Surely there’s nothing more to say about Gwyneth Paltrow, except that in a week fizzing with presidential impeachment, coronavirus and the drudgerous march toward the Iowa caucuses, there’s something appealing about grabbing a blankie and watching a rich lady getting her own plasma re-injected into her own face for something called a “vampire facial.”
And so we commence six episodes of “The Goop Lab.” It’s a Netflix show in which staffers at Gwyneth’s lifestyle company get high, jump into frozen lakes, examine their vaginas and commune with the dead, all in the name of “wellness.” The star lends herself out for some of the treatments. Other times, she interviews experts from the safety of an armchair before cutting away to an assistant who is dealing with intimacy issues and has been sent to Jamaica to bawl on a yoga mat while a tender man encourages everyone to become “one with the spirit of the mushrooms.”
“I started tapering off my medication,” Goop’s editorial director proudly tells Gwyneth, after determining that her chronic anxiety could be better managed via a mixture of ice baths and posing like a horse.
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Do you hate this show yet? Should you?
A decade or so ago, Gwyneth Paltrow’s jade eggs and expensive charcoal body scrubs made her a high priestess of woo-woo wellness. She was hateable — my heavens, was she hateable — which is why so many people hated her. Entire careers were built on debunking Goop’s dubious claims.
Now, you can buy charcoal body scrubs in Target, and your mom probably has a Himalayan salt lamp in the guest bath. Either we’ve all caught up with Gwyneth, or we’re all in a “Black Mirror” episode where we eventually become so well that it kills us. One student of the Wim Hof method — the aforementioned process of icy plunges, horse stances and controlled hyperventilation — drowned while allegedly practicing the breathing in a shallow pool.
Maybe one day I’ll understand how I can actually love Gwyneth Paltrow, and yet find that, when I open my mouth, only snark comes out. Is it that I find her earnestness both poignant and poisonous? Do I fear my own inner truth? I’d wager that anyone making time for “The Goop Lab” is coming to it from a similar place: A love-hate desire to know what she’s actually like when she doles out the advice that usually appears, disembodied, on her website.
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And the answer is: Thoughtful. Open. Searching. Curiosity is hard to fake, and Gwyneth has it, whether she’s asking a doctor to explain his psychedelic research or querying one of her assistants/guinea pigs about the effects of an experiment.
The show is spiritual cousins with Joe Rogan’s podcast, or Russell Brand’s — celebrity seekers, all. The concept, at least, is similar: Here is a famous person with natural intelligence but zero subject-matter expertise, having a series of conversations. Some of the guests are mainstream (Neil deGrasse Tyson for Rogan, sex-ed guru Betty Dodson for Gwyneth) and some of them are not (Alex Jones for Rogan, a psychic medium for Gwyneth).
They do this, they say, because conventional practices have failed them, and also failed you. Overmedicated you. Misdiagnosed you. Convinced you something was not possible, or hidden the information that would make it possible.
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All of the guests, mainstream and not, are given the same block of time. Which is an example both of the open-mindedness that celebrity seekers pride themselves in having, and of how open-mindedness can cause your brain to fall out. Maybe ... some guests ... shouldn’t be given large platforms ... to share ideas ... that are crazy.
Maybe, when you have such a gigantic platform, it’s not enough to slap a warning at the top of every episode — “The following series is designed to entertain and inform — not provide medical advice” begins each Goop episode — or to insist that you’re just a comedian/actor/seeker, not a journalist/doctor/politician. Maybe you owe people more than curiosity. Maybe you owe them vigilance.
And maybe this is getting too solemn a viewing exercise that was meant to be a lark.
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“The Goop Lab” ultimately doesn’t make a serious dent in conventional wisdom. Most of the crazy-sounding claims eventually wind their way toward something reasonable. Can a medium help you communicate with your dead relatives? Maybe not. But do we need to find a way to make peace with our grief? Yes, absolutely, and that seemed to be the larger point of the psychic-medium episode, which prominently features a staffer who has recently lost a parent. The takeaway from the vagina-examining episode is ultimately, “It is good to know and understand your own body,” and it features, quite movingly, a gay staffer learning to appreciate herself after growing up in a repressive household.
Yet another takeaway: My, these people have fancy bathing suits.
In the Wim Hof episode, several staffers decamp to Lake Tahoe in the middle of winter, where they learn breathing techniques and prepare to plunge themselves into 30-degree water. I would have dug out an old Speedo for such an endeavor, but these staffers lined up in the prettiest bathing suits, with elaborate necklines and flattering cuts. The woman with the fanciest one, a two-piece one-shoulder contraption, was the editorial director who confessed to regular panic attacks and later shared she was tapering off her medication (with the help of her doctor, she added).
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Watching them all lined up, shivering, sopping, miserable and coutured, was a reminder that the exhaustion of life comes for all of us. These Goop staffers are attractive, toned, privileged and employed. And yet there they are, struggling with anxiety, grief, self-acceptance and trauma, and traveling to the edge of all reason to save themselves.
The rich lady has come to help you, and she has succeeded. Because you can either find something moving in the naked, shared humanity, or lift your spirits by cackling at your TV.
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