by Lucas Mann
You’re the first person I ever admitted this habit to. The reveal was meant to be a conscious offer of intimacy. It was early on in the relationship, and I remember I was worried about seeming autistic but also kind of hopeful that I’d seem like an autistic genius, or at least an enigma. I ended up seeming neither, but it was a repeatable thrill to sit opposite each other on your bed, speaking the way we used to speak when we had no idea what the other might say next, and finish each sentence with a description of how we said it. Maybe that was when our obsession with each other began, nineteen and momentarily unashamed, allowing the space to reintroduce and reannotate ourselves as we went along.
That instinct has never diminished, even if the scaffolding has fallen away. How can we not say to each other, so many times on any given day, This is who I am? What do we want more from a companion than the promise to enhance the stories of ourselves? To take the stories and believe them and care for them and heighten them, and then reflect them back as a reminder that we’ve been seen and heard? To confirm that we’ve been, might continue to be, worth the interest?
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My grandfather was not an interesting man. Not in the ways that I’ve always found interestingness to manifest itself, anyway. I never heard him tell a story, which I have later come to understand is the main responsibility of grandfathers. This was over sixteen years of regularish visits. He polished silver that he’d made many years before (which would have been interesting if he’d ever discussed it), pretended to be unable to hear my grandmother, and looked for excuses to climb ladders.
This changed after his Alzheimer’s diagnosis; not right away, but when things were bad enough to land him in a home. He was in a special wing that had heavy doors with code locks to prevent escape. (Side note: If somebody could find a way to market this so that it didn’t seem morally reprehensible, the Alzheimer’s wing of a nursing home might provide the greatest set for a reality television program ever.) It was electric in there—so many bodies with so many years’ worth of material, all of it fractured and swirling, slipping and then rushing back. We visited enough times for patterns to begin to emerge in the stories that the afflicted returned to when given an audience.
One woman, who had lived most of her life in Massachusetts, a housewife and mother of many, had apparently grown up in the South, had been beautiful, and had been involved in high school theater. She inhabited that self, and when we visited, she spoke mostly to me, the only high-school-age boy. She’d try to rush out the door whenever a new visitor opened it, and when the aides restrained her, she would revert to this beautiful, howling Bette Davis accent and cry out that the stage was waiting for her. It was as though she’d somehow managed to choose the self she wanted to end with, the most vivid version of all she’d ever been.
She wasn’t the only one; the ward housed champion sprinters and lotharios and scientists on the verge of something unspecific but definitely great. My grandfather, suddenly and without explanation, became impish. One of my uncles sneaked in some wood glue for him (this is, with the very notable exception of me, a family that values manual tinkering), and he stuck a bunch of pennies to the floor in his room.
“Oh look, a penny,” he would say to everyone who entered, his face wearing an expression that I’d never seen before. He’d get impatient and laugh before you could even crouch and pretend to try to pick up the penny.
“I always get them with that!” he’d roar. “I invented that gag.”
My mother would say to him, “You’re funny, Dad,” and he would respond, forcefully, “I’m funny.”
These are the only moments I regularly remember about my grandfather, ones during which he was, by all medical and anecdotal accounts, not himself. I still surprise myself with how moved I am when I remember the detail of him working to hold on to and present this little wisp of who he had maybe been.
Of course, I can’t ignore his suffering. Or I shouldn’t, anyway. This was all happening during a time when he was grasping for any sense of normalcy as he died in opaque terror. He became more interesting to me when I could marvel at the fact that he was steadily coming apart, that every sentient sentence he spoke could be the last he ever managed, and maybe he realized that. Maybe I cared only because of the rushed passion in his jokes and the wrenching cloud on his face when he lost them. Within this worst narrative constraint, he finally wanted to be heard, to be seen—and in such a specific way: the kind of mischief maker who glues a penny to the floor. “Beauty” seems like the wrong word, too gentle, too absolving, but I sat there and saw beauty. I still do. Or whatever it was, I’ve remembered it.
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Near the end of Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag wrote: To speak of reality becoming spectacle is a breathtaking provincialism….It assumes that everyone is a spectator. It suggests, perversely, unseriously, that there is no real suffering in the world.
The book is not about Sontag, nor is it about the run-of-the-mill, white-collar, nonviolent suffering that we love, but I do think it’s worth noting that this quote came from the last pages of her last writing project, on the precipice of a leukemia death that involved much suffering. Spectacle is a grotesquely antiseptic word; I think that’s what she was getting at. There’s no mess or risk to it. It suggests a lack of proximity to the thing, which keeps the dirt and the blood away, until all that’s left is an image that can’t ever hurt, an image to call funny or sad or beautiful.
I know that I’m every bit the cocooned, self-satisfied dweeb Sontag critiques, not at all a part of the great majority of this earth who, as she puts it, do not have the luxury of patronizing reality. And I do wonder if there’s something unavoidably insidious in the luxury of my patronage that allows me to conflate reality and spectacle, while also creating mutually exclusive moralities between the two.
