Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  And what do we feel as we watch? I refuse to think that we feel nothing, to conceive of so many of our shared hours as blank, in front of an arbitrary collection of shows that invite blankness. And I don’t think that we feel some kind of relief or validation when we see petty dramas resembling neon versions of our own played out as if worthy of being seen.

  When we watch marathons of a particular show, it becomes impossible to keep track of how many times each person reiterates to the camera that their lives are valid. It is a fabulous life, they say. Or: My children are beautiful; they’re gifts. Or: I love my job. Or: These are the best years of my life. Or, if they’ve been transformed in a narratively meaningful way: I can really see the life I’ve always dreamed of now. Or (and this is a hard one not to harp on): You really can have it all. Taken together, spoken by people whose homes have been turned into a set, who spend their nonfilmed moments responding to blog attacks and making enough mall appearances to stay relevant, these become a near-hysterical mantra.

  Nothing makes you more aware of how tenuous an ideal of a good life is than to hear it repeatedly voiced. Every time any character states that he or she is happy, the words are yet another invitation to wonder if that is really the case—a tension, mounting. I think of Agee in these moments, I do—the real housewives of Knoxville, 1915: Here they are, all on this earth; and who shall ever tell the sorrow of being on this earth.

  We watch Ramona Singer, and I think of Agee, of comfort and pleasure and sorrow, and how the living room looks nice with the Edison bulbs dimmed but there’s a water stain in the corner behind the cabinet that we should get someone to come look at, and my body feels heavy and lumpy and I don’t want to be in it anymore, and I finished the popsicles while you were at work again and I’d feel better if I came out and apologized for that, but instead I’ll wait to see if you have the energy to bring it up.

  * * *

  —

  Ramona’s life kind of fell apart during this latest season, season 6. Her daughter finally left for college, her husband cheated and moved out, and now the tail end of her character arc is full of scenes of her in leather pants and scoop-neck tops at singles mixers populated by young, bland Wall Street chums.

  On the show’s one-hundredth episode (a landmark worthy of a breakdown), she finally breaks down.

  The setting is a very roomy beachside villa in Turks and Caicos, where Ramona has organized a group vacation for the show’s cast members, a gambit that occurs once or twice a season—the removal from routine serving, as it does for all friend groups, to stir the pot. There’s been a fight among a few of the women mostly focused on the drinking of Ramona’s friend Sonja—whether or not she drinks too much, drinks to cope with loneliness as opposed to drinks to have fun. Sonja has already stormed off to bed and most of the other women have drifted off as well.

  Only Ramona and Bethenny Frankel (a former enemy) remain, draped, drunk and exhausted, over a gigantic, gray outdoor couch on the deck. A camera zooms in over Bethenny’s shoulder onto Ramona’s face, with tiki-torch flames smudged behind her. Ramona throws her head back, brings it down again, and begins: I think what Sonja misses is to have a significant other in her life who wants to share your life and is true and honest to you and you have a friendship and a great relationship sexually and that’s what we all need and crave for.

  She has, through simple pronoun shifting, wrangled control of the narrative. Sonja has shifted to you, and then finally come around to what we all need. And the invitation is written in the conversation for we to become more specific: Ramona. She is letting us know that she needs to have a moment.

  Bethenny takes the bait and brings up Ramona’s freshly collapsed marriage to Mario—twenty-five years of happiness, and six seasons of smug televised happiness, all gone. Ramona has bragged very publicly about Mario’s body (I mean, can you believe it—a man his age?), their money, their mutual respect, the sex (still constant!). Now, after all that, we’re being invited to watch the greatest, most humanizing conflict her character has ever faced.

  He’s part of me, she says. It may not be good for me, but he really is a part of me. The second time she says part, she turns her eyes skyward like a Goya portrait of Christ, and crosses her arms around her own neck, gently hugging.

