Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  I loved watching her live, which really means I loved watching her want. Even as I knew that she would never not make it, that she had a Vogue internship that was being filmed (her bosses were merely extras on her show), I watched to see her in a manufactured state of in-betweenness that always seemed to poke at the in-betweenness of our lives as we watched her, not recognizable, exactly, just a vague parallel, still potent. I remembered every detail of how she behaved in so many little moments: when she turned down a summer internship in Paris to stay in Laguna with fucking Jason. When she fought at that club with Heidi, and then the next day Heidi tried to make amends but Lauren held strong and said, Sometimes you have to forgive and forget, and right now I just want to forgive you and forget you. When she fought with another friend and wept a single, perfect, black-mascara tear. When she finally made it to Paris and, after dutifully holding a clipboard at a Teen Vogue gala, got picked up on a cobblestone street by a grungy, gorgeous suitor identified only as “Mattias: Guitarist,” swinging her legs over the back of his scooter while saying, There isn’t any ladylike way to do this. It was weird and forced and sweet and preposterously stylized and banal, and it just existed, or it seemed enough like it did.

  She was—she made—a recurring drama, something intentionally hovering between bland and bizarre, and when I came home from work, we watched pirated reruns of her drama in bed, as you lay stiff in the back brace. We were nostalgic—for her, for our former selves who watched her originally. She was all over our memories. We reminisced together: what a show she’d made out of something like her life. Now she was making things.

  * * *

  —

  “If you asked my graduate students,” Mark Andrejevic says to me, “they’d tell you that art doesn’t exist objectively. That taste doesn’t exist objectively. Or talent. They’d say it’s all a social construct of class. That it’s meaningless. That’s where we’re at now. But I don’t know about that; I think that’s kind of boring.”

  He teaches in California now and writes mostly about government surveillance. He hasn’t written about reality television in a decade, since he was one of the first to try to analyze the fault lines of self-expression and self-monetization. This was, he’s quick to point out, before social media. He saw reality TV doing the work that, very soon, Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and Snapchat would take over. The earliest shows that fascinated him were entirely about surveillance—the illicit thrill of cameras rolling at all times, in one house or on one deserted beach. His fear then was that all this material would be available on-screen and that everybody would feel compelled to show everything all at once.

  “But social media became what we worried the reality show would be,” he says.

  What he doesn’t fully understand is why, then, reality TV still exists. If people are eagerly and often professionally giving up some selective version of their own realness in real time online, then we don’t need to reach to television for the constant murmur of surveilled lives. Access is already complete, so what appeal is left for the shows to provide?

  I tell him that I’ve begun to follow my favorite reality stars across various platforms—Phaedra’s Instagram feed, The Situation’s Facebook page full of inspirational sayings and videos of bikinied women falling down, Ramona’s exclamatory on-brand tweets. The list is very long. I thought this would give me the final, ecstatic rush of access, but instead it’s almost always enormously disappointing. I find their constant selves to be either far too overt in what they’re selling or boring in their repetition, or just sloppily composed. I continue to monitor them only for the enormous distance I feel between their digital blathering and the performances on their respective shows. It enhances the shows, makes it somehow fuller to watch for whatever ineffable quality has been isolated on-screen, in episode form. It’s like how I love Inside the Actor’s Studio because of how stupid the movie stars seem in interviews, which heightens the mysterious genius present in their work.

  When I tell this to Andrejevic, he chuckles.

  “So what’s your taste, then?” he asks me. “What makes these shows better, or even just good?”

  I think this is the thing I’m trying to figure out. Can I isolate some particular beauty in what I see, or am I just used to the medium, or is what I love the fact that we watch together, so watching can become interaction, which can become autobiographical?

  Kant said: When a man puts a thing on a pedestal and calls it beautiful, he demands the same delight from others.

  Andrejevic brings up that line because he says that what I’m doing is demanding the kind of universal agreement that aesthetics cannot provide. He’s right; we can both hear the demand creeping into my voice. But here’s the catch: for a form to be allowed to be beautiful in any way, to have the potential for art, there needs to be room to make an aesthetic argument. Within that argument there’s the crucial assumption that the form has beauty if executed well. We can talk all day about whether or not The Corrections is any good and, not despite that argument but through it, the novel remains a beautiful form. Legitimacy is born when critics point to beautiful versions of something and shitty ones, too, trying to differentiate. That hasn’t happened for reality television; maybe it never will.

  The differentiations made between reality shows linger at the level of money and demographics—different target audiences, or different ratings that shows manage to pull in, or particularly destructive worldviews that shows might be peddling. The New York Times even released a map to trace what shows are popular in what parts of the United States. This ran on the politics blog, the shows removed from any artistic aims or successes, relegated to the role of prolife voter or Second Amendment warrior—windows through which to track and then feed people’s basest pathologies. The assumption remains that whatever a reality show is about and whoever it’s made for, its ambitions are low and its results cynical. It’s judged for what are accepted to be uniformly bad intentions. The conversation resists the aesthetic, lingering in questions of ethics.

