Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  All of this, in the Midwestern July swelter, felt more than surreal. It felt operatic. Or really, it just felt in ways that I’d never lived through. Your pain was physical, inescapable; I made it mine, made it a saga of domesticity and perseverance as you nodded into momentary OxyContin relief.

  I still think about the day of the accident, and the weeks after. Mostly, I think about how much it hurt to see you hurt. I remember the look on your face—terrified, puppyish, yet angry enough to remain resolute. I was in awe of you, even just the way you giggled at whatever we happened to be watching, wincing but still allowing yourself to giggle. But that brings me back to the swell of my own emotion, to the awareness of how monumental each little beat in our lives felt then, as I piggybacked off your ache, your steady, stubborn healing.

  What I still haven’t figured out is what this pleasure in feeling does to what it is that I feel. I return to the memory so often; I let my eyes tear up about it and that feels both bad and good. But if one admires the emotion he feels for someone else, does it mean that he wasn’t ever really feeling at all? The third person is deflecting here. What I want to know is this: Can I fear for you and tend to you and love you and our little life together, and also love the show of it, as I play the loop again in my mind, tell the story again to hear the drama?

  * * *

  —

  “Do you think people write off The Real Housewives as unserious because they’re women?” I ask Brenda Weber, who has written or edited two of the best books I’ve encountered on reality TV. “Like, the title has ‘wives’ in it, so—”

  She interrupts me: “Yeah, but it doesn’t matter. It could be ‘The Househusbands of Wherever’ and people would still turn up their noses. The form is feminized, no matter who the participants are.”

  I’ve been telling her that since I love a particular set of reality shows, I realize that most of my watching is dominated by portrayals of women in prominent roles, a landscape divergent from much of the fawning critical acclaim that, until very recently, was reserved for mad men, or men breaking bad. I am, I should admit, outside my target demographic in my favorite shows, though I find the structure and emotional appeal of most reality programs to be identical in their day-to-day interpersonal emotion, with the chief variant being that men are often operating machines and women are often holding white wine. In telling this to Weber, I should also admit, I am transparently hoping that some sense of ally-ship is leaking out through implication. That it seems apparent that I watch with thoughtful, even altruistic intent. She is disinterested in this line of conversation.

  “Don’t limit it to the bodies you see,” she says. “It’s about the mechanisms of storytelling that surround the bodies, and the way that gets coded.”

  She says that reality TV has bastardized an accepted, masculine form, the investigative documentary, and polluted it with tropes that people have seen as feminine for centuries now—soap-opera story lines; refusals to stop for long-winded characterization; an ongoingness, as Weber puts it—an obviously serialized quality that shows that, more than resolution or insight, the maker wants to ensure that the audience has something to return for, an emotional pitch that promises repeatable crescendo. If a giant, discursive, serious novel about a brooding man’s internal struggle is perched atop our hierarchy of artistic merit, then what could be a clearer opposite pole than fast-cutting, serialized teledramas about emotional peaks in the daily lives of women who didn’t even exactly write their own material?

  I laugh too quickly and assure Weber, again, that I’m a writer rejecting such hierarchies, a writer interested in the opposite of the discursive, serious novel about a brooding man’s internal struggle. This sounds disingenuous the moment I say it—after all, what is this that I’m trying to write, regardless of what I use to spur the internal self-seriousness? I fall silent; she doesn’t push me. She just laughs, too, and says, “Fine, good.”

  But why is the argument over seriousness so important to me? Is seriousness just one person’s particular hang-up, the way fame is another’s? And if the end result can captivate me, what does the intent matter? If one person says, “Hey, I’ve got multitudes over here; you couldn’t begin to figure me out even if you tried,” and another says, “Life is pretty good, and I love the things that money buys me, but you’ll be fucking sorry if you cross me,” is the actual content of either perspective all that different? Each still lies open to the audience to explore, to make visceral with subjectivity. Regardless of the credit the artist wants to take for awakening these emotional responses, isn’t that ultimate effect still the barometer for whether a character or a story has any meaning?

  We get to talking about The Biggest Loser, a show that comes up in Weber’s writing about makeover TV, the ubiquitous narrative of forced change—a problem for which someone must be shamed and then, after the shaming, helped to overcome. Unlike many of her peers, Weber often places herself in her work, a participant in the phenomenon on display. She identifies as an “acafan,” an academic who can both study and love her subject, which is what I think I’m trying to elevate myself to, as though that will make the loving part of the equation more respectable, more serious.

  For Weber, to reduce the effects of these shows into something wholly good or bad, or even fully comprehensible, is to miss the point. They are didactic but also nonsensical, uplifting but also cruel, simultaneously stupid and deeply engaging. They open themselves to visceral subjectivity, a heightened, perplexing dissonance, where cognitive skepticism and emotional submersion can coexist. As Weber writes, these shows are an art form meant to invite viewers to think and feel complex and often contradictory thoughts and feelings.

