“The Skeleton Key to Health”: COVID-19 and the Rise of Wellness-Critical Media
Hulu
“We’re going to get you well.”
It’s a refrain that echoes – by turns threateningly and reassuringly -- throughout the pilot of Hulu’s Nine Perfect Strangers, which was released this month and stars Nicole Kidman as Masha, the sinister leader of a cultish wellness resort. But post-quarantine, the phrase carries an all-too-familiar resonance for viewers.
On its surface, Nine Perfect Strangers (based on the book of the same name by Liane Moriarty, who also penned the HBO-adapted Big Little Lies) is both a thriller and ponderous send-up of the 4.5-trillion-dollar wellness industry. The show’s opening credits linger on an ominous slow-motion shot of fruit exploding in a blender. Masha’s svelte and platinum-haired styling appears to be loosely modeled on actress Gwyneth Paltrow, founder of the now-infamous luxury wellness brand Goop. But these tonal and stylistic choices situate Nine Perfect Strangers squarely in a new strain of media that has emerged in tandem with the COVID-19 pandemic: the “wellness-critical” show.
During COVID-19, the phrase “self-care” evolved from a trendy buzzword to a public health concern. In the absence of gyms, doctors’ offices and wellness boutiques, innovations such as telemedicine, online therapy, and at-home gym simulations both democratized healthcare and fostered the sense of wellness as an intensely personal responsibility.
In summer 2021, the wellness tech platform Mindbody released a report that over 75 percent of surveyed United States consumers believe that “wellness is more important than ever” and 80 percent of surveyed consumers reported using live-streamed workouts. A recent survey by Acosta, a global sales and marketing services provider, revealed that “two thirds of shoppers take a proactive approach to living a healthy lifestyle” and 49% of those shoppers define self-care as “healthy eating and nutrition.” According to a study by market research company Technavio, the corporate wellness industry is slated to increase by $24.4 billion dollars between 2021 and 2025.
It’s clear that despite devastating hits to the brick-and-mortar services it previously relied on, wellness culture is not just here to stay – it’s here to thrive. But the increased accessibility of wellness via digital platforms also means that the industry has been stripped of its “elite” status.
“Before the virus, the wellness industry was rightly accused of a too-myopic focus on the wealthy,” says Beth McGroarty, vice president of research for The Global Wellness Institute, in an interview with CO. ““In the future, I believe more people will reject super-elitist, absurdly expensive wellness experiences and products. Wellness in general will become more important in people’s lives — and command a bigger share of wallet, even if the wallet has shrunk.”
It’s no wonder, then, that this cultural shift away from wellness as status symbol toward wellness as personal investment has prompted a pop-cultural reevaluation of the wellness industry. In 2020, Netflix released the docuseries (Un)Well, which trains an analytical eye on the effectiveness of health trends such as intermittent fasting, aromatherapy and ayahuasca use. Episodes follow a range of both true believers and defectors who have sampled the more extreme ends of the wellness spectrum for treatment of chronic illness or self-improvement. Though the series itself has also been critiqued for failing to live up to its investigative conceits, it provides occasionally shocking insights into the darker side of wellness through the lived experience of its subjects. In Episode 4, “Fasting,” a woman alleges that her husband died through the negligence of a wellness facility in Costa Rica during a water fasting retreat. Journalist Thomas Stackpole recounts developing an eating disorder after feeling inspired by Twitter founder Jack Dorsey to pursue intermittent fasting, a restrictive diet that alternates periods of eating with periods of extended abstention from food.
“We perceive male eating habits really differently than we perceive female eating habits,” says Stackpole. “If Jack Dorsey was a woman, we’d be having a really different conversation about his eating habits. It wouldn’t be ‘I wonder if I should eat like Jack Dorsey,’ it’s ‘Jack Dorsey obviously has an eating disorder.’”
The popular podcast Maintenance Phase takes wellness critique one step further into the realm of wellness debunking. Hosted by journalist Michael Hobbes, who co-helms the podcast You’re Wrong About, and writer Aubrey Gordon, who published her debut nonfiction book What We Don’t Talk About When We Talk About Fat in 2020, the podcast skewers everything under the wellness umbrella, from celery juice to Weight Watchers to the President’s Physical Fitness Test. Each episode deep-dives into the history of a particular wellness trend (the keto diet, Moon Juice, Halo Top ice cream) through a social justice lens and examines the elements of moral panic and “junk science” that propel our collective interest in wellness.
“It continues to blow my mind how much we hang on to the magical thinking of weight loss,” says Gordon in an interview with Xtra Magazine. “We keep believing, in spite of our own experiences and in spite of the research, that we’ll find some skeleton key to thinness and to health.”
The Body Mass Index episode, released in August, is one of their most popular to date and recently hit #1 on the Apple Podcasts Health and Fitness charts. It references Aubrey Gordon’s own research about the racist history of the Body Mass Index (BMI) and describes its use as a rubric for health as problematic at best. In 2020, the book Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia by Sabrina Strings won the Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award from the American Sociological Association. The book, which frames the eternal quest for thinness and health as a function of white supremacy, became something of a pandemic reading sleeper hit through references on popular pop culture podcasts like The Nod and the Instagram posts of body positive Instagram influencers like Megan Jayne Crabbe. The global racial justice reckoning that occurred in the wake of 2020’s Black Lives Matter protests has boosted awareness of the racial and class inequities that cause health disparities, and may at least partially account for the evolution of “wellness” as it sheds its old associations of socioeconomic privilege and moves toward a more accessible and inclusive definition.
“Health has grown from a worthy pursuit into a kind of moral imperative,” continues Gordon in the Xtra interview. “We think of healthier people as having a stronger work ethic, as being more tenacious and driven, as being more productive and effective. We don’t necessarily think of healthier people as having the benefit of well-paying jobs that allow them to take time off, as living in neighborhoods where they can safely spend time outside, as getting paid well enough to afford and cook food at home. So, we’ve got to remove weight from the center of our paradigm of health, and we’ve got to remove health from the center of our paradigm of virtue.”