What multilevel marketing schemes are really selling.
Have you ever been invited by a friend or a family member to a coffee shop or a lunch date, and when you get there you realize that they don’t just want to catch up?
Instead, it turns out they’ve got a great business opportunity for you. All you have to do is spend a little money on the front end, maybe buy a package of protein supplements or meal replacement smoothies, and pretty soon you’ll be your own boss and living the dream.
If that sounds familiar, it’s because this is an enormously popular business model, called multilevel marketing (MLM), in which sellers make money either by selling products or recruiting others to sell those products. Millions of people in America participate in MLMs, and while the people at the top make billions and wield a lot of power, roughly 99 percent of the people who join up don’t make — and often lose — money. For that reason, MLMs have — rightly — been controversial and a target of regulators. Critics see them as little more than legal pyramid schemes.
One of those critics is Jane Marie, the host of a podcast series called The Dream and the author of a new book, Selling the Dream, both of which investigate the intersection of MLMs and pyramid schemes and the broader “wellness” industry. I wanted to know a little more about the history of these businesses and why they persist despite their track record, so I invited Marie on The Gray Area to talk about it.
Below is an excerpt of our conversation, edited for length and clarity. As always, there’s much more in the full podcast, so listen to and follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you find podcasts. New episodes drop every Monday.
Sean Illing
What’s the simplest definition of multilevel marketing?
Jane Marie
Basically, if you picture a triangle, there’s people that own it at the very top. Then they recruit, say, five people, and the way the scheme goes is those five people are supposed to recruit five more, and then those five are supposed to recruit five more, and the idea is that it keeps expanding exponentially.
And the way multilevel marketing companies differentiate themselves from straight-up pyramid schemes is that there’s some sort of product or service involved. It gets sold to people being recruited into it. Almost all of them have a sign-up fee. They usually have a kit or a collection of products that you have to purchase right away when you join. And that money is what flows up the pyramid. The people at the very bottom often quit pretty quickly because they’re not making any money, and then they’re replaced by more eager, hopeful folks who buy what the company is selling, which is false hope.
Sean Illing
Is there actually a meaningful distinction between a pyramid scheme and an MLM?
Jane Marie
I don’t think so, but the legal difference, which is debatable, is that there’s a valid product or service involved in an MLM. But when you dig a little deeper, the products are typically overpriced. They’re not something unique. They’re things you can find in the regular marketplace for a lot cheaper, or the service is offering something that’s cheaper and works better.
Sean Illing
Do we have any idea how many active MLMs there are now and how many billions the industry brings in every year?
Jane Marie
One in 13 adults in America have participated in an MLM, which is a lot. And they’ve expanded into developing countries. So there’s a huge MLM presence now in Southeast Asia and in Mexico and South America. It’s just a guess, but I’d say the industry is probably worth $40 billion or $50 billion.
Sean Illing
MLMs disproportionately target women and they seem to thrive in rural areas and on military bases where spouses are often alone with the kids. In many ways, that’s not all that surprising, but how do you explain it?
Jane Marie
Well, they’re feeding on the idea that we’re all raised on in America, which is that if you work hard, try hard, you’ll get rewarded. The world is your oyster — that whole thing. But it just isn’t true. The promise is still very attractive, though. The appeal of the American dream, it doesn’t ever really go away. And the architects of these schemes understand that that’s all you really need to appeal to.
This is what they sell. Do you remember how when you were growing up, you were told that you should be able to achieve anything you want? We’re going to be the only company that gives you that opportunity. And even better, they don’t ask if you have a high school diploma. They don’t care if you’re a felon. You can do anything and be anything. And they’re specifically going after groups that need that opportunity or that feel they need that opportunity and aren’t given that opportunity by the mainstream marketplace.
Sean Illing
The thing that really drove me to your book is how you draw a straight line between what we think of as the “wellness industry,” which includes the vapid world of online “life coaches,” and MLMs. Can you tell me about the connections here? Why is the story of MLMs also the story about the rise of wellness hucksters and life coaches?
Jane Marie
It’s kind of an endless chicken and egg thing, but I’ll tell you the elements that I see.