We can lie together watching someone shrieking in agony (usually emotional, though sometimes physical, too) and tell each other how we feel for the pain expressed. Of course we do; that’s why we’re watching. But I can also turn to you in the middle of someone’s real pain, and say, “My God, what a line” or “Jesus, this is perfect,” or even mutter, precisely on the nose, “Spectacular.” I cannot be thinking of something terrible as real if I so easily call it “perfect,” right? I’m calling the spectacle perfect, not the reality. I hope that’s what I’m doing. But when I’m next to you, watching, smiling, I never stop to consider the distinction.
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I think a lot of the discomfort written into the types of shows we watch, and a lot of the pleasure, comes down to the control that we can convince ourselves the people on-screen have. The particular brand of moral and intellectual vitriol that each show provokes depends on whether the subject seems to want to be seen. In the case of someone like Ramona Singer, the performer is judged. She is the narcissist who profits from her demands to have an audience for her rage and pain, which sets up an unwinnable negotiation—the more empowered she appears to be, the more hated she becomes. In the case of hoarders and addicts and the clearly financially desperate and the morbidly obese, the subjects are seen as too pathetic to be complicit. Their producers, then, are the ones held to blame, out there searching for cheap human clay to mold and eventually squash. Either way, we watchers, while not the chief villains, are at least accessories to the crime.
Sontag wrote about the tradition of war photographers restaging the dead before capturing their deadness, and the simultaneous tradition of this horrifying people even as they devoured the images—Everyone is a literalist when it comes to photography, she wrote. Part of the horror stems from the fact that the grievers of the dead or the mutilated, or even just the defeated, might see the images of their tragedy turned into story, into art. The victims (or muses) have no voice or intentionality in this equation. They merely exist as a sight—malleable, tragic, compelling.
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br /> So what do we make, then, of that woman addicted to eating cigarette ash on My Strange Addiction? Or the man who finds his cat rotting under a pile of his garbage on Hoarders: Buried Alive? Or the tweaker at the end of a pretty typical episode of Intervention, running from his family, weeping, screaming on a street corner outside the hotel about the way they let his stepfather abuse him and now they suddenly claim to care for him? Or the six-hundred-pound woman trying to explain away her quasi-covert eating of one last cheeseburger in the bedroom of her trailer on My 600-Pound Life? We watched them all. We watched some of them twice. Every time we’ve watched, I have had actual goose bumps; that’s how much thrill I’ve found in these shows, in the way these unexpected stars glance at the camera, the way they try to explain and deflect and rationalize themselves through pain we have seen so many times but cannot know.
In her essay “Imitating Disaster,” Susan Lepselter frames the production of Hoarders as ruthlessly driving subjects to a very clear identity and meaning—people with a specific psychological flaw, a trauma that explains it all, a sickness that must be cured. But even as they’re shoved into pathetic, predictable patterns, Lepselter says these performers transcend (or are made to transcend) their own stories. There is something going on underneath the obvious stated meaning: I look at reality television hoarding narratives as themselves symptomatic of a public feeling: a feeling of disaster…simultaneously encroaching, imminent, and already lived-in disaster.
Yes, disaster. And yes, simultaneity. To feel something pressing on you, to feel it in your past and see it in your future, to feel it omnipotent—when a sufferer is at her most compelling to me, it’s this storm in her words and gestures that holds my attention. And there’s the feeling of complicity; that’s part of it. The camera is inserted, and by extension we who love what the camera brings us are also inserted into the mess. We are part of what’s encroaching. I feel the subjects aware of the way they’re trapped, the camera among the debris between them and the doorway. When they’re asked to tell their own stories, they speak to us, they look out at us, and maybe they’re imagining our bland safety in the home we clean at least semiregularly.
We watch Hoarders, like so many other shows, in binge form. That it was made to be watched that way, is almost always aired that way, is not unimportant. In the face of the show, we lose control. The show spills over us, holds us down. The mess of all the episodes, the tragedy of all the freaks—it begins to encroach and another, larger narrative evolves: a narrative of overwhelm.
I say “overwhelm” because I feel it, but I’m still not sure I know exactly what I mean. What overwhelms is hard to handle well enough to express—that’s part of the fear, part of the pleasure. It’s a wave cresting, perpetually about to crash. I see what I’m trying to get at in Eve Sedgwick’s Touching, Feeling, as she attempts to diagnose the paranoid ways that people so often read a text, or the world. She writes: Paranoia seems to require being imitated to be understood and, in turn, seems to understand only by imitation.
The feeling permeates all; the borders between what is watched and what is experienced were always meant to bleed. It’s the fear of what you see in front of you, and the desire to protect yourself from what you see until the intensity of that desire begins to resemble the panic of what you’re seeing. When we watch, our glances back and forth are furtive. Our bodies touch, then come apart. One of us is always asking, voice strained, if it’s time to get up and do something else. The panic of the subject in front of us begins to contort to resemble our own?
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Sometimes—and this I’ve been too embarrassed to admit even to you—I read the scrolling comment-thread responses to the episodes we watch after we watch them. I say I need to take a shit, and I sit in there with my phone, not shitting but letting the shrieked feelings of a thousand strangers update in real time:
Pffft! Call it entertainment?! It’s just trash and typical of the modern age we live in.
It’s just cheap and nasty television!”
