by Lucas Mann
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It’s hard to trace an exact history of the “reality show.” The term is often applied retroactively—roots can be found in The Real World, back in the midnineties, or in Cops in the late eighties, or in early eighties variety shows like That’s Incredible!, or the seminal seventies docudrama An American Family. One thing remains consistent: it’s always been a tortured lineage, a confounding term.
The best parsing of the language I’ve read is this, from a book called Trans-Reality Television: “Reality show” as a phrase is self-confessing.
In proximity, the two words begin to chip away at each other’s meaning. Reality should not be a performance; a show, if it’s any good, should probably be exaggerating something. The resulting promise of the phrase, then, is an impossibility: transforming facts to the level of the spectacular.
I like that the implication isn’t that we who watch so faithfully are being bullshitted, but rather that we are willfully bullshitting ourselves to get what we want. We are promised a dynamic that cannot actually ever exist, and we accept that.
More than accept it. The genre means a lot to us, to me. I’ve never expressed that sentiment with even a gesture toward sincerity, because it’s embarrassing. But I think I mean it. Sincerely. At least for now I do.
Far more than I’ve read Berger (or Barthes or Baldwin or Sontag, or any of the others on the grad-school syllabus that I claim shaped how I see the world), far more than we have walked through museums together (and really, how many times have I had the patience for more than one wing and the café?), far more than we’ve sat and listened and harmonized to the songs that we so seriously call ours, we have watched and internalized and discussed televised showings of spectacular reality. The Real Housewives of Atlanta (and New Jersey and New York and Beverly Hills and, to a lesser degree, Miami and Orange County), Keeping Up with the Kardashians, The Real World, Road Rules, The Real World/Road Rules Challenge, Love & Hip Hop, Sister Wives, Basketball Wives, Breaking Amish, Storage Wars, My 600-Pound Life, My Big Fat Fabulous Life, Shahs of Sunset, Married to Medicine, Botched, Say Yes to the Dress, Deadliest Catch, Million Dollar Listing, Intervention, The Little Couple, Vanderpump Rules—there are many more that I’m forgetting offhand, and there have been many that came and went and briefly held some importance for us, and there are many more being produced right now that we will soon adopt. These are the narratives that have underpinned our lives. These are the stories that we choose to live alongside.
When you live alongside anything for a long time—any person, any character, any narrative structure, any screen flicker—you become a part of it and it becomes a part of you. A part of what—and also how—you remember.
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We’re on your bed next to the window in your dorm room and we’re nineteen. I’m running my hands along your tattoo, your first one, and you tell me to stop because you don’t like your body, and I tell you that I do. You don’t believe me.
We ask for everything about each other, the kinds of details that other people wouldn’t know, as though that will confirm the importance of our conversations. My first memory was of a red vacuum cleaner on the gray carpet of my mother’s apartment on East Sixth Street. I was scared of the noise it made. It was a cramped basement apartment, and every sound was loud. I was frightened often. This was Alphabet City in the late eighties, and outside our windows I could see and hear the pacing boots of methadone patients waiting for their morning fix.
“Oh, I can picture you,” you say. “Were you blonder? Were you chubby?”
I was, both. And I want you to picture me that way: a cherub in a hard, looming world.
I do remember the vacuum cleaner, and that the carpet was gray. I have heard about the methadone clinic from my mother, mostly cheerful stories about me getting free lollipops. I don’t remember it, but I can picture it now, too.
You are running your fingers through my hair and smiling at what isn’t an outright lie, just an interpretation, the beginning of a character that I would rather you see, another in a quickly building collection—Q: How many partners have you had? A: Plenty. Q: Wait, did you come already? A: [Indecipherable, hopefully erotic grunt].
You say you remember almost nothing. You didn’t speak as a child, you say, like not ever, because you moved to different countries and had to start learning language all over again. You remember an overall feeling of loneliness but hardly any images. Oh, here’s one, you say. Coming back from the beach in Italy, drinking peach nectar out of a carton—how sweet and thick and simple it was. Oh, and you had a boy’s haircut. Oh, and you were bullied for your weirdness, and your silence, so you preferred to be alone—most of the memories you have are of that pain. Oh, and one more thing: you were a liar. When you did speak, it was never the truth. And there was one particular lie you told that was too big, too painful, and you’ll never talk about it even still.
This scares me a little but mostly turns me on—a repressed past; an untellable secret; dark, brooding eyes under a strange, little-boy haircut; lonely; sucking nectar out of a carton. It becomes instantly important to know that there is something unknowable about you.
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I keep thinking of your secrets and the lonely anger, and all those redacted memories for a while, and then I forget about them as other details emerge to pay attention to. But these plot points linger, always, making each new scene a little more enthralling, and then they resurface, brief, overpowering—reminders that we can see so much of each other, know each other as best we can, and yet always, underneath, there is the unknown.