One thing is that MLMs, wellness, and life coaching all preach this idea that they — the big “they” — don’t want you to know that there is in fact a cheat code to life. They don’t want you to know that you don’t have to go to therapy. You just need a life coach. They don’t want you to know that you don’t have to do chemotherapy, you just need to buy this vitamin or this oil. They don’t want you to know that you don’t have to go to college, you can just sell Tupperware.
So it’s the same mindset with all this. There’s an “us versus them” mentality and it feeds on the idea that there’s a shortcut and a cheat code to financial prosperity, to achieving the American Dream.
Sean Illing
I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time on Instagram surveying the whole life coaching space and the amount of bullshit on offer is just incredible. I realize not all life coaching is like this, but there’s a guy I used to know a long time ago and I discovered recently that this is what he does. And he’s not just a “life coach,” he’s the coach of aspiring life coaches. He was always charismatic and now he’s shifted into some kind of New Age douchebag Socrates, and it appears to be working very well for him.
But it looks like a straight-up pyramid scheme to me, a lot like the classic MLMs, because it relies on this fantasy that there’s an infinite supply of clients out there for these potential life coaches. And maybe there is, in theory at least, but the reality is that almost every one of these people are going to spend thousands of dollars taking this stupid guy’s stupid course and they’re not going to make any of it back!
Jane Marie
Unless they develop their own course, which is also what he’s teaching them. He’s showing them the way to make money selling the course!
Sean Illing
Right, that’s the pyramid! But the music is going to stop and the people at the bottom of the pyramid won’t have chairs to sit in.
Jane Marie
That’s absolutely right. But the people who traffic in these schemes think that’s fairness. They believe that not everyone’s going to have a chair to sit in and that makes sense to them. Not everyone gets to be a billionaire. Only the smartest, most hardworking people are billionaires, which we all know isn’t true. But that is a mindset.
Sean Illing
The other side of the wellness industry is also bullshit but it’s a little different. It’s the world of essential oils and supplements and tinctures and alternative therapies and that kind of stuff. Is someone like Gwyneth Paltrow patient zero for this particular disease, at least the modern version of it?
Jane Marie
In the modern era, yeah. I would say she is the poster woman for the wellness industry, and even she’s gotten in trouble for peddling garbage. She had that whole jade egg thing that you were supposed to put in your vagina.
Sean Illing
Why doesn’t the FDA regulate any of this stuff in the wellness supplement space? Could they do it even if they wanted to?
Jane Marie
They put boundaries around it a few times. We’ve created laws over the last hundred years or so around what constitutes food and drug. This distinction is important. What’s a food and what’s a drug? Well, a drug is something that is proven to treat, cure, or alleviate an ailment, and that has to be proven a certain way according to their guidelines.
And then foods are things that keep you alive. So that leaves a lot of stuff out there that people can just make up and say, This’ll help with this or that. It’s not a drug and it’s not a food, but you probably want to drink it. Because it’s going to make you feel better, or in some way help.
They do get in trouble every once in a while when people get sick. There’s been plenty of them that have been found to have high levels of lead or other poisonous metals, and then they get closed down after that. But the FDA doesn’t really have the bandwidth to check out every single bottle of vitamins.
The trickiest thing about the vitamin stuff is you don’t know actually what’s in them. So if I’m going to buy vitamin C, vitamin C does nothing. I mean, you need it, but you don’t need thousands of milligrams a day and it’s not going to get rid of your cold. And so if that was what’s in the bottle, it’s fine to take it. It’s not going to kill you.
But there is no agency that tests every different factory’s vitamin C or says, this is how much vitamin C is actually in that pill. And there have been plenty of cases of someone finally testing some bottle of vitamins from the grocery store and finding out, actually, there’s no vitamin C in here. It’s sugar or whatever. It’s like something else entirely.
To hear the rest of the conversation, click here, and be sure to follow The Gray Area on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Spotify, Pandora, or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Country music uses the West as a synecdoche for America. Beyoncé is here to disrupt that.
Of all the pop stars currently working in America, Beyoncé is undoubtedly the most visually sophisticated. Every new album comes with a lush, rigorously staged set of images, dense with allusions and Easter eggs, that act as an elaboration and a commentary on the themes of the album.
