Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  Skeggs and Wood reference the term compulsory individuality—the need to make, then remake yourself, to display that self and constantly perform or defend its worth. The need to linger and swirl in your own distinct emotion, until it reinforces that all you’ve got is you, the spectacle.

  * * *

  —

  On the night of the 2016 Iowa Caucuses, I was on assignment, trying to self-style as a serious reality-TV journalist. I went barhopping with a group of producers while covering the industry’s largest annual convention—some wannabe, some established; lifestyle focused, travel focused, personality focused. Any bar we went to, on every screen there was Donald Trump in a dead heat for the lead, and though the TVs were mostly muted, even the closed captioning managed to express breathlessness, incredulousness, fear, glee.

  We stopped and watched every time.

  Can you believe it? I asked every time. The guy from The Apprentice?

  Every time, the answer was like this: Can I believe it? Of course I can believe it. This is what they want.

  They meaning everyone, I guess. The ultimate audience.

  These producers were not happy or gloating, not really sad either, certainly not afraid. They spoke the way I imagine soldiers speak to one another, or bail bondsmen, or sex workers; they spoke as though there was a world of civilians out there—rubes, naïfs—and then there was them, the ones who had seen the thing up close.

  The most successful producer in the group had this tic where he responded to every reach for commiseration from his counterparts with “My heart would go out to you if I had a heart.” Every time he said this phrase, it was met with laughter and a rush to join in his sentiment, a performed jadedness toward the human capacity for the trashy or the grotesque.

  The cool guy, the heartless one, pointed at Trump on the screen and began to explain him, and then the others rushed in with their own explanations. They all sounded like every other explanation that people were beginning to offer, said with that same desire to show that if you can point to how the trick is performed then you are not one of the ones who is caught up in the feeling:

  We’ve jacked up emotion so high that regular talking is boring.

  People don’t want to think, so all you have to do is offer something easier and louder.

  People watch rich people because they want to be rich. People watch arrogant people because they would love to be that way. People watch stupid people because it makes them feel less stupid.

  And then: Remember old Scorsese flicks, back when you could make something with a message? [What message? Never addressed.]

  And then: Remember Edward R. Murrow? [No one was old enough to remember, but most claimed to like that preachy George Clooney movie about him.]

  The way these producers framed it, intellect and emotion were rendered entirely divergent—intellect was what a person should aspire to; emotion was the thing that the lazy settle for to avoid thinking. Every one of these emotion-purveyors said they wished for a world that was better than the shit they professionally put into it, but you know what, the world is the fucking world. They discussed their own projects, the lives they wanted to commodify, with a strange mixture of pride, exhaustion, and scorn.

  Cool guy, heartless guy told me I should write a book about reality stars of yore, the ones who knew nothing and were discarded by culture, husks of what they had once presented themselves to be. It would be grotesque, but it would be captivating; he would’ve pitched it as a show if licensing wouldn’t have been such a hassle. We imagined these discarded stars as a group: just as willing as ever, maybe more so. People don’t think about the damage, they just want to hear the shouts and see the squirming; everyone agreed upon that.

  There was an undercurrent to the conversation, of course, that was about complicity, particularly as reminder clips ran across the screen, little teaser morsels of everything Trump said or Tweeted, whom he had mocked, how he had lied. It all looked familiar—a closed-circuit loop of mania. As we watched, there were whistles and sharp inhalations. There were rueful headshakes, the mixing timbres of semiforced laughter. What a shitshow, it was marveled. What a pageant. What a sham. What a spectacle.

  In my hotel room, I watched CNN for a while, and it was still loud and panicked and gleeful. I changed the channel, and it was the same. I felt tired and sad and anxious and guilty. I tried to identify each emotion as it came, as though that knowledge might dull how it felt.