  Bethenny, also presented with a chance to be humanized, dives in to hug her as well, and Ramona continues, looking back into the camera over Bethenny’s shoulder: It’s like I’m losing a part of myself and people don’t get it. It’s like, yeah, I get it, I’m whole, yeah, I get it, I’m a strong woman, but for him not to be a part of me because he’s been such a part of me, he’s part of my soul, he’s in my heart. I don’t know how to fix him. I wish I knew how to fix him.

  She rears back into the couch and covers her eyes, then launches herself onto Bethenny’s shoulder. Bethenny holds her, covering her face, and Ramona, realizing this, shakes away Bethenny’s hands so that her face is directly in the camera again.

  I want to fix him so badly, she reasserts. Then, once more, in a whisper like the last line of a country ballad: I wish I knew how to fix him.

  The scene, if written by someone else, would end here. I would have been totally satisfied as a viewer to see a two-minute detour into Ramona’s hurt parts, something simultaneously genuine and exhibitionist. Instead, she gives fifteen more seconds, that, to me, feel like that moment at the end of “I Believe When I Fall in Love,” when Stevie Wonder has written the perfect ballad and could leave it there, but just to remind us he’s Stevie Fucking Wonder he throws in this little funk jam, because he can make love funky if he wants to, like he’s winking at the listener. Ramona winks like that.

  Still lying in Bethenny’s arms, she opens her eyes huge and gets louder, her voice newly assertive and condescending: People say that, oh, you know, Ramona you’re so pretty, you’ve never looked better, you’re so smart, you’re independent—yeah, I fucking know that shit.

  By now she has hoisted herself back up and is glaring at these hypothetical morons who only see her brilliance and her beauty, not her pain. Then she stops on a dime again, smiles, throws her arms up, says, I have no idea; I just want a hug, and collapses into Bethenny’s arms once more—humble, a bit goofy, resigned. The camera focuses on their sprawling hug, then a tiki torch still burning, then finally—in a heavy-handed cut—on a Caribbean sunrise.

  The rest of the episode was mediocre—a yoga class with a hot instructor, more arguing, shots of the women in their bikinis complimenting one another’s bodies while speaking ill of their own. But Ramona’s speech was sublime. It came on again a few days later and again we watched it, this time waiting for every turn in emotion and grinning at one another as each arrived.

  I will admit that I find something really joyful in the shared experience of watching her unravel like that—Ramona, with her bulging eyes and her preternatural gift for bullying, suddenly distraught. I’m sure it has to do with her willingness to be bared, the idea that I am lording over my screen saying, Emote for me! and Ramona, like a zoo seal, is willing to perform that trick. But it’s not a simple trick. She is not merely performing sadness—how easy that would be; so appropriate that it would feel inhuman in its neatness. Instead, she’s taking her lowest moment and inserting into it the notion that random people repeatedly tell her she looks amazing and is amazing, before turning cuddly and kind, ending the scene on a satisfying, near-unrecognizable emotional note.

  In a scene staged for drunken gibberish, she manages to feel astonishingly human in ways I wouldn’t have considered until I watched her go through the whole process. She is a virtuoso of contradictory feeling; she did it so well that it made sense.

  Who grieves neatly? Nobly? Unselfishly? Who wants to grieve without in some way getting something out of it? Without making sure that they’re turned out to the camera or the metaphorical equivalent? Without reminding themselves that whatever they’re feelin
g, they’re feeling it well?

  * * *

  —

  The Ramona-Singer-to-Guy-DeBord transition seems a bit smirky, and also too much like justifying one thing with the other, but there’s a line I like a lot from The Society of the Spectacle, when DeBord refers to stars of any kind as specialists of apparent life. He says they become objects for the rest of us to identify with in order to compensate for the fragmented productive specializations that [we] actually live.