In the Lemonade era around 2016, Beyoncé made herself into a goddess of many identities: the Christian Virgin Mary, the Roman Venus, the Yoruba Oshun. With 2022’s Renaissance, she became a disco diva celebrating the pleasures of the dance floor as a safe space for queer Black joy.
Now, in Cowboy Carter, the country-inflected album she dropped at the end of March, Beyoncé has reinvented herself in perhaps the most difficult transformation of all. She’s transformed herself from American goddess into goddess of America.
Let’s decode the imagery of Cowboy Carter together.
Sweetheart of the rodeo
The album cover for Cowboy Carter sees Beyoncé sitting sidesaddle on a white horse, in red, white, and blue leathers. In one hand she’s holding the horse’s reins, and in the other, the American flag. Together, her upraised arms and her head and neck create a sort of W shape.
“It’s such an awkward and specific gesture,” says Sonya Abrego, a design historian specializing in the history of American fashion. “I really don’t think Beyoncé and her team did that accidentally.”
Abrego sees Beyoncé’s pose as echoing the posture of a woman in an illustrated map called “Evolution of the Cowboy,” created by artist Jo Mora in 1933. The full illustration charts the way cowboy gear and techniques changed over time, along with a rundown of the different cowboy archetypes of various territories. In the center top of the chart, though, we see a woman in a cowboy hat and riding leathers, standing with her arms upraised so that, together with her head and neck, they create a W shape. Behind her, a legend reads “sweetheart of the rodeo.” Flowers blossom in the air where she gestures; she is the bountiful source of the rodeo and all that it signifies.
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Columbia via Wikimedia Commons
The sweetheart of the rodeo has appeared on album covers. The Byrds used her on the cover of their 1968 album, tellingly titled Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It was known as one of the first country-rock albums, a crossover country album from a band that, like Beyoncé, built their name on a different genre.
The horse of a different color
The horse Beyoncé is riding on the cover of Cowboy Carter looks white, but it’s not just any white horse. It’s a Lipizzaner, a breed that is usually born with a brown or black coat that grows in gray and then white over time. This transition is common among gray horses, but it’s a telling choice here — especially given the themes of the album, with its name-check to Linda Martell, the first solo Black woman country artist to play the Grand Ole Opry.
The title Cowboy Carter, too, nods to the whitewashed work of Black artists in the history of country music. The Carter Family was one of country’s weightiest acts, and they developed their distinctive sound under the influence of Black musician Lesley Riddle. Riddle taught them his innovative style of guitar picking, and he got the Carters entrance to Black spaces, like churches, to help them gather songs from Black communities that went on to help form the basis of the white country songbook.
Cowboy Carter is a history lesson on the Black musicians who helped build country music and whose contributions were swiftly whitewashed. It’s fitting, then, that Beyoncé ride a horse that was black at its birth but is now considered white.
The All-American girl
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Beyoncé/Blair Cardwell via Instagram
On the official album cover, Beyoncé’s wearing the colors of the American flag on her body and holding the American flag. On the vinyl cover, she’s standing in a Statue of Liberty pose with a Miss America sash around her torso and her hair in red, white, and blue beads. She’s playing with one of the common visual motifs of country music, which is Americana kitsch.
In country and Western music, the West acts as a synecdoche for America itself: Western iconography is American iconography because the West is America.
“If you go around the world and ask people for a symbol of the United States, it’s the cowboy that people say,” says Josh Garrett-Davis, H. Russell Smith Foundation curator of Western American history at the Huntington.
The cowboy becoming a symbol of America is not an accident, Garrett-Davis points out. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner posited the frontier thesis, claiming that the distinctive American character was rough and independent and that it came from the nation’s constant movement westward. Theodore Roosevelt, a wealthy East Coaster who needed to add some grit to his image, picked up on the ideas and began to make much of his time in North Dakota.
“All these indicated that just a touch of sort of wildness on the Western frontier could kind of give America its character and refresh,” says Garrett-Davis. “It’s in a sense masculinizing because they were worried that, in the Industrial Age, the country was becoming too feminized.”