  * * *

  —

  I want to be a smart writer, but I don’t know that I am. My thoughts don’t clarify themselves on the page, not at all; in fact, they fade and distort. Sometimes I think I can feel them leaking, though I’m not sure out of where or into what. On the page, the I conjures only emotion, the loud kind. I’m not a great feeler away from the page; you know that. But here I am on a laptop in a vegan café just emoting all over the place, until it feels like the only thing worth doing is emoting. Everything that is supposed to feel private, or even hard to voice, feels the opposite, and I return again to the hysterical well.

  The mechanism is turning numb into noisy. The mechanism is saying the worst thing, the grossest, the thing that makes me feel bared, even though I’m not bared because I’m not really there, which is why it feels so good to feel in the first place.

  When I watch you watching, I think that you assume the best in these people. Not that you believe they’re all great and deserving of our love and absolution, and I don’t mean to say that you’re not a critical thinker, but you choose to take them pretty much at their word—that’s part of the pleasure. When I watch, I’m thinking: Way to get angry! Way to be sad! Way to scream! Way to menace!

  There’s plenty of male arrogance to that, for sure—as though every action is acted for the opportunity to receive my appraisal. But I think it also has to do with the different ways that the shows allow us to find emotional pleasure. I have my own assumptions that I choose to believe. It’s important to me to believe that there is value in self-exaggeration once the red light turns on. Like every off moment has been muted and unremarkable for a reason, because there is an immutable self, waiting to be unleashed. I imagine it like a howl. They’re howling. I howl. Howl like our dog in the yard, when the neighbor’s pit bulls are out on the other side of the fence, and she wants them to hear because she knows they can’t get at her.

  We sit on the deck together and watch the dog howling, and laugh at her until the sound gets really high pitched and annoying. Then, sometimes, I scream at her, and you tell me to relax. Or you ask me what I’m feeling, because I probably wouldn’t be screaming at a very small dog causing no harm if I weren’t caught up in feelings about something else. And I can’t think of anything to say that makes sense or sounds real, as though I’ve sapped myself of the resource of emotion and also coherence.

  “Nothing,” I say, and you don’t believe me.

  12

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  Okay so my name Is _____­_____­_____­. In my opinion, I’m a person who doesn’t like to be In drama. It’s weird that I’m always surrounded by It though. I literally have the craziest, most loud, but real family. None of them have filters, and are not shy. We know a lot of people and are extremely outgoing. We just say what ever Is on our minds. They could have the whole world laughing If people seen how they acted. There’s also sooooo­ooooo­ much drama, and arguing between my family. I have a huge family so something juicy Is always going on. Though we do not all live together we always manage to be around each other. That’s probably why there Is so much excitement. I could honestly right a novel on my family and our everyday lives

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  I should talk about Jax Taylor because he’s the one we talk about the most lately. He’s our newest shared favorite. He’s the worst one, or he’s the best, depending on what you’re looking for in a person on televisi
on.

  Jax is a bartender at a fancy restaurant in LA called Sur. Jax models, too. He’s older now than he’d like to be and than the modeling industry prefers (thirty-fucking-six!), but he used to work a lot. He was the lead on a bunch of campaigns, face and body. He’ll show you—look, that’s him in a Gucci sunglasses ad, and the poster is still up in the Gucci store where he’s shopping for sunglasses right now. He loves to work out—look, there’s a montage of him and the boys doing pull-ups on a jungle gym somewhere. He also fucks a lot because, again, he’s supergood-looking and works out daily, and also because he likes to feel good about himself. Other people are expendable in the service of his feeling good.

  That’s it, really. Jax’s show is called Vanderpump Rules. It’s about him and his coworkers—servers who are models and actresses, busboys who are EDM DJs, other bartenders who front pop-rock bands. They all party together, and retake their headshots, and have cigarettes in the alley behind the restaurant, fighting over who gets to take the six-top of high rollers and also who has actual worth, like a future. Who is just a server or a bartender, and who is more. They are often vicious and duplicitous, usually horny, though their horniness bleeds into their opportunism, and they always eventually forgive one another. They were not rich before filming, nor were they famous, nor did they overcome anything, nor do they do anything particularly dangerous or weird—they were hot and wanted stardom.

