Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  Later in the season these same players are climbing into one another’s beds, lights off, their eyes glowing into the cameras—almost alone, hidden yet on display. I remember watching and hearing them whisper, the quotes probably shifting in my mind over the years but the tone and force of them still vivid:

  I want you. I love you. I don’t care if we use a condom; I love the way you feel.

  Then:

  I’m sorry I put us in this place. If you’re pregnant, will you keep it? I think we can do it. I think I do love you. I think maybe this is what I need.

  Scholarly essays have identified the Las Vegas season as a crucial breaking point that led to what is truly the modern age of reality, when all hopes for educational documentation were shelved in favor of spectacle. The producers left a show about race and class and politics and engineered instead a show about vanity and sex within the same sociological premise. And not the complex issues surrounding vanity and sex; just a show about watching hot bodies fuck. Indeed, the last remaining vestige of the Real World franchise is The Challenge—former stars flown to tropical resorts to compete in arbitrary competitions before returning to their rooms, tanned and wet, for drinking, fighting, and, inevitably, sex.

  Las Vegas, it is argued, left behind any interest in the substance of modern life and instead began to orchestrate this recurring fantasy that’s far more reliably fun to look at. But it wasn’t a fantasy. Even as I fantasized about it, it never felt like a fantasy. It never had that easy shimmer of impossibility. It was a group of people trying so hard to figure out how to be worthy of a fantasy, a roomful of young, ambitious, malleable unknowns who’d made their bodies perfect to be noticed, who had auditioned by insisting, over and over, with their own little twists on the theme, that they were pleasurably observable, that most desirable identity. It was the jittery high of suddenly embodying the parameters of a fantasy, that climax attained and potentially ongoing, and the instant anxiety of what it might take to linger there.

  I return to that moment when three of them start kissing and they keep saying, I can’t believe this is happening, even though they’re making it happen. They are pulling away to look at their reflections in the mirror. The others are watching them, then turning to the camera, then looking down, ashamed to be part of the spectacle, thrilled, too, wondering silently, and later out loud in the confessional room, if they are capable of, willing to be, this kind of person. They flush with jealousy that, for five seconds, they weren’t someone who’d been chosen for a kiss.

  * * *

  —

  The creators of The Real World modeled their show after An American Family and paid homage to its auteur, Craig Gilbert. Gilbert saw his work as anthropological, and I think this is crucial to understanding everything he did and everything that came after him. In the 1960s, he produced Margaret Mead’s New Guinea Journal, in which Dr. Mead returned after a generation to observe how remote villagers were adjusting to increasing modernity. The time span cultivated there is important, the ongoingness. There was story, a central drama to be found even in the simple fact that the subjects grew older and wearier, that things change over time and also stay the same.

  Gilbert mapped out the future of what he was calling “television documentary”: It must be in a series form—repetition and involvement with characters is what holds viewers—and it must be concerned with the events in the daily lives of ordinary citizens.

  He said this sustained voyeurism into the recognizable could break through the aching sense of being alone that most of us feel.

  The shift, then, was from the anthropology of the foreign to the anthropology of the common, from the thrill of finding recognizable humanity in far-off, unrecognizable situations to finding the bizarre, perhaps reassuring, humanity hidden in everything that feels all too ordinary.

  Look at us. Look underneath us. Inside us. Look what we have become.

  * * *

  —

  I have so many memories of sitting still, watching you watch, to the point that I freely substitute those memories for my own. They are my memories; I was there. But the emotion, the action, the animation, is yours; I’m just watching.

  Dorm-cot watching—your face in the up-close laptop glow, younger in that light than I allowed myself to see you, which meant that I was younger than I wanted to see myself.

  Watching that Pixar movie Up, drinking boxed wine—how you wept at the beginning montage of squat cartoons loving, then aging, then one dying, then grief. I still glance to see if you’re crying the moment we’re watching something that might be worth tears, and I can feel you glancing at me, looking for the same signals; the simultaneity of the action is comforting and anxious and collective and alone, all at once.

  The main memory, played on a loop, is of laughter: the fullness with which your laugh explodes at the screen, so many versions of that laugh and the realization each time of its fullness. It seems, each time, a more genuine laugh than I can achieve—no forced exhalation, no tension of waiting for the acknowledgment or approval of your taste. I envy you when you laugh; I begin to laugh to catch up with you, and then our laughter builds together, and then I’m really laughing, a bodily response of relief that I always associate with you.

  In Ordinary Affects, Kathleen Stewart attempts to define a person’s self in the face of the onslaught of images that make up daily life: It exists, obliquely, in dreams of disappearing, of winning or being done with it all. Forms of attention and attachment keep it moving: the hypervigilance, the denial, the distraction, the sensory games of all sorts, the vaguely held promise that something is happening.

  I like the idea of the self as a thing that needs outside animation; I recognize the sensation. The self as one of those rounded mirrors on curvy roads, taking the images of passing cars and stretching them around the glass, suddenly alive. There are too many metaphors to mix here. What I’m saying is, when I think of these words, I think of you, the same way I think of you now when I think of watching. I never liked the term losing yourself, in reference to a book or a movie or a show or a person. It’s too certain that either something very good or very bad is happening, instead of something very common: living, looking.