The heroic myth of the cowboy was also a deeply white supremacist idea. “They erase the fact that a good portion of the working cowboys in the American West were Indigenous, Mexican, and African American,” says Garrett-Davis. “This was a fiction that was created using these icons of the cowboy, but not really the truth of what cowboy life was like. Cowboys were migrant agricultural laborers in terrible conditions being underpaid.”
By placing her Black female body in the poses and costumes of Western Americana, Beyoncé disrupts that mythology. She evokes the lineage of the erased people of color who came before her — in the West, in country as a genre — and she insists on her right to be there now.
Whatever else happens, Beyoncé is always a goddess
Let’s go back to the vinyl cover, with Beyoncé standing in the pose of the Statue of Liberty, replacing the statue’s torch with a boss-man cigar and the statue’s crown with beaded braids. It’s worth remembering that the statue is also a goddess — she’s the Roman goddess Libertas, or Liberty. Beyoncé is pulling from the Lemonade playbook here to evoke a classical goddess while keeping the details specifically Beyoncé. She’s also added a touch of masculine swagger with that cigar, reminding us all that before she was a goddess, Beyoncé crowned herself King B.
On the pageant queen sash around her torso, Beyoncé’s name appears to be misspelled: Beyincé. The apparent error references a painful family episode. Beyoncé’s name comes from her mother, Tina Knowles, born Celestine Beyoncé. On her birth certificate, though, Tina’s last name was misspelled as “Beyincé.”
On a recent podcast, Tina says she asked her mother why she didn’t get the birth certificate corrected. “And she said, ‘I did one time. The first time, and I was told, ‘Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate,’ because, at one time, Black people didn’t get birth certificates,” she added.
In the same image where she re-establishes herself as a goddess, Beyoncé references a moment where the very infrastructure of America seemed designed to inflict humiliation on her family because of their Blackness. The play between those two ideas is part of the play of this whole album: placing Black people back in the center of a genre and aesthetic that erased them, and making the moment beautiful.
Ripley fails to capture what makes Highsmith’s book so compelling.
First, the bad news: Netflix’s new show Ripley, based on Patricia Highsmith’s immortal novel The Talented Mr. Ripley, is a snooze.
It’s shot beautifully. Under the auspices of showrunner Steven Zaillian (the screenwriter for the movie Schindler’s List, among others) and Oscar-winning cinematographer Robert Elswit, Ripley renders its exquisite Italian landscapes and architecture in gorgeous, sinister black and white. The camera is forever panning across a Caravaggio or a palazzo, leaving your eyes time to linger. Each frame is elegantly composed.
Yet everything happening within those frames is so boring that it feels like a waste of beauty — not to mention a waste of a more than capable cast. Andrew Scott, who has been so charismatic and emotive in Fleabag and Sherlock and All of Us Strangers, plays Ripley with a careful detachment, as if he’s been warned not to try to make the audience feel anything. Likable Johnny Flynn (Emma., Lovesick), in the less showy role of Ripley’s callow mark Dickie, has himself so reined in that it becomes difficult to understand why Ripley is so drawn to him in the first place. The spark between them that is meant to set the whole plot ablaze ends up feeble and barely visible. (It doesn’t help matters that both Scott and Flynn are over 40, making it difficult to buy them as the sort of just-out-of-college gallivanters whose worried parents might plausibly be keeping a too-close watch on them.)
The biggest waste, though, is the waste of the story itself. Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is a particularly stylish entry in a highly specific grouping of stories that are currently having a bit of a moment. Besides Netflix’s Ripley, last fall’s Saltburn launched a thousand internet arguments. Donna Tartt’s The Secret History remains the darling of the dark academia readers of TikTok. This is the genre I’ve started to call “striver gothic,” the stories of pretenders striving to make it among the careless and idle wealthy, even if they have to kill to do so. They are stories about how even for the smoothest operator, the sheer force of wanting can eat you alive.
Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley is a perfect iteration of the striver gothic. Netflix’s Ripley does not stick the landing. Looking at the ways it falls apart can tell us a lot about why these stories appeal to us.