  Look at the idol, see yourself in the idol, and maybe at a certain point seeing someone be that way becomes feeling that way, and feeling that way means we don’t have to think about what it feels like to be ourselves, spin-cycling through ordinariness. What changes in that tried-and-true equation when the idol is ordinary, or at least possesses no obvious skill set other than that apparent life, simply living away, with the added narrative purpose and external reward of our gaze? I don’t know—maybe nothing. Maybe reality strips stardom down to its simplest mechanism: who is seen living and who isn’t. I mean, yeah, that’s exactly what it does. That’s the point. So in that case DeBord’s idea should hold true—it doesn’t matter whom you’re looking at; as long as you spend your energy seeing the pageantry of their life, you don’t have to see yourself.

  This isn’t a cheerful thought. I’ve never voiced it when we’re together on the couch, watching Ramona or any of the others who fill the same role on a given night. But I am thinking it often in those moments, so really I am seeing myself. Even if I want to hide from that sight, it’s unavoidable.

  David Foster Wallace once called television a river of images, and I like that idea—the constancy, the movement. I see myself on the surface of the river, somewhere in the ripples of everyone else’s repeated stabs at apparent life. In the ripples, I am blurred, fleeting, and they, too, are blurred, fleeting, even as they’re working so hard to be vivid.

  Another metaphor to try on: the British scholar Kristyn Gorton explored how, on television, these emotions of self-becoming become contagious. I especially like the bluntness of her framing—TV emotion as a sickness. What better way to describe this apparent life than as a chronic condition of self-becoming, all done in front of me, as I feel all the symptoms? Watching makes me feel the worry that seems to underpin all the actions of all the people I watch, even as they say the opposite thing: I worry that I am not enough.

  * * *

  —

  Here’s what The New York Times said about the premiere of The Jersey Shore:

  When in the perhaps not-so-distant future scholars try to figure out just how a great culture fell so far, so fast, they won’t have to look too hard. They can just pop in a DVD or download this happy train wreck or others like it, sloppy slivers of American reality, and it will be right there in front of their eyes.

  No more dire a promise than that of a future absent our formerly great culture. And the key to this absence is the fact that the unworthy, the untalented, the unanointed have been allowed to star. Gym managers, bartenders, wedding DJs—all a bit dumb and dissatisfied and striving in a run-down party pad in South Jersey. We didn’t miss an episode of that show. We picked the ones we felt to be heroes, and then the villains, and then those we weren’t sure about, and we watched to make up our minds.

  I remember how and where we watched the premiere. It was in a grimy, gray-carpeted Iowa apartment, with meth heads and undergrads as neighbors, the week after we moved halfway across the country. The last tenant had been an old man evicted for unpaid rent, and he’d pissed everywhere before the leasing company forced him out. The carpet smelled like both carpet cleaner and piss. I lay supine, nursing the ankle I’d sprained falling off the back of a U-Haul, and we seethed at each other for the fact that we were both in this place. We finished the last dregs of the coke we’d brought on our move, and this became the first time I’d ever smoked pot with a sense of need. We paid six hundred dollars for rent, more than a hundred for a good cable package.

  I remember the way we laughed at The Jersey Shore, when Snooki got too drunk the first day, threatened to leave, fell down, and ended up staying due to immobility. I remember that you loved Sammi Sweetheart’s tagline, the first thing she said on-screen: I’m the sweetest bitch you’ll ever meet. And of course I loved The Situation, and the way he was always on-screen looking at himself as though rediscovering the image, the anxious joy he found in touching the mountainous swell of his biceps, the stare-down he gave to every reflective surface. I was sort of infatuated with him, to the point that I defended his most indefensible behavior, and I said many stoned, earnest things that I think I still believe about his magnetism, the power of his unmitigated ridiculousness, so looming but also so helpless.

