There is something weirdly dark about Tidying Up with Marie Kondo

BuzzFeed News

The Japanese organizing guru's new Netflix show, says Alison Willmore, "places Kondo’s relentlessly cheery domestic advice against what sometimes feels like a roiling American backdrop of late capitalist panic and crushing internalized expectations. It’s hard to believe that organizing a house will be able to address the anxieties and old wounds that some of the clients, through polite smiles and grateful tears, lay bare onscreen. Still, every episode ends with the carefully edited conclusion that it might, and that they won’t know until they try." Willmore adds that the "aura of moral righteousness that has over time become attached to minimizing and to minimalism has always seemed unearned to me," and the show is not about abstaining from things. "As a life advice show, especially next to its warmer, fuzzier Netflix sibling Queer Eye, Tidying Up is discordant in a way that takes a while to pin down," she says. "So many of these snapshots of family lives burble with a quiet but persistent distress over what it means to make, have, and share a home these days, and to feel secure in it. At the core of the show is a wistful promise that if you could just get things in your house right, for once, then so many weightier and seemingly intractable stresses would surely just melt away, shed alongside all those clothes that no longer fit. It’s a reminder that keeping things highly organized can be just as much about maintaining control as never throwing things away."

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