy eliminated his suicidal ideation. A man diagnosed with Guillain-Barré syndrome claims that the cold-water therapy restored his full range of movement; he can now do a split.

And yet, when “The Goop Lab” winks at its own absurdity viewers are in more danger of being entertained, even moved. “The Pleasure Is Ours,” an episode about female orgasms, is great TV and genuinely educational, largely thanks to the charismatic and rightly militant ninety-year-old sex educator Betty Dodson, who, since the seventies, has led group workshops for women determined to find sexual satisfaction, in which she requires that they study their own and one another’s vulvae. (“We used to say that a woman had to learn how to ‘run the fuck,’ ” she says.) The episode comes with its own exposure therapy, in the form of a montage of photographs featuring vulvae. Later, Dodson assists a colleague as she demonstrates the “rock and roll” masturbation technique. I’d never seen a woman coming to orgasm filmed that way, with such lack of fetishism. For a moment, I was thoroughly Gooped. ♦



READ NEWS SOURCE

This website uses cookies. By continuing to use this site, you accept our use of cookies.