  “I know some people, like my cousin, who love a show like The Biggest Loser and are moved by it the way I think the show wants you to be moved,” she tells me. “Who cry when the people start crying after they get thin. I know other people who watch it to be angry at what’s being sold as desirable or even possible, but isn’t really. I know people who specifically eat ice cream when they watch. That combativeness gives them satisfaction.”

  We both laugh again. Then I ask, “What about you?”

  She pauses and starts over, wry: “I watch it when I’m exercising.”

  * * *

  —

  When I binge-diet, I do it without you. I’m sure you’ve noticed. Twice in my life, after multiyear periods of willful ignorance toward any changes in my appearance, I have broken the ignorance quickly and painfully, and have lost roughly fifty pounds in roughly two months. This is my pattern of transformation: fiftyish pounds, two months, every five years, only in the summer. I don’t do steady routine, or (even the word is unappealing) lifestyle. I only change at critical mass (pun unintended but apt), and perhaps that’s a learned narrative device, or perhaps I just haven’t found a way to make contentedness productive.

  I convince myself that your gaze is too gentle. Almost all the time I need that gentle gaze, its forgiveness, but then you go away for a while and there I am, and there’s a mirror, and there are all the eyes of all the other people, and there are those pictures taken of us and posted online, and I feel like I’ve been caught.

  When I pick you up from the airport after any long absence, these feel like the last moments available in our lives together in which we can register change. I want to see you see me, and ask if it really is me. I want to sense you feeling, How can someone be so different from what they used to be? I want you to yell that as you run to hug me, and have people watch us and smile and clap as though I were in army fatigues and you were my young daughter.

  The last time I lost the weight was right after my first book was published. I have never felt less seen than when I was writing that book—peering out at others and describing them, writing their images, alone, in the dark, in total, necessary, effortful obscurity. I ate fries with every meal then. Whenever I stopped to get gas, I’d buy
a family-size bag of Combos. I’d go to the diner where you worked at closing time, to write and eat the leftover pie that was going to go stale by morning. I’d catch my reflection in the window, lunging toward the spoon to catch a falling morsel of crust, then turn quickly back to my manuscript. When the book got published, I felt the rush of exposure, however small that exposure may have been. The reminder that I existed, that I was seen, that I had always wanted so badly to be seen differently.

  The first time I binge-dieted we were still babies, just twenty-one. I was hung up on feeling that you loved me first out of pity and availability, then out of habit. You spent summer vacation in California, getting high and selling handmade dresses at a flea market with friends. I isolated myself and ate 1,200 calories a day, reduced-carb English muffins topped with tuna, no mayo, ziplock bags of celery sticks that I took to work. I grew my hair out at the same time and fixated on the idea that one day I would be a pleasingly shirtless man with a samurai topknot. I told you about each day’s caloric sacrifice. On the phone you would say, I can’t wait to see you. What a phrase. It’s the only phrase I ever really wanted to hear—again, we’re back to what it’s like to feel worthy of being seen, chasing that.

  Another thing I never told you about that summer: I watched The Biggest Loser alone. And Celebrity Fit Club. On my parents’ couch, in the dark, when they were busy with dinner that I’d yet again skipped, I scrolled their TV and watched each new contestant step shirtless onto an industrial farm scale to strip, then see the image of their stripping bodies played back to them, fresh red stretch marks like lightning cracking a tree trunk, a reminder that they were broken but still malleable. I munched my celery sticks and cared very deeply for these people on the farm scale, and I told myself there was hope, triumph even, in forced malleability.

  * * *

  —

  The moment in our lives together when I worried most that you could no longer bring yourself to love me came right after that first adult crash diet, when we went on vacation with your family. It was one of those sprawling, gated resorts where nobody had to hold currency or wear more clothing than absolutely necessary. The whole situation was intimidating for me, so I took solace in my own improved reflection.

  Remember how none of my clothes fit? I hadn’t had time to get new ones after I shrunk myself down, and also I think I hadn’t wanted to because the moment I normalized my new body would be the moment it ceased to be anything worth noticing, and the transformation story would be over. During the early evenings, I’d make a show of saying I had to go to the hotel gym, so then I’d be hurried for dinner—Sorry, just need to wash the sweat off, lost track of time. When I arrived at the table last, loose shirt flapping, I tracked the eyes turning up to me.

  You had not spent the summer starving in front of the television; you’d been cultivating a life that resembled happiness—being social, getting stoned, eating tacos, hawking your dresses with your hippie friend at a thrift market, wearing matching long T-shirts that you’d turned into short dresses. You looked tan and beautiful, and comfortable with yourself in a way I didn’t understand. You had a new bleached streak in your hair.

  My sudden commitment to a flagellant type of change had created a rift, hard to exactly describe but very acutely felt. Looking back, I think the tension was a small version of the one that makes reality television so frightening to consider for some: when a particular set of ideals is introduced as regular or desirable or even morally superior, it’s so hard not to internalize that certainty. I was certain that I had improved myself. I was certain, for the first time, of the value in the ever-reach for self-improvement, punishment given an aspirational name.