Toward a working definition of “striver gothic”
Striver gothic is a term I developed with my friend Kirsten Carleton to describe stories that pull from a specific set of tropes. Here are the basics:
- An outsider main character is desperate for inclusion in a rarified upper-class world. He (and this character usually is a he) is the striver, and it is his desire to ascend from the bourgeoisie to the upper class that powers the story. The upper class is represented in metonymy by a friend group or family with intense, almost cultish insider dynamics. Frequently their group dynamic was formed within the cloistered walls of a school, creating some overlap between this genre and dark academia. They are either Ivy League or Oxbridge — or they borrow the aesthetic.
- A country house or manor represents sanctuary, prize, and inclusion within the group.
- The main character is obsessed with the leader of the group, frequently with queer undertones: Do I want to be him, or do I want to be with him?
- Identities are doubled and doppelgängers abound.
- There will be at least one murder, committed either by the striver or by the group he is trying to infiltrate. The boundaries of this world are guarded fiercely, and any attempt to break them ends in death.
The nonnegotiables of the striver gothic are a striver and a murder. Everything else you can fiddle with.
For its part, in Netflix’s Ripley, Dickie, his girlfriend Marge, and his friend Freddie are the upper-class friend group that striver Tom longs to penetrate. In his attempt to get there, Tom murders Dickie and takes over his identity, then murders Freddie, too, to cover the whole thing up. Ripley doesn’t quite have a country house (Tom does briefly move into Dickie’s Italian country home, although he prefers city palazzos), but the rest of the tropes are all there. Tom doesn’t have to long for Dickie’s house when he can simply take over Dickie’s whole identity instead.
Brideshead Revisited set the template for this genre. It is not a striver gothic in and of itself; it’s not gothic and it contains no murders. It is nonetheless a striver story, with middle-class Charles seduced into a corrupt and decadent wealthy world via his love for aloof, androgynous Sebastian and the enchanted realm they build together at Oxford in the 1920s. In some ways, all the striver gothic stories are attempts to play out the subtext of Brideshead, to bring its suppressed gay longings and its numbed wartime rages out into the light of day.
That is in part what happens in The Secret History, perhaps the most complete entry in the genre. There, Richard the pretender makes his way into the rarified world of his college’s classics students by helping them commit and cover up a murder so that they’ll let him stay at their picturesque country lake house. In The Secret History, Richard’s desire for inclusion in the group crosses the line into sexual desire more than once, and the group’s aversion to anyone who betrays the aesthetics of their class is what turns them murderous.
Meanwhile, Saltburn wears its derivative nature on its sleeve and straightforwardly places the action of Ripley into the setting of Brideshead. It’s a movie that cannot quite decide if it’s going to be a pastiche, a subversion, or a straight iteration of the striver gothic, which is part of why it’s such a mess.
I haven’t made a conclusive list here. Tana French’s The Likeness and arguably Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca are both striver gothics with female strivers. The movie Bodies, Bodies, Bodies parodies the genre, and the most recent season of You sends the murderous Joe Goldberg into a Secret History-style world. Popular culture abounds with strivers.
But Tom Ripley is unique. Where Brideshead’s Charles is too earnest, Secret History’s Richard too opaque, and Saltburn’s Oliver simply too psychologically improbable, Tom Ripley is endlessly, delightfully fascinating. That’s probably why people have told his story so many times.
Tom Ripley is the ultimate striver
Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley is a man who is always hunting or being hunted.
Highsmith drops us straight into Tom’s paranoid, obsessive head from her first page. Her novel opens with Tom fleeing from one bar to another, certain that he’s being followed by the police and that they’re going to arrest him for one of his many petty crimes of forgery and fraud.
Tom’s right that he’s being followed, but his pursuer isn’t a police officer. He’s the father of Dickie Greenleaf, an old acquaintance of Tom’s, who thought he recognized Tom and wanted to come say hello. As soon as Tom understands this, he pivots effortlessly. He stops worrying about what his pursuer might have on him, and he starts thinking about what he might be able to get out of his pursuer.
In this case, it turns out that Tom can get quite a lot out of Dickie’s father. Dickie, it develops, has been in Italy for years, refusing to come home to New York, no matter how much his parents beg him. With the gentlest of pushes from Tom, Dickie’s businessman father hits on the plan of having Tom go to Italy to persuade Dickie back home — all Tom’s expenses to be paid for on the Greenleaf dime.
