Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  I’ve got you, the therapist said, which again toed a line between caring, commanding, and threatening. Come on, let me see your face.

  Rob obliged, moved the towel, and face exposed, camera creeping even closer, said: Nothing matters. Nothing’s gonna change.

  There was one perfect beat extra, and then a cut.

  * * *

  —

  The first time I talk to B, he’s on a job somewhere in Canada. He can’t give me specifics about the gig because of a standard nondisclosure agreement. I don’t know the name or the network, only that the producers watched B-roll of another show, a trip to a ski town, and they saw the mountains and the cute bars downtown and said, I wonder what life is like in that kind of place. And so a makeshift apparatus sprang up—casting calls for would-be stars, makeup teams, camera crews, the whole squad. Then, finally, a bunch of editors like B.

  There’s something of a gold-rush element to it all. B calls reality the Wild West, and the metaphor seems to fit: a bunch of start-up, nonunion shops descending for a few months on locales that may hold some value, drilling, dredging, then looking again for that elusive thing somewhere else. B is based in New York and mostly works there, but he had just walked off a job when the call came to head north. The previous job was just too much. He would cut the same scene with the same shitty material over and over again, and the head producer would tell him it wasn’t right, even though there was nothing he could do. He can’t just magically make anybody interesting. And they were up against it timewise, and of course he’s the last line of defense, so he’s the guy working twenty-four hours straight knowing full well he doesn’t get any scaled pay for overtime. Maybe when he was younger that would have been acceptable (on his first job, for example, he turned out a show in thirty days of postproduction, without a single day off) but he’s been doing this too long, and he’s too good to get treated like an interchangeable part.

  “When the material sucks, the editor gets blamed,” he tells me. “That’s just a fact. And sometimes, when I’m angry—and believe me, editors are usually angry—I just want to scream, ‘I make you!’ ”

  The problem, as B sees it—well, there are a lot of problems as B sees it, but the main one is that the focus isn’t on quality lives, it’s on how quickly a narrative can be turned around. And a lot of people on these shows, they think they can just be themselves and stay away from anything flashy, as though merely existing is adequate. B is enough of a reality veteran to know that is very rarely the case. And often producers don’t seem to push their muses for the best they’ve got.

  We tune in to see the characters, B tells me. You need to hone that. You need to stay faithful to this thing that you have made compelling, but the producers don’t bother.

  “These are your actors!” he says. “Direct them! Give them a fucking voice! Help them tell their fucking story!”

  In the end it falls to him and the other overworked laptop jockeys given five, six weeks to make a story out of a collection of slapdash situations, hours of dead air between people who are content, in the most insulting sense of the word, to be. It’s B, hunched at a desk in a bare room in a month-to-month office, sifting through and trying to find the thread to follow, the thing that, when extracted and shined up and displayed, can make a person transcend into watchability.

  * * *

  —

  When I tell B that, overall, you and I always seem to like Bravo shows best, he isn’t surprised. He says that viewers like us think we like the stories, but what we’re really responding to is character, and underneath that what we’re really responding to is style.

  It’s hard to get a Bravo gig as an editor because you need to be able to create within their strict style parameters. They take that shit seriously, as they should. They give out a list of rules if you’re lucky enough to get a gig. I ask him if I could see a copy, but somewhere in that list of rules is a pretty strict nondisclosure-of-the-rule-document rule. I manage to cobble together some vague examples instead:

  For a restaurant scene, we should see at least one of the main subjects order their food and at least one main subject take a bite in the midst of dialogue.

  For any argument, there should be at least a few seconds of chatter immediately before and after the explosion. You should never show the explosion without some kind of tepid lead-in and a breather at the end.

  It’s all part of moment building, he says. If you watch a show that feels flat or inhuman, that’s probably because the moments aren’t built; the crescendo of the scene seems to just arise out of no curated foundation.

  I think of NeNe in her very first episode, the way she changed from a side of potatoes to crab cakes because of the look Gregg gave her. I mention this to him, and he says, “Exactly. You’ve got to let NeNe breathe on-screen.” Let her be NeNe ordering, NeNe changing her mind.

  NeNe is an example of someone who gives you so much—all NeNe really does is give, whether it’s volume or emotion or humor, an opinion for every situation, a constant simmer always eager to reach a boil. NeNe gives so much that she can cease to make coherent sense—that’s not just her, that’s anybody. Think of any person observed, trying to tell a story, or many stories, that don’t really begin or end. How could that be coherent? B assigns the meaning.

  “My calling card is the way I work with music,” he says. “I use the beats of the music to punctuate the stories they’re telling. If you’re watching and you pay attention and you feel like the action is grooving really well to the song in the background, then you might be watching my work.”

  Sometimes I think it’s not even what NeNe’s saying but the cadence of it, like she’s a melody line and the beat is there in the backing track, and then she delivers her put-down and a good editor sets that right on a crescendo, then adds that pause to let it breathe, then a reaction shot of the person she’s just insulted, then goes back to NeNe, who doesn’t even have to say anything, just gestures, and the editor cuts out the music right then, and everything is perfect.