  “I think it’s a leftover Puritan thing,” Andrejevic says. “We’re uncomfortable with someone having something for nothing. We can’t see these people as definably better at a particular thing and therefore more deserving. We fixate on that.”

  The screen still deifies, but it can seem inherently suspect to think of someone not actually godlike being allowed to transcend. It throws off an internalized sense of order. If we look and say, Hey, that could be me, it only naturally develops into Hey, that could be me and instead it’s this shameless asshole who’s no better than me, and is probably worse. It’s an updated version of looking at a Pollock painting and saying a six-year-old could do it, except way more people want to be famous than want to be a painter.

  In her GQ profile of Kim Kardashian, Katy Weaver writes that Kim is living the American Dream and then perfectly addresses what she assumes will be backlash against that notion: If you bristle at the designation, remember: Someone who lives the American Dream is not, strictly speaking, an American hero.

  That’s the tension the audience is forced to reckon with—to want what they have up there on-screen, while feeling the need to assure ourselves that we don’t like who they are or how they go about getting what they have.

  Andrejevic points out that people have always loved a behind-the-scenes backstory of what made someone famous or special.

  “Now I guess we just eliminated the backstory,” he says.

  I think it’s more that the backstory has been streamlined into one basic story, which has become the only story: the hunger for more. If the question is, Why do you get attention? the answer is, Because I want it so fucking badly.

  * * *

  —

  When I think of my failures—and this is not something I tell Andrejevic—it’s very important for me to separate talent from effort. I tell myself it’s not a lack of talent that holds me back, t
hat always has, it’s that I’m not willing to try in the cloying, clinging ways that others try. This is bullshit, yes, but still I say it. You’ve heard me say it, falling asleep in bed to my whispers about these straw men and their cloying, their clinging.

  It’s calming to see talent as divine, ambition the opposite. Talent transcends any petty condition, remains pure; ambition is always vacuous, eventually implodes. This is, of course, untrue—talent and ambition are inseparable because we wouldn’t know about one without the other. It’s easy to look at a reality star as only ambition (and a very narrow kind of ambition at that), which then must drown out any chance at talent or even sincerity, to see Kim Kardashian as obviously gaudy and gross while Jon Hamm is obviously a genius, focused on the integrity of his gift, one channel up the dial (ignoring those endless Mercedes commercials he’s doing). It never seems like a spectrum; instead it’s just two poles and a lot of shame in between, and you know how quickly I can get wrapped up in shame.

  But I want to tell you how bad I want it. Whatever it is that’s required to be seen, I want that. Above all, maybe. I put so much effort into obscuring that desire because of the risk in voicing it, how easy it is to fail at a stated ambition, and how voracious that ambition feels whenever I do acknowledge it. That felt like a purge just to write down; it’s already tempting to delete.

  The scariest thing about ambition is that it’s hard to understand or explain. That I can say I value privacy, small and quiet intimacy, some notion of integrity, and that makes sense and I mean it, but then there’s the ubiquitous broadcast, the search to give intimacy away.

  There are these moments, the images that are our every day, ours together and alone: how it feels to take turns rubbing fingertips on the soft skin of the inside of a forearm. The clumsy grope for tissues after sex, with the red flush still on your cheeks, grinning at each other while we dab. Silent morning walks when we aren’t exactly fighting, but one of us is unhappy, and then the rush of relief, like finally exhaling, when the silence breaks and we can say, What’s the matter? Can you tell me? At the bar, after one of your plays, when we try to find language together for what you managed to convey. In these moments there is safety and joy—a gift; enough. But then look at what I’m willing to do: display me and us and our little common, hysterical shames, write about the fighting and the fucking (Jesus, I’m doing it again) in the hopes that someone might look. What is this but a fire sale on our lives—All items must go!—to try to get a glimmer of attention?

  * * *

  —

  I was thinking about talent and ambition and shame, and the spaces between them, while watching the season 7 finale of The Real Housewives of Atlanta. There was one scene that you said was the greatest piece of TV you’d ever witnessed, and I think I might agree: Kenya Moore’s screening party for the pilot of her self-funded, autobiographical sitcom, Life Twirls On.

  The title is a reference to Kenya’s habit of twirling for the cameras whenever she wears a fancy dress, while screaming, “Twirl!” In fact, everything about Life Twirls On is a reference to what Kenya does in the role she’s already been playing for years. All the major themes are there: Kenya’s inability to keep a man (one which many a fellow housewife has commented on quite cruelly); her love of her gay best friend; her outsize, combustible personality.

  From what we’re allowed to see of Life Twirls On, which Kenya wrote, directed, and stars in, it appeared to be an abject failure. The Real Housewives episode built around it, though, was amazing.

  Kenya invites the other women to a rented McMansion. We get a shot of each one opening the door to the surprise sight of a rent-a-butler holding a silver tray. From the wings, two cater-waiters throw rice. A spindly harpist plays next to Kenya’s stairwell; an opera singer sings arias, ribbon dancers perform. When the whole group has arrived, there’s a wonderfully awkward shot of everyone clustered in an almost entirely empty foyer, each dressed like she’s attending an Oscar party. They are complimenting one another’s outfits and gossiping, when suddenly Kenya is introduced. She enters the shot, at the top of those stairs that all McMansions seem to have, made to look grand in a historical way, despite their newness. Kenya yells, Hello, ladies! She is wearing a full-on wedding dress, plus veil.

