Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  I was left with nothing to write beyond a regurgitation of the shit he’d already worked and reworked, just set in the Sunset Boulevard Denny’s this time. There was no realization to be had. There was no forward momentum to be found. I thought back to Bill Nichols’s claims of the dramatic envelope of banality, every emotion channeled into the same insular bullshit—no broadening, no deepening. I felt tricked, trapped in the envelope. I was mad at Jax for a while. And I was mad at myself, for my inability to coax more from him, or something like that. I don’t know.

  Looking back, the anger seems pointless and misplaced, born from a leftover instinct to minimize the kind of pleasure he so reliably provides. What else did I want from him, other than to be a hungover hardbody at a Denny’s, mumbling his way through the things he’d done wrong, cycling between exhaustion, contrition, and pride? The surface he provided was the surface that worked. I got wrapped up all over again in the way he tells the story of himself. The way he makes you contend with the surface and the desire for something beneath it, and then you dig and it’s the same thing, and then you ask him for more.

  He seemed like he meant it all. When I published the article and read my words about what he told me, I wanted to watch him again. We did.

  * * *

  —

  C produces reality shows. She’s been doing it for five years now, an unexpected life that has taken her through freaky medical procedurals made of mostly reconstructed scenes; megahit homages to the trappings of monogamy; longer, more docuseries deep dives into the “real” world of a particular community. She goes where the work is. She’s good at her job, and there are so many shows, so there is always work if she wants it.

  You can make a kind of amazing life out of this if you can hack it, she tells me. And she genuinely likes it. She cares about the people she’s filming—some more than others, sure, but she still texts with them, gets invited to birthdays celebrated in their real lives, long after the cameras stop rolling. Plus the money: for anyone planning a life of creativity, the money you can find out in the boondocks of what might be considered creative work is beyond what you’ve been taught to hope for.

  I ask her what jobs have been her favorites, and she tells me that it’s always the ones where she has some time. She likes the shows where she really gets to be with them, her people. She refers to all subjects as hers, a phrasing that I’ve noticed across the board from those in her line of work. But when you only have a person for an episode at a time, what do you really have of them? The job can sometimes feel like pressure-filled cocktail-party chat from behind a camera, enough to sketch out the parameters of someone’s occupation and hobbies, some likable-ish details to fill a twenty-two-minute narrative arc. When you have someone’s story for a season or more, you can dig.

  Mostly, she tells me, her job is trying to make people genuine. C and I are at a diner in Brooklyn eating eggs. It’s her first day off in a while.

  Her job is like this, she tells me, like what we’re doing now, except it’s more of a rush because the interview never really begins or ends and a lot of the time is spent getting her person, or many of her people, to say the same thing over again, but better.

  Take the main person she was assigned to on her favorite show, one in which she had a full season to sit with and know and prod this person. This person should have been great. They’d made it onto the show for the parameters of their life: hard upbringing, self-taught success story, business owner back in the community where they were brought up hard. But they were not a good person—not in that they were cruel or anything, just in that they had an enormous amount of difficulty approximating their own humanity. They didn’t want to be interesting; they wanted to be impressive. C came to work every day and fought with this person to be better.

  “A lot of what I do is prodding,” C says. “I would sit with them for four hours some days, this close, like we are. And the camera was on behind me. I told my camera guy to never turn it off. And they knew that, of course, but when you’re talking to somebody for that long, you forget to see the red light.”

  The two of them would sit there and fight. C would say, “You know I love you, but you’re not being real with me,” and this person would say, “You don’t know me at all,” and C would say, “Of course I do, and the you I know isn’t showing up. Tell me the story again.” “Again?” “Again.”

  This person could cry on command; they leaned on that skill pretty hard. But false crying shows like a bad paint job. C was unimpressed. She would say, “You’re doing the pageant thing again. Can you please tell me something that’s true? Can you tell that story again like it has meaning?”

  This person got progressively nastier over the course of the shoots, to the point of interrupting the interviews to say shit like, “You know your ass has been hanging out all day? The whole crew has been talking about it.” C would say, “I don’t mind who sees my ass,” and this person would get imperious and pursed lipped and say, “Suit yourself.”

  On and on like that, a standoff over what kind of story to tell. Because this person thought they could game the whole system; they thought they could give packaged publicity answers like they were teaching a morning-show host how to make pancakes in a fake kitchen. C knew that nobody would give a shit if there was nothing offered up on-screen that hurt.

  “You need to feel,” C told this person. “I know you’ve got pain; we talked about the pain. And the stress. Remember, when we were over on the couch there before shooting?”

  It came to a head late on a Friday shoot. The postproduction team had told C they needed fill-in material. A week’s worth of shooting and there still wasn’t enough. The story was supposed to be this person coping with the possibility of failure—a big deadline coming up, a potentially life-changing project that they’d signed on to and then frozen in the face of. C had all this footage of the person sitting, looking out the window in intense thought, stacks of untouched papers, the whole thing. Now she needed them to acknowledge and inhabit the story of how they’d frozen, how they were floundering.