  B has never met any of the performers whose lives he edits, and he’s never been on set, but he calls the scenes my scenes and admits that sometimes he thinks of every shot of every show as another page in a book that he’s writing about people and the way they are.

  “Am I disappointing you?” he asks, with a hard laugh. “Everybody loves beef and everybody knows that cows die for beef, but nobody wants to know how the cows are killed.”

  I try to answer him honestly. “I don’t think I really care how the cow is killed,” I say.

  He says, “Figures,” and we both laugh.

  He has to return to work—he was supposed to be back in New York a week ago, but the Canada project is turning into a real shit show and they’ve extended his contract to try to find something worth salvaging. I return to an Atlanta rerun, waiting for you to come home from rehearsal so that we can catch the new episode together.

  The rerun shows NeNe at a party with the rest of the housewives. She’s wearing a flowing, pristine white pantsuit and arguing with a once friend, current enemy, about a future event she’s planning. The volume and emotion have been building, along with the music and the mounting anticipation for an inevitable NeNe crescendo.

  She delivers. She raises herself up, tells her frenemy that she doesn’t even think about her, and then says, You know what, when I have my event, I’m gonna be thinking about how fabulous NeNe’s event’s gonna BE. She leaves a pause between gonna and be, and she snaps her fingers down in front of her foe’s face. The song hits its own crescendo when she snaps, the drums dropping back in, subtle yet forceful. Then another almost imperceptible beat, and then NeNe turns to strut away.

  The scene continues for a little while, but it’s all clearly outro, winding down, letting us bask in the moment NeNe has provided: perfect.

  * * *

  —

  The
re’s something vital in the space between spontaneity and authenticity—that’s what I want to get at here. There’s a progression. It’s what makes NeNe tower and Rob Kardashian whimper and jiggle so compellingly. It’s not quite spontaneous, or rather what I mean is it’s honed spontaneity. It’s what B and his kind are busy building, always another job taking what might be the blandest spontaneous utterances and massaging them into something structured enough to feel authentic.

  Barthes once wrote that the accurate transcription of what is spontaneously said rings false. In its lack of stylizing, the result seems like an excess of style. There’s something rigid, inhuman about the process of attempting to express something totally unvarnished, when that unvarnished moment is already gone. Somehow that style, which is the absence of style, is the most jarring.

  Barthes was writing about how a voice only seemed true to him when filtered through the artifice of turning it into something else, a new text born from what was once there. This is beyond style-as-substance; it’s style-as-self. And I don’t know if a star like NeNe sees her substantive style when she watches a scene back, like Barthes reading his work. And it does feel a bit ridiculous to apply the philosophy of a French semiotician who looked upon TV watching as a doomed and tamed practice to our reality-show obsessions. But I do, and that idea heightens the pleasure—the person on-screen not merely transcribed but made by a whole team of people who cut and shift and add a little pulsing soundtrack until a vivid, presentable personality emerges.

  The moment Barthes became text, he became free of the responsibility to represent the constricting coherence of himself. He could instead become a sensibility, an idea, a feeling. I know the appeal of that desire. I’ve felt that imagined freedom, and maybe that’s what I’m after now—disappearing into the text until I’m nothing but a recognizable vapor, and within that construction I think I can see myself better, from a distance. I can convince myself that I’m no longer yoked to my actuality. It’s seductive. I much prefer to see myself when I think I’m not really there.

  * * *

  —

  Now I’m thinking of a moment when we were both younger and very horny but also very sad, living in New York City and trying, as one does, to convince ourselves that we were somehow different from all the people who looked like us and lived in the same place we did, doing the same things and feeling the same way. We were fighting on Fourth Avenue as our friends pulled away in cabs to go to a nightclub that you didn’t want to go to.

  I remember you pouting under a streetlight, leaning your arm on one of those bins full of free newspapers. I love the way you pout. You pout fully and unabashedly, bottom lip out like a shelf, cheeks flushing red the way angry peoples’ cheeks are described in shitty novels.

  I remember you hissing, “You should have fucking left with them; I didn’t want you to stay with me.”

  You said it like there was a period between each word, and this felt performed, as though you were thinking about the implied punctuation the same way I was. I was so angry at you; also, so aroused by the intensity of the moment, how much we could hate each other, how we could, however briefly, become that couple that we so often watched on late-night subway rides. Drunks passed us and slowed their stumbling walks to look and listen. What did they think of us?

  We had to wait a while for a cab because a lot of cabs didn’t want to go out to where we were living, the side of Prospect Park farthest from Manhattan. When we finally got one, we refused to look at each other. I watched the driver’s eyes on us in the rearview mirror. I thought about how many pairs of people he saw in the backseat, framed in the small square cut out of the plastic divider, and then I thought of Taxicab Confessions and all the people I’d seen framed that way.