  Everyone stares up at her, confused, laughing, clapping, because what else is one really supposed to do in that situation? Cut to a perfect Phaedra Parks confessional quote: I’m all for a grand entrance, but one that makes sense.

  Then back to Kenya, a famously single woman in a very expensive wedding dress, twirling in her trademark fashion, simultaneously unhinged and in perfect control, flaunting all that is supposed to make her insecure. The harpist plays. She descends, her train shimmering behind her, dominating the scene. She jumps a broom that has been placed on a red carpet on the floor.

  By the end of the episode the women sit in Kenya’s basement home theater, providing the absolutely singular visual of couture dresses sinking into oversize red auditorium seats, under dim lighting. Then we watch them watch Kenya playing herself, wearing the same wedding dress in both shows, one show trite and formulaic (the fictional pilot), the other (the one in which she watches the fictional pilot) decidedly not. The other women clap for Kenya and say good job about her performance on-screen, even though they all know it wasn’t any good, and even though it’s the exact same performance she’s been beautifully putting on alongside them for the better part of a decade and is in fact putting on at that moment.

  When we watched, I didn’t intellectualize the layering of her behavior. I mostly felt giddy and overwhelmed. We kept smiling at each other, like, What the fuck? Since then, I’ve been trying to think of what exactly the scene was doing that was so electric. I think it’s that Kenya made explicit to us, those who have watched and judged her for so long, the question of whether we were watching her fail or succeed. Whether we were laughing with her or (along with her producers, maybe) at her. Or both. And also whether that self-awareness matters.

  Our own commitment to self-awareness, after all, has reached the point where we often reference that quality and then make fun of ourselves for the very referencing. It’s exhausting. And Kenya’s whole thing, whatever it is, seems exhausting. She is forever on, which is, I’m sure, a very difficult quality for her to sustain and also for others to be around, but she’s committed to it. She’s the preemptive embodiment of anything that anyone could think to ridicule her for—dramatic, overspending, self-involved, child-hungry, single. As a fiction, she’d be stale and offensive. She knows that. She shows that to us, and she is spectacular throughout this process of revelation. It doesn’t make her acting or writing any less horrible, but it might make those skills unnecessary. She makes us wonder if there can be brilliance in a performance that reveals how unbrilliant a person would be as anything other than herself.

  After we watched her, we tried to articulate to each other how we felt. We talked about the strange liberation in the act of naming your own gestures or putting an exact visual on themes that you embody. Twirling, physically, and then saying “Twirl!”

  “How Duchamp-y,” I said, and you made the jerk-off motion with your hand.

  “Asshole!” I yelled, and pointed at you.

  “Pretentious asshole!” you said, and pointed at me, beginning to laugh.

  “Did you really mean that?” I said, the anxiety of an audience already closing in.

  10

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  Hi my name is _______.

  I am 32 years old. I am currently starting my own business that will consist of female barbers at a barbershop. I’m tired of working in regular barber shops where men dismiss women barbers. I want to create a place where men can go with female barbers. It will be called “The Barberistas” A Barbershop Salon. I plan on having a bunch of independent powerful women, together, having a ton of fun on this journey. I start construction on my Barbersho
p in two months and my opening day will be January 1, 2016 happy new year to me and hopefully you want to watch me on my journey and broadcast me to the world. Follow me @_____­_____­_____­__

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  The other day you asked me what I was so disappointed about. The desired answer, I realize now, was, Babe, I am the opposite of disappointed. What I said was something really vague and obnoxious, like, I think that’s just a logical way of being.

  The honest (or maybe I just mean vulnerable again) answer would have been that it’s an issue of narrative. Nothing is happening; that’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t mean to refuse to acknowledge the luxury of stillness and quiet, to deny static pleasure. That’s not what I’m trying to do. The Edison bulbs are glowing warmly and my phone is not ringing with obligations and it’s still warm enough to sit on the deck and eat grilled asparagus and make little jokes about smelly piss that aren’t meant to be laughed at, just acknowledged as a thing. I’m not sure how it’s possible to be content and exhausted and bored all at once, but that’s the feeling I would want to explain if I could. Sometimes I contort my face to approximate rage or pain or shock. I do it in the mirror: This is my he-said-what? face. This is my nobody-better-fuck-with-my-check face. This is my sudden-death-indescribable-grief face. And on and on like that—so many ways to feel, to be.

  And how easy it is, my love, to get drowned out.

  And what if the kind of noise you make is less important than the fact that you’re making it?

  And, look, my friends have money jobs and I know that’s actively not the life I sought out, but it doesn’t mean I don’t want it now that I see it existing for others.

  And how do people go on so many vacations, not even just moneywise but also in terms of motivation to move? Are we uncurious? What are we missing that we don’t know we’re missing?