Mimetic Desire in the Bad Girls Club

"A Bad Girl knows what she wants and how to get it. She makes her own way, makes her own rules and she makes no apologies. A Bad Girl blazes her own trail and removes obstacles from her path. A Bad Girl fights and forces her way to the top with style and beauty. A Bad Girl believes in jumping first and looking later. People will love you. People will hate you. Others will secretly wish to be you. A Bad Girl is you."

-Bad Girls Club Oath

René Girard argues that societies are constantly under the threat of mimetic violence that cannot be controlled once it erupts. Mimetic violence occurs when one individual seeks to imitate another individual and this leads to a desire to have what the other has and to be what the other is. As a result, the object of imitation soon becomes the victim of violence when the imitators attack him to obtain his possessions, status, and identity. Girard sees this kind of violence exemplified in the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers, in the gospels and in the story of Oedipus, but it can also be seen in the phenomenon of celebrity stalking in which people become so obsessed with a celebrity that they soon feel compelled to murder the object of their admiration.

When human beings live together in groups, large scale mimetic violence is a constant threat. What Girard calls "acquisitive mimesis" leads inevitably to a war of all against all unless it is transformed through the mechanism of culture (especially religion) and ritual (especially sacrificial ritual) into a war of all against one. "Violence," writes Girard, "is like a raging fire that feeds on the very objects intended to smother its flames." As a safeguard to keep this mimetic violence from breaking out, there is the controlled violence of sacrifice, a ritual killing to "trick violence into spending itself on victims whose death will provoke no reprisals:" the surrogate victim or scapegoat.

For the prophylactic power of the ritual to work, the victim must be totally separate from those for which it serves as a surrogate but also similar enough to them to give meaning to its destruction. When a victim is too much or too little like the sacrificers, there arises a "sacrificial crisis" in which the fundamental distinction between the society and its scapegoats dissolves, taking all other distinctions and hierarchies, with it and "pure" sacrificial violence explodes into impure mimetic violence.

You don't need to read archaic myths to see the surrogate victim mechanism at work. Just turn on the Oxygen network and check out the latest season of the Bad Girls Club, a reality show that puts seven self-described "bad girls" in a Miami mansion to see what will happen when they are given the chance to indulge their bad girl natures to the fullest extent. There is no element of competition or any form of systematic elimination like in Survivor or Big Brother. Nonetheless, the show is filled with talk from the bad girls about "playing the game," although there is ostensibly no game to play. More to the point, by the last episode, there are only two of the original bad girls left.

When the girls come in, they all have more or less distinct personalities, but soon the imitative instinct kicks in and we witness the girls begin to talk like one another, dress like one another, get the same tattoos, and sleep with the same partners. Just as Girard predicts, the acquisitive mimesis inevitably results in a widening conflagration of conflicts that is only stemmed when the crowd selects a girl to be singled out, scapegoated, and ejected from the house, often with violence.

The "founding murder" fittingly occurs on the very first episode. Morgan, one of the two Miami natives, has been picked by the producers to pick up the other girls on a yacht and take them to the Bad Girls Mansion, playing the role of group leader. She is also placed in the middle of the cast in all the promotional materials, confirming that she was set up to be the "queen." After her first night out, Morgan comes home to find herself locked out of the house with a sign reading "Majority rules, bitch," taped to the door. When she tries to break back in, the rest of the pack descend on her and dramatically drag her down the stairs by her leg, ultimately kicking her out and making her the first victim. One bad girl, Lea, sees that the violence is unjustified and seems troubled, but ultimately makes no attempt to stop it.

As with any founding murder, Morgan's expulsion results in a brief period of peace among the bad girls (now formed into a community by their collective action) in which even the victim's former allies are accepted into the fold. But this doesn't last, and when Morgan's replacement is brought in three episodes later the cycle begins again. The new girl's name is Kayleigh and she instantly attaches herself to one of the more dominant bad girls, blond pageant princess Kristen. She imitates and follows her object of desire to the point that Kristen refers to Kayleigh as her "puppy." In the true sense of acquisitive mimetic, Kayleigh desires Kristen's desire.

As this desire intensifies, it leads to rivalry, ultimately bringing the two into a conflict in which Kristen turns on Kayleigh, accusing her of disloyalty for trying to talk her out of a fight with a woman on the beach. The charge is frivolous and obscure, signaling that it is not the real cause at all, and that Kayleigh's undisguised imitative nature is threatening to expose the forces at work in the Bad Girls Club. And so Kayleigh, brought in to replace victim number one, becomes victim number two. Not a royal victim this time, but an outsider, both of which are different enough from the sacrificers to make the ritual effective.

At the same time as Kayleigh and Kristen's rivalry has been escalating, the second major mimetic rivalry is beginning to develop between Lea and her "BFF," the lesbian stripper Brandy, whose desire for Lea takes an overtly erotic form. Repelling her unwanted sexual advances, Lea alienates Brandy and pours salt in her wounds by having a threesome in the shower with one of her girlfriends (not a resident of the Bad Girls Club) and Danielle, one of the two outcaste girls in the house.

After seeing that Lea has no objection to sleeping with women as long as they that aren’t her and watching with envy as she develops a bond with Kristen (now free of Kayleigh), Brandy breaks down. She denounces Lea as a "Kristen clone" because she has begun to dress, act and talk like the blond pageant princess. Meanwhile, the group continues to select victims for expulsion. In episode six, Catya departs surreptitiously unexpectedly, perhaps seeing that she may well be next. She leaves a note explaining that she felt "that to be associated with the show the girls had to 'degrade' themselves, and [Catya] felt she was too 'high class' and she thought she was way more superior to all the other girls."

In the next episode, the constant hostility and scorn of the group forces Danielle out just as two more replacements, Ashley and Christina, are brought in to replace Morgan and Catya. Led by Kristen and her mimetic double Lea, the bad girls turn on Christina after their first night out, covering her with syrup, feathers, and other marks of ritual humiliation. Although marked as a victim, Christina fights back and refuses to leave, denying the group the prophylactic power of a sacrifice.

As the sacrificial mechanism becomes weaker with each repetition of the founding murder, things break down in the house. The girls begin to turn on the building itself, tearing apart the furniture and destroying the mannequin doubles set up to represent them in the main hallway. The failure of the Christina sacrifice leads to the explosive collapse of the Kristen-Lea-Brandy triangle. Brandy attacks Lea with a kitchen utensil and is expelled from the house, but not before making Kristen admit in front of everyone that she thinks Lea has been imitating her. With the nature of their relationship exposed, Kristen and Lea's relationship devolves rapidly into rivalry and then into violence when Kristen punches Lea in the face.

These are only a few of the mimetic moments from this show, which could have had its own chapter in Violence and the Sacred, but let's just skip straight to the apocalyptic conclusion. The last two expulsions have done nothing to stem the rampant mimetic violence constantly erupting among the girls. The sacrificial mechanism is broken and useless. Lea begins to turn on everyone, abusing each girl to her face (especially the only other original bad girl in the house, Erica) and smashing the furniture in unfocused fury. And the last night out, rather than ending in tearful farewells, ends in a vicious brawl in the back of the limo. But in the end the mechanism reasserts itself again and at the reunion, we learn that Kristen's two mimetic rivals, Lea and Kayleigh, are now living together, united in their hatred of her.