  Your parents were certain, for the first time, that I was worthy, and at dinner the last night, they laid compliments and questions at my feet—When did you know it was time to change? Where did you find the discipline? Does it feel different now when you move around? My answers were, I’m sure, insufferable. I don’t want to try to remember the specifics of them.

  I do remember the final question, the move in the story that was, looking back, inevitable. I remember the way your father said it: Do you think my daughter could—well—could learn something from this new you? We all turned to look at you and your body, which did not deserve to be made to answer for itself, which I knew and loved more than I knew and loved anything but which had been spotlighted in a new way, or maybe that spotlight was always there waiting for a moment in which it might feel less reprehensible.

  Look at what you can do, your mother said, and I remember how you looked at me after she said it, the fury on your face quickly losing out to a plea for me to be furious on your behalf.

  What I said was something like this: You can do it, babe. It’s not anything to be mad about. I’m here to support you.

  Then I sat back, already smug in my support.

  How could this not have been a learned way of speaking, intuited from all the times I’ve seen one person, with a pitying, tilted head, tell another how they should change, from the voice that caring men give to needing women who are supposed to openly admit that they need the care? Of course, naming that tradition doesn’t absolve the act. Neither does willful obliviousness. What a vicious lie to try to pretend that such a sneering, self-congratulatory tone was born out of care.

  My words lingered, heavy, tactile. You left the table.

  Later, on an empty beach, there was a bright moon that felt fluorescent, and you wouldn’t look at me. I followed you along the sand until rocks blocked your progress. I tried to hug you or hold you or something. You still wouldn’t look, and I hadn’t considered, until that moment, what a night would feel like without the promise of your eyes on me, which even as I write it sounds more self-involved an idea than I want it to be.

  I kept saying Please, and then finally, I’m sorry. Then I vacillated between the two until, though you still wouldn’t turn to face me, you spoke.

  I don’t think you know what a betrayal that was, you told me.

  I do know, or at least I think I do, which makes the betrayal worse. I did something that I know you’d never do to me, and when I even try to imagine the possibility of you doing it, I freeze. It was the breach of a really basic contract: I will see you without cruelty; I will help you love yourself at least slightly more.

  You walked away again, but you let me catch up and walk next to you, and all I wanted to tell you was a collection of shitty lines about the interaction between your beauty and the moonlight. I didn’t say those lines because it seemed like no matter how much I meant them they’d sound like lies, as though the cruel force of one statement had instantly superseded the attempted decency of any others. It had. Back in our room, you fell asleep first and I lay looking at the ceiling, still so as not to wake you. I didn’t look at you because to do so felt newly uninvited, and therefore profane.

  Up until that moment, I’d allowed myself to see only goodness in the way I looked at you. More than that—an understanding. I reasoned that I’d been made to feel shame in ways similar to ways you’d been made to feel shame, and somehow that meant that I couldn’t be cruel. And I still catch myself feeling that way, because I often allow myself to forget that I ever did that to you. And I allow myself to feel less conflicted when we sit down to watch women in shaming situations because I grew up a fat boy and have always thought that the perspective forced upon a fat boy is at least similar to that forced upon a girl. Which I still think is a tiny bit true, but such self-claimed empathy has its limits. I see how quickly I managed to take a brief moment of self-pride and turn it on you, weaponizing it, luxuriating in the role of “well-intentioned” body shamer, the worst kind of Biggest Loser trainer-bully, and why? Because I thought I’d been on the other side of it? Because I was so sure I would be again? That’s the opposite of empathy.

  Apologies are so easy, so temporary. I’m sorry; I was sorry immediately. I said s
o. Yes, fine. Explanations are harder; there’s an implied ongoingness in explanations—no closure, just a stab at something human and gross that could repeat.

  Why? I don’t really know. Why? Maybe just because I could.

  That answer provides nothing, and still I want it to sound like it has meaning.

  * * *

  —

  Eventually I get around to asking Brenda Weber about reality TV’s relationship to memoir. They’re two forms that have run nearly parallel through my lifetime, each discussed as booming over the past couple of decades, each boom met with a certain amount of cultural hand-wringing about the triumph of greed and voyeurism and self-love over art. Each form relies on the pleasure of a person presenting (and monetizing) the emotional crescendos of their own life. Don’t we see (and then dismiss) that gesture as feminized?

  “That I don’t think I agree with,” Weber says. “The autobiography, the public archive—I mean, generally who are the people who think their letters are so important that they must be saved for posterity? That doesn’t seem like a stereotypically masculine gesture to you?”

  This is true. But it’s a particular instinct, I think, when someone who is already famous or powerful or artistically respected saves his every ephemera out of the chest-puffed notion that people will want to know what went into the making of him. It’s something else entirely when the only product, the thing that is meant to be worth attention, is the mere self, laid bare, probing forward—instant autobiographical emotion.