  It’s not that the punctum for me is always you, just that the feeling is similar—a stirring, a familiar pleasure that is too hard to pin down. I don’t mean to claim that I know your perspective. The act of watching you and finding myself is limiting, it’s selfish; I know it. But the looking is part of living. I look, I recognize, I feel the stab.

  Another image of watching, repeated: We walk the dog in the summer when the sun is coming up, and I stare at your sunglasses, thinking that I want to find your eyes behind them. But when you ask me if I’m just staring at my own reflection, I realize that I am. We laugh about that, your laughter an explosion.

  5

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  HEEEYYYYY!!

  I’m _____­_____­ of Nashville, Tn and VERY excited about this opportunity. A little bit about me? I am an outgoing people person and I LOVE making people laugh. More importantly I am a single mother DOING THE DAMN THING! I graduated college with ALL odds against me and yet I still manage to keep a smile not only on my face but many of those faces around me. I love to party on baby free nights and TRUST that I take full advantage of those nights kicking it with my GIRLS. You will NOT regret having me as one of your cast members. I’m claiming this opportunity. Looking forward to hearing from you!

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  I’m thinking now of Ramona Singer, my least favorite character on The Real Housewives of New York, who has famously used her screen time to say, explicitly, that she is a living example that women “can have it all.” She has been on television, loudly, for eight seasons, as new waves of housewives have come and gone. Such staying power is no small achievement. Again and again, cameras follow her through and around everyth
ing she has: a spacious apartment on the Upper East Side; a sulky but ultimately agreeable daughter who managed to get into college; a husband who makes money but does not resent her making her own; friends of a similar race, age, and income bracket and with similar interests; the kind of alcoholism that is still fun and not, as yet, debilitating; an eponymous midprice Pinot Grigio that has received international distribution. There’s more that I’m forgetting, a new possession popping up every episode. With all that she has and that she flaunts, she reliably portrays a cartoon of the limited parameters of conventional desire. She embodies these parameters fully. Each time we tune in to her, we’re forced to watch her strut and display, to reencounter the cartoon, renegotiate our own relationship to it, as she profits from our continual tuning in and the cycle repeats.

  I think Ramona is well aware that she’s watched ironically by many. Or if not ironically, then at least with a sneer. Ambivalence, agitation, eye rolling. We are prime examples of the kind of viewers who can only watch her while maintaining that we don’t take her seriously, often cringing or actually saying Oof! out loud at her on-screen—that manic glaze to her eyes, the way she will careen from girlish giggle to vicious insult with no transition emotion. But she is watched. And she is recognized. And her Pinot Grigio is bought (I assume). And often, when we watch, we are drinking white wine (not Pinot Gri, but still) and claiming to be full from salmon burgers and grilled broccoli, and our vanity-breed dog is next to us on our L-shaped couch, where we’re entwined, not acrobatically or seductively but in a practiced way, and we’re planning our next day during commercial breaks—work, evening tennis if we can fit it in, shopping, sex, maybe—and we will be so pleasantly, terrifyingly self-satisfied when we perform these tasks. And we are laughing at her, enjoying that together.

  Watching Ramona at her worst (or best?), having it all, is both a constant celebration of the vapid sheen of an obvious kind of privilege and a reveal of its filthiest insides—the assumed exceptionalism, the obliviousness. Both are left there for us to do with what we will. Who are we to assume that she expects us to feel only celebration, no filth?

  I was at a reading recently, and a burgeoning star novelist was introduced with this sentence: He reminded me that realism doesn’t have to just be a defense of the status quo.

  This was met with great applause. I wasn’t exactly sure what the sentence meant, but the gist of it was nice, worthy of aspiration, and it was spoken with somber force by a writer I respect a lot, so I clapped too. It was the kind of room where it felt like not clapping when others clapped was a poor career choice, and I’ve been working on being more careerist. That’s not exactly true—I’ve been working on being more successfully careerist.

  The more I think about it, the critique was about how the concept of realism can be used as a weapon, or, more precisely, an eraser. What we choose to accept as conventional, even desirable, reality has the power to cut out everything else. And realism so often refers to privileged white people interacting with one another, emoting, oblivious to anything but their own feelings and possessions, but boy do they feel and own things. The more attention paid to that feeling, that owning, the more the validity of those values is reinforced.

  This hit novelist had broken that fallacy of the status quo. His was a better realism, “better” meaning more ambitious, bigger tented, less trite. Yes, definitely something to aspire to. But this also suggests that a more banal or self-involved or even superficial realism is automatically a defense or a celebration of the limited perspective it chronicles. That to display it is to validate it, and to consume it is to validate it as well.