Shouldn’t this guy be thinner if all he drinks is those diet drinks. This house appears to be the easiest hoarding clean-up I’ve ever seen. All you have to do is pick up the bottles. 2–3 hours tops.
One of the daughters seems to be hoarding some sizable items in her sweater. I’d be happy to help her out with those.
For those saying we shouldn’t ridicule, remember he CHOSE to invite the cameras in. Last I checked, no one forces someone to do it. People CHOOSE to humiliate themselves with their eyes on fifteen minutes of fame and fortune.
Like the gawkers at Bedlam in the 18th century…haven’t progressed much, have we?
You, along with all the other gawkers, just had a gawk.
Actually, Glen, I don’t watch TV…thanks for sharing your lack of insight!
And this is what’s wrong with modern society. Chastising the vulnerable. I’m sick of it!
Why don’t the fat, lazy daughters get off their asses to help him? So typical of today’s youngsters….I hope their own place is just as messy!
I’ve never commented. Fine, that’s a lie; I used to, but I stopped very quickly. I’m not saying this because I’m proud of that difference between me and the rest. Mostly I’m too afraid of the exposure, which feels unfair: reveling across multiple platforms in others’ exposure (even if it’s anonymous), withholding my own contributions. I read until you ask me what I’m doing in there. I reemerge into the order of our home, red spots on my knees from my elbows pressing down.
6
[REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:
I’ll be short and brief. I am 43 years old. I perform as childrens magician every weekend to make ends meet. I auditioned for a cruise ship in the late 90s as a childrens comedy magician. I was highly considered but I had a government job I was afraid to leave, and I was planning on getting married and having children. I stop chasing my dream. I now have a wife, and pre teen children that can handle me being away for weeks at a time. I am from north Philadelphia. That is the poorest part of Philadelphia. I was raised in and out of the homeless shelters and salvation armies. My friends and family laughed at my weekend job and never supported me. They said “there is no such thing as a black clown or magician.” I would love to perform on a cruise ship….To show the world what I can do…and keep my dream alive. Thank you in advance. Love in Christ.
—from www.castingcallhub.com
The moment of my life so far during which I felt most fully was when I saw the stretcher leave the ambulance and heard you cry as they wheeled you through the parking lot to the university hospital.
I already knew what had happened—a cop had called me from the scene of the accident to tell me about the crash, how you’d been thrown from your bike when the SUV T-boned you. He told me you were alive and awake, but to hurry. I hadn’t felt very deeply when he spoke to me—there was worry, of course, but it was numb, imprecise. Mostly I’d felt the pukey rush that occurs when an event that anyone would agree is a big event has happened. I was aware that this was a moment that might change everything, whatever that means, and we’d had very few of those. I thought of how I would sound when I called your mother to tell the story.
What changed was actually seeing you and hearing you. You didn’t see me, so you weren’t behaving in any way toward how you would want me to see the scene. Your neck was braced to the stretcher, your head facing straight up at the cloudless sky. It was 109 degrees out that day; I remember that’s what my car thermometer said. You squinted into a merciless sun. The soles of your feet, bare, were flat on the stretcher’s mattress, and your bent knees were swaying back and forth. I couldn’t tell if you had no control over them so they swung limply or if you were writhing. The sound you made was horrifying, one I’d never heard, but also had. I associated it instantly in my mind with Nancy Kerrigan, in that ubiquitous clip from our childhood, after one of Harding’s husband’s goons bashed her knee. An
d I also thought of that Survivor episode, the sound right after the bald man pulled himself out of the flames.
At a certain point in the scream, you actually said Ow!, which I thought was amazing, like when little kids cry and the sound is actually Boo-hoo! Sometimes the referential moments can be the most emotionally acute. Remember when we took mushrooms in that park in Amsterdam and I started clinging to you and crying when I imagined us rolling around on the grass together like Heath and Jake in Brokeback?
I don’t mean to make light. Really, I don’t. They wouldn’t let me see you until you were out of triage, so I stood leaning against the tiny window of the locked door, my balled fists resting so dramatically on the doorframe. I wanted to see my own face because I felt so horrified at the prospect of a world without you, or with a changed you, and I wanted to see what that degree of care might look like on me.
A very young resident came out to placate me in a thick, careful accent, and I pleaded with him. My voice actually broke; I noted that as it happened. “Please,” I said. “Please. I love her. I want to see her.” He looked at me with a mixture of pity and admiration. I registered his look as one I’d never received. An EMT with a military haircut came over and put his hands on my shoulders. “She’s making it, man,” he said. “She’s gonna be okay.”
Over the following weeks you were helpless, and seeing you that way without complication or guilt (you literally could not move yourself, after all), I stepped into the broad-strokes role of the good man—faithful, stoic, sturdy. I watched the way people watched us as I wheeled you around a Super-Walmart, trying to find a shower stool, a back scratcher, a bell for you to ring when I was in the other room. I watched the neighbors come to their windows to see the twice-daily show of me holding your weight as you tried to shuffle down to the end of the block and back to test your strength. Your skin was so warm in the heat. Your hair stuck to your cheek, like on nights that felt long past when you were dancing, and I wiped it off.