That’s how Tom Ripley works. He sees the world in a binary of hunter and hunted, target and prey, and always, he is determined to come out ahead. His philosophy is not to worry about the future because something always comes up, and as such, he burns his bridges merrily and without hesitation. It’s nothing new to Tom to have angry people after him, and someone new will always happen along whom he can use to get himself out of one bad situation and into a new one.
There are a lot of sociopaths in literature, but Tom is a peculiar one, an intelligent man who acts almost purely on instinct. He is suave enough to grant the reader pleasure at his exquisite taste, but always wrong on one or two telling details that the truly wealthy observer will inevitably pick up on, marking him as a class pretender. He’s self-aware enough to be funny, but he’s emotionally obtuse enough to miss the subtext in half his conversations and to lie to himself about the other half.
Tom’s contradictions, his combination of playfulness, methodical care, and murderous caprice, are part of what make The Talented Mr. Ripley stand out among its peers in the striver gothic. Tom is a striver among strivers, at once fiercely focused on his goals and incapable of considering them too closely. When Tom decides that what he wants, more than anything in the world, is to make Dickie like him, he doesn’t bother to consider closely what it is about Dickie that attracts him, whether he longs for Dickie’s wealth and easy lifestyle or whether he longs for Dickie’s love and admiration for their own sake. He simply identifies his target and acts to reach it.
Why Ripley fails
Netflix’s Ripley is the third major adaptation of Highsmith’s novel and, in some ways, the most faithful. It is also the weakest artistically.
In 1960, the French director René Clément transformed Ripley into Plein Soleil, marketed in the US as Purple Noon. There, Tom becomes a suave and beautiful con artist, more Thomas Crown than Tom Ripley, and he murders his friend less out of frustrated desire than out of rage at his sadism. In Clément’s hands, the story is no longer striver gothic, but it is a sun-soaked and brutal piece of filmmaking.
Probably the most successful adaptation is also the most famous: Anthony Minghella’s 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley, with Matt Damon as Tom and Jude Law as Dickie. Minghella’s film doesn’t match entirely with Highsmith’s version of the characters. After Highsmith’s Tom murders Dickie, he falls asleep that night “happy, content, and utterly, utterly confident,” but Damon renders Tom a vulnerable sweetheart of a character who weeps as he kills. Moreover, while Highsmith’s Tom is utterly isolated, Minghella invents two new characters he can talk to, through which the audience can learn exactly what the enigmatic Mr. Ripley is thinking. Through those conversations, and through Minghella’s ecstatic camera as it pans over his beautiful actors on luminous Italian beaches, we can see exactly how Tom’s obsession with Dickie takes seed and blossoms, until he feels he has no choice but to murder in the face of Dickie’s rejection.
Ripley is a straight adaptation. It contains barely a scene that does not appear in Highsmith’s book; hardly a scene that does appear in Highsmith’s book gets omitted. What gets left out is Tom’s sense of playfulness, the fun he finds in lying and deceiving. Where Highsmith’s Tom is prone to giggle fits when he thinks of his crimes, Zaillian’s stays sad-eyed and grim. Under Zaillian’s restrained touch, the emotional connections that drive Tom to kill are barely sketched in. Instead, we spend inordinate amounts of time watching him cover up his crimes: lugging bodies painfully and silently around and then scrubbing up the blood.
Highsmith, too, pays attention to the details of Tom’s coverups. But she writes about those details with panache. She delights in the elegance and thoroughness of Tom’s work. She makes it glamorous. Zaillian makes it hard and dull and unpleasant. This is doubtless an emotionally accurate depiction of what it’s like to dispose of dead bodies, but who comes to Ripley for that?
We come to Ripley for Tom Ripley himself. Tom’s flair, his playfulness, his social adroitness mixed with profound blindness regarding his own desires for human intimacy — these are the elements that make this subgenre compelling.
One of the pleasures of the striver gothic is the deep ambiguity about why, exactly, the striver is working so hard to get in with the group he’s targeted. Is he doing it because he genuinely likes them? Or because he likes their lifestyle? By extension: Is the genre about how much we long for intimacy from the people we admire? Or is it about how much we long for their money and their beautiful things?
Well, after all, asks Tom Ripley: Why can’t it be both?