A few years later, at a party in Brooklyn, you’re talking and drinking and laughing, and then suddenly you’re silent and flushed, looking over my shoulder, down a crowded hallway. You’ve seen someone from your childhood, from an American camp you were sent to when you knew no English, and your face is the face of a silent girl, alone and enraged. At first you ask me to hide you, but then she comes up and says, “Oh my God, how crazy to see you! Remember camp? Don’t you miss camp?”
I watch you glare at her, silent for a moment, and then you crescendo into emotion. You say that you don’t miss it at all. You tell this girl that she had been so cruel—does she even remember what she did to you? She says, “No, not me.” You stand closer to her and say with a new force, “Yes, you.”
There are others around us at the party, turned stiff and awkward, but you don’t see anybody else. The camp girl says she doesn’t remember it the same way, but then she squeaks through an apology. You don’t accept. The crowd watches; I watch, and watch them watch you. I am transfixed—by the coming tears, by your rage, by this beautiful soap-opera haze that has fallen over the hallway.
On the way home, you don’t bring it up. You are silent again; you hold your body in what looks to be a performed, anguished seethe, and I keep stealing glances at you as we walk. Years have passed, and I still remember it, a vivid, pleasurable return each time—those mysteries in you, the pain turned to brief power, probably overblown in my mind but always potent.
2
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I would say that we’re both obs
essed with the actual, or at least the actualish. This is strange because we have both dedicated our lives to art forms that will never achieve anything close to that effect. You’re a stage actress, which artistically is most closely related, I think, to the sand painting that Tibetan monks do—everything is exactly as it is for just a moment, and then it’s gone. When I go to see your shows, I never know how to answer with any certainty on the way home when you ask how this performance was different from the last. Or if you were closer to something right, something real. Even though the realness existed in the moment, all-consuming, it’s impossible to say after the fact. I liked it, decided to believe it, registered and treasured gestures that felt recognizably yours, and then the whole thing disappeared.
I write about real things, but of course there’s a limit. Write about what you’re looking at and you probably fuck it up; write about a memory and you’re probably a liar. The only thing that is incontrovertibly actual, actual in that it remains so, is the ink or the pixel, whatever fingerprint of content I can get. My words are pasted into endless, nonphysical space, and I search there to see if they’ve been shared forward into the nothing—so many events played out in front of me reduced to selfish squiggles, pleasurably decipherable at best.
The history of filmed narrative, on the other hand, is the thrill of the actual. Some part of any shot was really there, and stays captured there—a person really stood in that place, saying those words, and the proof is on the screen in front of us. That’s why we watch, and that’s why everyone watches, and that’s why everyone always has. Actually, let me back up. I’ve realized that’s why I watch, and maybe you feel that way, too. Even in our weekly allegiance to something fantastical like Game of Thrones, the actual is part of the draw for me. Regardless of the CGI dragons, the place they call Westeros on the show exists outside of the story. It’s the Croatian coast, or Malta—someplace Mediterranean, anyway; I remember waiting through the credits once to find out. The point is, it exists. You can go there. Every grain of sand is a grain of sand in the world that we live in, and every footprint made by every actor is a true indentation among a million grains. I like to fantasize that—depending on the winds and the remoteness of the location—the footprint could still be there, and, hey, we’ve been talking about taking a big trip.
When we watch the many reruns that we watch, we are revisiting a reality preserved just as it was. The people on-screen, actors or nonactors, were in an exact place in an exact moment, and there they are still, over and over again, on demand. This is, to me, enormously reassuring—like hikers’ cairns, marking the course of a life lived mostly stationary. How many times have we argued over whose impression is accurate and then rushed to replay the scene for proof of exactly what was? Sure, there are differing interpretations, meanings to find, tastes to adhere to, but beneath all that the action happened as it happened. They spoke, they moved, just so: there it is; we can see it. That feeling is its own kind of drama, more powerful sometimes than any plot.
Remember when we followed Tony Shalhoub down Sixth Avenue for like half a mile? Kept a few yards back and just watched him walk? He was drinking an iced coffee and talking on his cell phone. Black jeans, black T-shirt. We were transfixed by the act of seeing him, and it’s not like either of us were ever huge Monk fans, and honestly, I hated Wings. But we’d seen him so many times on-screen, and then seeing him offscreen confirmed how real he’d been every time we watched him. Does that make sense?
Tony Shalhoub looks exactly like Tony Shalhoub. I whispered that to you, or something like it, and I remember we giggled like coconspirators on an idea not yet fully conceived. He really, really did look like that.
* * *
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The first scrap of American film ever copyrighted and projected for the public was five seconds of a man sneezing. On the surface, it seems an arbitrary subject. I like to imagine how many ideas must have been discarded before they settled on it.
A man simply standing? Too lifeless.
Talking? With no sound, how compelling could that be?
In an embrace? Too staged; forcing the humanity a bit.