  We didn’t speak, so I began to plan what I would say to you. I began to plan how I would explode. I’d never exploded before, or it didn’t feel like it, anyway; I hadn’t with the full, towering rage that I thought I was capable of. Back in our apartment, I sat on our bed on the sixth floor, top floor, windows open, and you sat straddling the windowsill so you could blow smoke out over the fire escape.

  You were talking about how you didn’t want to be made to feel bad for not wanting to do the same stupid shit that we always did, with the same people, at the same bars, like we were doing these things just because they felt like something, at least, and I always assumed that the alternative was nothing. This was a very good point and very well articulated, but I remember not wanting to think about the content and instead focusing on the volume of my response.

  “Fuck you for saying that,” I said.

  I said it very quietly, in a manner that I felt could be accurately described as a seethe. I was building the moment, and you helped when you said, “Excuse me?”

  You put your cigarette out and stood up and moved toward me, starting to say something else. I remember so clearly springing off the bed and moving to loom over you, a foot away maybe. I could see our reflections in the window.

  I screamed, “Just shut the fuck up! Just give me a fucking break! I’m so tired!”

  There was a rhythm to the way I screamed it. When I said tired, I punched my right fist into my left hand, and it sounded like a good punch. You gasped, like really gasped, when my hand drove down in front of your face into my palm. You began to cry, your crying, like your pouting, so perfectly on-the-nose of how the action is supposed to look and sound. You were frightened of me. I felt stoned. I felt not-me, or at least such an exaggerated performance of a me that I’d never been that none of it was real, even though it was real and it was me in the reflection in our bedroom window. It was a scene; we were making a scene in every possible definition of the phrase. I would watch that scene. I’d been watching it. But in the silence that followed, the comedown, it began to feel too much, too long, unnatural, over. There was a beat, then a shift. I began to apologize, quivery—a new cadence, a lowered volume.

  After I stopped apologizing and you stopped crying and then I stopped crying, we went in the living room and watched The Hills. Do you remember that part? The main girl, Lauren, was on a date with that college baseball player from back in Laguna who ended up in rehab, I think on Celebrity Rehab, actually.

  They weren’t speaking much (God, they so rarely said anything at dinner). She just sipped and he just gulped, and she poked at her food. At some point, I think Lauren indicated she was frustrated, as always, and as always he said something like, “What do you want me to do?” Their eyes met briefly, and hers were pleading and his were vicious. The show cut to them in bed, still clothed, his hair still cragged with gel. They looked at each other, then away, their bodies tense but perfectly compatible as she fit into the bulk of his torso.

  For us, then, on the couch, I don’t think there was any moment of reconciliation, just a fade into sleepiness—our bodies slackened, moving toward each other, our eyes beginning to shut; a scene that had run its course, with the screen flickering in the background, familiar. In the morning I made eggs. It was a lovely morning, slow and hungover, from that time when hangovers weren’t physically incapacitating so they could verge into romantic. Routine was weighted with lingering notes of the previous drama. It was like we watched ourselves reemerge, doing the crossword and taking turns refusing to let the other give up. I said I was sorry again, you said you knew that; you taunted me gently when you got clues I didn’t know—hands on shoulders, hands on knees, a walk to Prospect Park as church ladies smiled at the sight of us.

  * * *

  —

  On the Kardashian shows, for a long time, Rob has been mostly an absence, though a fraught one.

  His mother says: Maybe I spoiled him and that’s why he’s like this, but he’s my son.

  His sister says: I’m not saying he’s not in pain, I’m just saying he could learn to take a little responsibility. He could do something about it.

  His other sister says:
I showed up at the condo to take him to the gym with me, and he doesn’t even fucking come out. Like, I’m an adult. I’ve got things to do.

  Where is Rob? What is he doing? What is he eating? Is the room dark? Has he painted all the mirrors black? Will he be okay? Can anybody save him?

  I’m not going to pretend I don’t sometimes ask, “Am I as fat as Rob Kardashian?” I ask so that you’ll say no. There was a time when I asked and you said no, but the honest answer would have been: “It’s a toss-up, depending on the angle.” I still like that the great tribulation of his story line is as petty as mine, but that on-screen it can seem seismic, and that seismicity feels like an accurate reflection of the way I experience it. Still he returns, and you and I watch him with a gleeful memory of all the times he looked like he wanted to escape.

  Last season Rob apparently didn’t want to be on the show at all, but there he was. He appeared only sporadically, but he was there, sitting silent on the couch as the rest of the family continued at their normal volume. We smiled at each other—Of course he’s back!

  I remember one scene when Kourtney, Khloé, and Scott were arguing playfully on the couch next to him about something that didn’t matter. They were giggling and tugging on one another, and then Kourtney, the littlest, was draped across the rest of them, her sister slapping her ass, camera focused on her exposed thong. Their self-satisfaction was extragratuitous but also extra-appealing next to Rob, who, as usual, embodied the way I have so often felt: perfectly still, aware of every inch of space he took up on that piece of furniture.

  “It ain’t over till the fat lady sings!” Scott yelled.