  Looking back, it’s easy to point out our desperate escapism, but it was a particular version of that urge, and I remember it with more fondness than I’d expect. We escaped, desperately, into a show about other peoples’ desperate escapism. These stars did not want to be themselves; they wanted to be stars. Stars might be too acute a word for their ambitions, but I can’t think of another one, and I’m not sure they’d be able to either. They went about becoming stars by showing the embarrassing smallness of their current existence, hoping that it would be inflated by the attention. And as we paid attention, I could feel them inflate in real time—does that make sense? They seemed to feel so deserving of something better, even more than we did, but then they also seemed like they didn’t believe that. They lacked. Openly, messily, even strategically, they lacked. And so we watched and felt something more than bland idol worship, something less than empathy.

  The first blizzard of the fall came quickly, and we trudged to the gas station, bought all the beer we could carry. We finished it that same night as we watched, and passed out on each other, semiwittingly emulating the sloppy slivers who ran from their own fragmented productive specializations and turned them into something superficial, elevating their real lives and dragging down stardom until they met in a fault line of everything I did and did not want my life to be.

  * * *

  —

  We’re no strangers to the desire to feel exceptional. No one is, I know that. But we, particularly I, seem to feel the weight of this desire especially. Even now, see, there it is—my need to deem myself more illustrative than others of this basic human condition.

  We’ve been doing this thing lately where we say, “That’s so me.” We say it the way your garden-variety narcissist, the unself-aware kind, might, tilting our heads to one shoulder and adopting intonations somewhere between Valley girl and music snob. It’s a critique of that way people so casually yet forcefully define themselves in the middle of conversations, claiming a pattern of behavior as identifiably their own—saying the mean thing that everyone else is thinking? That’s so me. Assholes. We’re saying those people are a particular kind of asshole. The only problem is that usually these impressions grow out of moments in which we have exhibited this behavior and are scrambling to stake a claim on being the kind of person who notices and self-corrects wittily.

  It is important to emphasize this quality. It is very us.

  It’s exhausting to be, and be loudly; let’s agree upon that. So many ways we can say something, so many ways it can be interpreted, so many ways it can be disseminated. How many versions of the questions we ask each other come back to this: Did I do it right? Did I say it right?

  In all the easy hand-wringing about the narcissism of our generation, I think what’s being specifically maligned is the need to voice the self, not just obsess about it. It’s the prevalence of the self-introduction, that command: see me, and when you see me, see this.

  I was raised on people telling the story of who they are. Growing up, I always admired the people who said it best, with the most force, force I assumed I could never muster. So I was one of those predictable ten-year-old white boys aping Biggie lyrics for the way he started a song and announ
ced exactly how he was to be seen: When I die, fuck it, I wanna go to hell / Cause I’m a piece of shit, it ain’t hard to fucking tell.

  The two pillars of American entertainment perfected during my lifetime have been hip-hop and reality TV, and I don’t think it’s coincidental that the two rely upon a similar force of personality more than any musical or narrative forms before them. In song, or in scene, they so often begin with a throat clearing and a proclamation. I’m talking about exposition as mantra; what’s more seductive than that?

  My whole life as a storyteller, story consumer, has been dominated by shows in which scenes of dramatic action pull back into a private moment with the actor in a room alone, confronting the action, outlining their motives, laying out patterns and trademarks within their own character, the form of the Shakespearean soliloquy taken and repeated on demand. They refuse to just be character; they are first-person narration. I think again of NeNe Leakes saying, If you just ask anybody about me, pssh, NeNe, she’s real fun.

  And I love that about NeNe—it’s like she’s attempting a monopoly on the idea of fun, like if others try to horn in on her fun territory it runs the risk of diminishing her.

  When I was a kid, in my head, I would contextualize the things I said, as though I were quoting myself on the page. So I’d tell a joke, and after it, silently, I’d add: he said wryly, a knowing smirk on his face. Or when my grandmother died and I told my father I was sorry for him: he said softly, wanting only to let the older man know he was there.

  It was a bit much, and certainly revealed the beginnings of an adverb passion that hasn’t ebbed. I used to think this tic was a sign that I was born to be a writer, but that’s not it. It was more symptomatic of a sensibility than a skill set.