  As I often do when a roomful of smart people seems to agree, I began to feel that they were all against me. I began to see myself in the perspective they scorned. Like I didn’t have the courage to reach for anything that might challenge me. Like I can’t handle the effort or imagination involved in subversion. Subversion is so easy to claim—I watch Ramona Singer to feast on dark subtext; I write about myself watching Ramona as self-critique. But that claim doesn’t take away the consistency of my interests: her opulence, my validation, my comfort. Much like Ramona might midepisode, I felt the desire to defend myself against an attack that may have never existed.

  As the night went on, I got wasted, and agreeable careerism faded into desperate contempt, a much more natural state. The crescendo: I told an editor that The Real Housewives of New York was as valuable a cultural artifact as Twin Peaks, and how’s that for realism, and I felt a brief rush of righteousness, but he gave me the most withering look, muttered Jesus, and walked away.

  * * *

  —

  I like to teach James Agee’s “Knoxville: Summer of 1915” in my introductory creative writing classes. It’s short, so we go around the room reading it aloud—long, elegant sentences about a summer night from Agee’s childhood when he sat on a suburban lawn with his family. When I ask how it makes them feel, my students usually say comforted. Or bittersweet. Content. One said, “Sleepy, but in a good way.”

  I do that teacher thing where I say okay but hold the second syllable to let them know that okay isn’t quite good enough. This is met with silence. Then I ask them to go through and find the images, or even single words, that feel out of place, that have a different mood to them. With more coaxing than I should probably offer, the words and phrases are eventually said out loud. I throw them up on the whiteboard:

  An insane noise of violence, from the nozzle of a hose.

  The fishlike pale body of Agee’s father.

  Finally the question buried in the middle of a longer, gentler sentence: And who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth?

  The idea, I try to tell them, is to pervert the comfort of comfort. I ask, Who would want to read about something that’s just comfortable and cheerful, with nothing else deeper than that? With no edge? No dissatisfaction underneath?

  Often there’s a sense that I’m trying to force a way of seeing onto them, an aesthetic that shouldn’t be compulsory, this certainty that we must be responding to more than just the portrait of a lovely home.

  “But what does that matter if we can miss it so easily?” a student asked once, as his peers nodded. Those are just little tricks in the grand scheme of things; how could we think Agee was trying to pervert us with a few little tricks? And anyway, what’s so wrong about nice things? What’s so wrong about porches and yards that look like our own porches and yards, or look like the porches and yards that we wish we had? And what’s wrong with our parents, whom we love and who love us, and happiness, and, again, what the hell is wrong with all that?

  * * *

  —

  When we talk as we watch, we usually talk about the characters we’re watching and we usually disagree. You are, I would say, generally more hopeful in your outlook. When couples that have been fighting reconcile, you tend to take them at the words of their confessionals. When I say that Ramona seems to actively hate, or at least resent, her daughter, you slap me gently on the shoulder and tell me to stop.

  Be generous, you tell me, and I love that choice of word.

  Though we don’t say it, this dynamic probably has something to do with the way we each deal with the looming, unmovable structure of our own quotidianness. Jesus. That came off overwrought; let me try again: the way we rationalize the ease with which we continue to burrow into lives that resemble a detergent commercial. So when I throw tantrums at Whole Foods, it is because I want—I guess—you and all the other Whole Foods patrons to know how much I hate it there. Because if I didn’t hate it there, if I wasn’t even really aware of being there but instead was simply present, shopping for the week as one does, robotically wheeling everything out to the car that I proudly parked in the one remaining shady spot, who would I be? I would not be smirking at myself; I would instead be the kind of person who doesn’t even realize that there’s anything to smirk at. Sometimes t
hat possibility is intolerable.

  Never mind that I do the shopping every Monday, even when you volunteer to take a turn, because I feel such unarguable worth when I lug sagging bags through the sliding doors. Never mind that there are so many things I genuinely like about the Whole Foods experience—as I said last week, it’s pure pleasure to see a display of many different-colored heads of cauliflower. Never mind that the feeling of paying for designer food, clucking about the prices and the faux-organicness while still resolutely purchasing, making precise lists of nutritionally valuable items and then checking those items off, is enormously satisfying. Lists, man—what greater satisfaction is there?

  You don’t seem to feel that pressure to show that you are at least a bit disturbed by the lie of American bourgeois normalcy, even as you participate in it. When this schism leads to a fight, I get all worked up and righteous, thinking I’m just a more self-aware person, but I suspect I’m confusing self-awareness with self-loathing, trying to attach value, or at least a sense of action, to the self-loathing. The unspoken question is whether you can still desire something as you sneer at it, or whether it’s a cop-out to try to straddle that line.

  We are so tired at night from our lives, and we put the TV on and settle in together and watch lives. Lives like these: eager couples buying homes and discussing whether they need an extra bedroom, how close they need to be to a public park, bickering about whether he deserves a man-cave even if the man-cave eats into potential family space. Or these: friends at Pilates class talking about their husbands and their other friends who aren’t there, saying nasty things, not out of genuine nastiness but out of the tiny thrill of getting away with something. Or these: people shopping in packs, showing the price tag as they turn to one another and ask for assessment or reinforcement, faces scrunching because it’s so hard to know what to want.