  And now they have it, kind of. But really it’s like a strange purgatory on the way to stardom. The show has been on for five seasons (as one producer told me, if you make it past three seasons in this game you’re an outright hit), but in each new season Jax is still back behind the bar, V-neck plunging low, getting narced on to the manager for going way past his allotment of shift drinks. Whole episodes still hinge, at least partly, on the tension of trying to get someone to cover him while he goes on a boys’ trip, even though he’s so clearly run out of goodwill among his coworkers.

  The entire scenario is nuts—he gets paid for the show and paid for club appearances, paid to wear a certain brand of sneaker. I follow his Instagram, which is all him lounging in comped suites at Hawaiian resorts or getting special detailing on his new Dodge Charger. He’s an investor in another restaurant now, a similar upscale-type thing but a little farther out in Ventura. He mentions that fact whenever he can in any location outside the show; outside the show, he’s proud.

  On-screen Jax behaves without pride. We have seen him brawling over the girlfriend he mercilessly cheated on in a parking lot in Vegas (pausing, first, to take off his shirt before throwing a punch). We have seen him lie about an affair with his best friend’s girlfriend for ten episodes, only to quietly and remorselessly come clean, describing the way they were sitting on the couch drunk and he was falling asleep when she started to go down on him. We’ve seen him take a punch to the face at a club over that story. We’ve seen him display a horrendous tattoo he got to win back the woman who left him. We’ve seen him sit with a drunken glare, real dead eyes, while being called a monster and an asshole, seen him sneer at that and shrug, go back to his drink. We’ve seen him filming a fitness app, flubbing the simplest of lines, his buddies laughing at him from behind the camera.

  He doesn’t often seek to defend or explain himself—he simply behaves wildly, foolishly, captivatingly, and then confesses. He looks happy when confessing. Fulfilled. Like he knows the narrative value of confession and knows he’s good at it. Like he’s been saving it up. Then he sets about the task of reloading salacious material for the next unburdening.

  * * *

  —

  I decided I loved him at the end of season 1, when he goes to see a therapist for what is, we are told, the first time in his life. He’s in a black button-up, chest exposed, as always, the muscle line between his pecs a deep groove. He’s trimmed his stubble so it’s still present but clean—that’s his best look. His eyes really pop, shimmering greenish-blue diamonds that he holds wide open as the camera holds him in focus, until it feels like we’re sitting right at his knee, leaning in.

  The therapist nods gravely when the camera turns to her, and Jax monologizes. He’s from Michigan, he tells us. He went to community college, but he dropped out. He always quits everything early. He always feels like he’s never enough.

  He used to be a regular guy, regular screw-up. Really. Now there’s this rock-star lifestyle…he trails off, which implies what? Internal strife? Honesty? He looks down at his feet, then up, then back to the therapist. He modeled in New York, Miami, Europe; he did well out there. He thought LA would be the same, but it’s not. Nothing is ever enough in LA. People aren’t impressed with him. He wants to be impressive. So he lies. He says he graduated college when he didn’t, because he’s ashamed. More pregnant silence.

  He speaks again, pauses, then laughs at what he’s about to say. He says, Let’s start with my name. My real name isn’t even Jax. He opens his eyes extrawide and says, None of this is real. Like he just blew everyone’s mind.

  He looks maybe really pained. He talks about women, about going on rampages where he fucks anyone, how he can’t stop lying to the women he fucks, and to anyone else in his life, about how the lies are getting tiring and confusing, the partying, too, the lifestyle. He says he’s trying to go back to the person that he used to be, the one we’ve never seen and never will, the regular dude who dropped out of community college somewhere in Michigan in the nineties, a time and place that seem inconceivable in this context.

  He’s a liar and a fraud, someone who wants attention of any kind at any cost because it makes him feel good, and that’s all he is, and he’s owning up to it, like the story is over, like he has learned, like he will change. The therapist (who, we will later discover, is Henry Winkler’s wife and is starting production on her own show about being shrink to the stars) looks pleased. This is the good stuff.