Too much action could be overwhelming (and indeed, about a year later, French audiences fled from the Lumière brothers’ short film of a train pulling into a station).
So instead the great ancestor of all American screen characters is Fred Ott, a tech who happened to work at Edison’s laboratory in New Jersey, a good sport with a photogenic mustache, who agreed to take snuff and then sneeze in front of a giant camera. For that one act he remains a celebrity, though some might also recognize him from his follow-up film, made a few months later: Fred Ott Holding a Bird. I can watch him right now, a piece of cultural history presented free of charge by the Library of Congress.
He’s dressed nicely for the occasion; he wears a tie and a suit jacket. He’s still in his overcoat, too, which lends a certain feeling of the haphazard, the uncomposed—if this were staged, it’s tempting to think, surely he would have been there for a while and he would have taken off his overcoat. But the staging is apparent in other ways. Ott induces his own casual behavior. When he snorts the snuff, an impish expression turns up his lips. He is aware of being watched, and excited to perform, and all that is conveyed in less than a second, because then his head rears back and his eyes close and he sneezes in the manner in which I’m sure he always sneezed; it’s a perfectly reasonable sneeze, one that anyone anywhere will forever be able to recognize as a sneeze. He seems to look at the camera, just for a moment; then the film cuts to black.
There were no TVs then, of course, but there were also no movie theaters, and the viewing experience more closely resembled television’s. One by one, viewers were allowed to peep into the little windows at the top of Kinetoscope machines to watch the image of this stranger, this neighbor, sneezing. For five seconds, they were alone with him. They saw him perform a tiny part of the reality that they participated in each day without questioning it. How many times had they watched a sneeze? How many times had they sneezed while being watched, unaware of the gaze upon them, never considering how it might look in those moments when their eyes closed and they lost control, head whipping forward, air and snot rocketing from their nostrils?
I like to believe that, up until right then, the line between performer and audience had never been so blurred. Or the line between the staged and the truthful. Or the line between participating artist and objectified subject. Not even the line between art and commerce, because the whole point of the film was to advertise what Edison could do with this new technology: We can capture reality unawares; look at this willing reality we’ve captured! Five seconds in the dark, with Fred Ott sneezing the way we all sneeze.
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Ask me the most memorable moment I have ever seen on TV, and I will tell you about an early season of Survivor, a show I never even liked that much.
This bald guy, a rock climber, a ziplock-bag-of-almonds type, was helping to build a fire on a beach on a South Asian island, and suddenly some smoke blew up into his face. He accidentally inhaled and it knocked him out. He fell forward into the flames and then the cameras rushed to him. He was burned so bad he was melted. His fingers were shapeless, beginning to stick together. What a scream he screamed. I was maybe fifteen, and I’d never heard a scream like that. In my memory, I still haven’t again. This was back when the novelty of unvarnished pain was surprising. Fifteen years later, it’s no longer surprising but the appeal remains.
I remember how aware I was of how much I was drawn to the scene when I first watched it. I loved it because I saw the guy hurt, and I saw him dealing with hurt, and I saw other people confronting the rawness of what it’s like to be around someone so hurt. He lurched toward the ocean and came out of the water like a blacksmith’s iron, and again the camera closed. He sat in the water some more to cool, and I could hear him say, “It keeps intensif
ying,” his face scrunched.
Medics broke the fourth wall and entered the shot, conveniently labeled on the bottom of the screen in the show’s trademark jaunty yellow font. They put him on a stretcher, and he screamed until they drugged him. Then came quick cuts to the other cast members hugging one another, crying, hyperventilating. Then he was put in the helicopter, almost passed out, and the show aired his final words of the season: You guys know what’s right; you know what to do.
His eyes were pale blue and stoned cloudy, weirdly beautiful. He looked right at the camera and showed us that beauty. I remember thinking he didn’t have to look at the camera, but he did—maybe someone asked him to, or maybe it felt like the only appropriate thing. Maybe he was lucid enough to reach for one more moment when he was centered in the shot. Then the doors closed on him as his eyes drifted shut.
His fellow cast members waved and blew him kisses, made ridiculous proclamations:
We love you. (They’d only known him for a week.)
We’ll catch some fish for you, buddy. (What?)
Looking back, what’s striking is that at the same time the show was forced to expose the beams of its structure and break from its coherent, constructed-yet-unacknowledged narrative, it also transcended into a far better piece. Seeing the crew react, seeing a helicopter appear that had always been available, somehow only heightened the intensity. The cast members, these “survivors,” instantly weakened, looking right at the camera for help: Fix this, please; survival is terrifying. The set felt like a set, not an endless expanse of coastal Filipino wilderness but a stamp of land painstakingly selected, contained, and constantly monitored. And when the careful construction was laid bare, it wasn’t a disappointing revelation—the show was free to become about itself as a show, a vehicle for something horrible and human, about danger and pain and a person’s willingness to display that for whatever reasons.