A tidy piece of viewing
A Netflix self-help show has a host of handy household tips, finds Calum Henderson
Like a lot of lifestyle and self-help gurus, Marie Kondo’s patented KonMari method of tidying up seems to be about 90 per cent common sense and 10 per cent nonsense. But what delightful nonsense it is. How hard your heart would have to be, how dully rational your brain, to resist the charms of her new Netflix series Tidying Up with Marie Kondo.
This is the reality series that inevitably follows the best-selling books. The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up is the essential text, the one where Kondo lays out the secret to a tidy home and a happy life: basically, you take everything you own, starting with clothing, moving on to books and miscellaneous tat, and clutch each item to your chest. Only keep the things that spark joy.
Maybe I am doing something wrong. I can’t get anything I own to spark even the faintest glimmer of joy, and neither can anybody else I know. Even the participants in the show seem to be mostly making it up as they go along.
They are American families, at their wits’ end over mess. They’ve thrown open the doors of their untidy hovels, and in has floated Kondo, emitting a highpitched hum, shadowed by a translator who she never introduces or even really acknowledges. These people aren’t extreme hoarders, merely everyday pack rats — the young family where Mum is the only one who knows where things are, or the empty nesters who have managed to amass an entire room full of Christmas decorations.
After assessing the lay of the land, the first thing Kondo does is greet and thank the house. She wanders around for a bit, like a dog looking for the perfect place to go to the toilet, then drops to her knees and begins performing an elegant silent prayer. It’s a
strangely moving ritual, and once you’ve spontaneously cried watching one of them there’s really no turning back.
Everything Kondo says and does from this point on seems strikingly profound. Maybe it’s the layers of translation, maybe it’s that she exists on a higher plane of emotional consciousness but every emotion is expressed with piercing clarity. Just once in my life I’d like to possess such grace, to enter a room and confidently declare, “I feel happy” or to respond to a compliment with, “Thank you, I’m grateful for you saying that.”
Self-help gurus don’t come much more inspirational than this. And all the peripheral fairy dust does a good job of disguising the fairly mundane reality of the KonMari method, which is basically just being grateful for what you’ve got, getting rid of stuff you
don’t need and putting the rest in boxes. If we’re being honest, the tidy home reveals at the end of each episode aren’t even that impressive — you’ve definitely seen better.
Still, this is how it goes: you take the bits that are useful to you, and leave the rest. So thank you, KonMari, though I may be incapable of experiencing joy, I’m still grateful for your laundry folding technique.