  By season 2, Jax is back in for another session, admitting that he lied about some stuff in the first one. He talks about his inability to stay faithful, calls himself ashamed. Again, the therapist looks pleased. She suggests that Jax may be a sex addict, and he pulls his head back and grins. He asks, There is such a thing? Later, he says, Wow, that does sound like me. He seems genuinely excited to have been diagnosed. It’s another thing that can be his thing—hot, nihilistic, and now sex-addicted! Next episode he’s back at the bar, flirting back at a boozy brunch, whipping off his shirt.

  He makes a show of saying he was once really there, and it’s enough to make all the continued emptiness even more intriguing. Nothing changes after the therapy session. Of course it doesn’t; if it did he’d be out of a job. He behaves as he has always behaved: craters and confesses, cries sometimes, then reemerges, emboldened, ready. Now when the group fights, they have extra ammo to sling at him—are we really going to believe the self-confessed liar? Who gives a shit about what the sex addict thinks? He smiles. He nods. He shrugs. He continues.

  * * *

  —

  Last month, I flew to LA to interview Jax for a magazine profile. This felt, to me, like the pinnacle of my journalistic career, but nobody I told about the gig seemed willing to match my excitement, except for you. I crashed with friends who laughed when I told them why I was in town. I think they thought I was looking to do a takedown: head to the tackiest part of LA, find the tackiest person there, and start shredding all the surface-level bullshit. I tried to project seriousness when I told them that I wanted to shred nothing. A probe, maybe, was more what I was after. A punctum. This was a man who bared himself well, and what an opportunity to witness the baring up close, one-on-one, which would have to provide a second layer of intimacy, a still-uncovered self.

  Jax canceled twice, which I was happy to consider part of the story, an authentically Jaxian way to behave. Finally I was supposed to watch him work out, but he showed up too hungover, and told his PR flack that he’d rather just go to Denny’s. So we
did—I sat with Jax Taylor at a Denny’s and asked him to explain himself anew.

  He spoke for hours. He was funny, a nice combination of chest-thumpy and self-deprecating as he slumped in his chair. He spoke of his past—dropping out of college, the pressures of being a misfit in conservative suburban Michigan, a vague stint in the navy. He spoke of his father, a good man, wanting to make him proud. He spoke of being a simple guy at heart, a guy who never wanted everything that he has now, who wanted to raise children someday in a small, quiet place near a beach, maybe work as a fireman. He spoke of his urges, how easy it was to give in, how he wanted to not give in.

  He felt raw, and this pleased me. He felt nostalgic in a way that didn’t seem empty. When he left me, he was going to hang out with the people he hangs out with on the show—“It’s all true, dude,” he told me. “We really spend our whole lives with each other. It works because it’s authentic.”

  He said that word a lot.

  He shook my hand and called me bro, and said it was an honor that I wanted to hear him out. Then he put on his leather jacket that I’ve seen on TV and hopped into his Dodge Charger that I’ve seen on Instagram, and drove away.

  I called you so happy. You asked what we talked about, and I said, “Everything.” Come home and debrief, you told me, and on the plane I anticipated our conversation. Back home, I tried to write something that would express the everything he’d given me. We rewatched episodes together, so that I might do a sort of annotation, filling in around what was shown on-screen.

  What I discovered was that pretty much every revelation he’d talked himself toward over hash browns was a thing that he’d already said on the show. Sometimes the phrasing was the exact same, and the cadence was the same, the mischievous side-eye as he revealed a giddy embarrassment. The way he managed to project the feeling that the revelations were hard to come by, that he was only just stumbling upon some truth about himself. Most of it was part of the backstory he’d provided the therapist in season 1, in my favorite scene—a guy with no substance willing to tell the story of his emptiness until the story became the substance. Somehow I hadn’t noticed the retreading during the interview. Or maybe I had chosen to ignore it. Maybe I’d loved it when he told me because it was all so familiar, as though I could sing along to myself.