Everyone Is Watching

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses sexual assault, abusive relationships, and gun violence.

The color white has numerous resonances in literature and culture, ranging from representing innocence and cleanliness to marking death. In Everyone is Watching, whiteness also caries various symbolic meanings. 

Fern notes, early in the text, that Cat’s false bedroom is festooned with “layers of down comforters, cashmere blankets, and piles of pillows all in a crisp snowy white hue that hurt Fern’s eyes” (23). Fern later looks at the broadly white decor of the estate: “All pristine, Fern thought, but somehow soulless” (180). Here, the overwhelmingly bleached surroundings highlight the twist at the heart of the novel: Cat performs a warm and friendly intimacy with her viewers, pretending to invite them into her bedroom to chat, but in reality is an abusive and coldly manipulative vigilante. Similarly, while the contestants have ostensibly been invited to participate in a game show, they are really there to be punished by Cat. 

Later, white becomes the backdrop for dramatic bloodletting. When Camille notes that the group is all wearing white jackets during the “Spin, Speak, Shoot” challenge, she wonders if this is meant to unify the group. Fern teases her: “Or, Doctor, a white jacket is just a white jacket” (249). The game demands that contestants shoot themselves with an ostensibly unloaded gun; when the gun goes off, the expectation of blood is replaced with another red liquid—wine.

Whiteness, in the reality show world that Cat has created, is thus a signifier of falseness, one that imitates the truth so closely that appearance and reality are impossible to fully parse. Its appearance prompts readers to suspect that whatever is happening on the page will soon be revealed as a feint hiding reality.