  It was all staged—the person sitting by the window of the business after closing, looking out to convey reflectiveness. The crew was still there, impatient. C kept pushing, asking the person to talk about why they were stalling—what were they thinking? Was the pressure mounting? What the hell was going on? Then C says she saw the person’s face change, just a little, hard to describe. They looked right at the camera and said, “Well, maybe this doesn’t bring up happy memories, you know? Because I was raped as a child. That’s right, raped.”

  I’m looking at C now, trying to figure out if this is a success story. I’m nodding, like maybe this is an example of how one prods successfully.

  “It was just a power grab,” she says. She takes a sip of coffee. “And, look, I get it, that’s weird to hear. I’m not a rape denier, and I know I sound like an asshole saying this, but I’ve been around a lot of people in this job, and I know why people say what they say, and whatever had happened, in this moment it was just a power grab.”

  We pause, push food around on our plates. C tries to convey how it feels in a moment like that, when there is the personal interaction between two people who kind of know each other, but then the refusal to commit to something larger, the combativeness and manipulation.

  C says, “We were getting close to something genuine and instead of telling us how scared they were of failure, how almost off-the-rails things had become, how overwhelming, all that, they tried to one-up me. So, rape.”

  The clip never aired. This person lost out on a lot of screen time to people who shouldn’t have been nearly as entertaining as her. I ask C if it ended up feeling needlessly horrific to air a rape story, like just too much to bear.

  “No, that’s not it,” she says. “Honestly, if the rape story felt like the right story, if it felt like the real person, it could have worked. But we n
ever got that.”

  * * *

  —

  I’ve been checking our realtor’s website for the promotional movie we were supposed to be in, and I think it might be time to admit that we got cut out.

  I’d been so excited. My hairdresser (yes, another beard trim) was superimpressed when I told her that we’d been deemed realtor-promo-movie material. She said, “My realtor never even put a picture on the Facebook page of us giving a thumbs-up in front of the house. Not even that.”

  Then, as she was trimming my neck, she said, “I get it. You guys have, well, you have a look.” And that felt so good to hear because, honestly, I had been cautiously optimistic of late about us having a distinct, appealing couple aesthetic. It just feels really nice on the occasions when these hopes can be confirmed.

  For the shoot you wore those leather boots with the heels that you can’t really walk in, but we were in our own house, so whatever. And the orangey-red lipstick. And the black jeans that cling all the way down to your ankles. You had that rouge on that smells like peach and chalk, the kind your grandmother gets you from Italy, and it’s a smell that I’ve only ever smelled on you. You looked the way I describe you to you, and I felt like I looked the way you always try to describe me to me. I wore that short-sleeved button-up with the diamond pattern, kind of hipstery but in a mall-bought way, which is an accurate and, I like to think, charming dynamic for me. I stayed shirtless until the videographer knocked, to avoid pit stains. You smiled at that and said, “Look at you trying.” I really was trying.

  They staged us on our little deck, and the red bush with the name we can’t remember was blooming. I had my legs crossed, and my right arm around you, and the videographer said, “Perfect, you look like you do this every morning,” which we don’t but we could, and I’d like to.

  I want to say something about those few minutes that doesn’t sound trite. Our bodies fit into each other so well, in the home we’d made together, adorned by the artifacts of a life shared for so long. And there was this man in our home, and he had an expensive-looking video camera, and he said, “Whoa, cool place—is it old?” and he was impressed when we said, “Civil War era.”

  He said, “What do you think your unique needs were as first-time home buyers?”

  And then we told him. I interrupted you once but stopped myself, and you said, “We’re working on that,” which I choose to think read as cute.

  He said, “Do you think a home has to represent the people in it?”

  We said “Totally.” We pointed to our home, which I described, pretty hilariously I thought, as the shape that a five-year-old would draw if you asked him to draw a house. It wasn’t fancy but it was tasteful; we emphasized that. We liked its snugness, that it was no more than we needed. And the built-in bookshelves, we said. That was a selling point. We’re readers. We think a home looks better with books in it. Then it was his turn to say “Totally,” from behind the camera. I was happy when he filmed the shelves and ignored the flat screen, which is far more centrally located. “This is great,” he told us. “They’re gonna love it.”

  He showed us a quick clip that he’d captured, and there were our bodies, entwined, and there were our voices, a bit more nasal than I’d like but still ours. We both began to do our thing of saying you look good, but I look horrible. Our hearts weren’t even in that. We looked how I wish we looked, and I trusted the image, if only for a fleeting moment, because this man had recorded it. He said he’d want to know us; he’d want to have a beer on our porch. He said to check the company website and we’d see the final product soon.

  I’m looking at the video section of the company website right now, and we aren’t there. I see some generic shots of the agents touring an empty house, interviews with people who are not us sitting at a coffee shop by the river. I have an e-mail written up, asking our agent what we did wrong. I don’t think I’m going to send it, because what’s he going to say? Maybe we came on too strong. Maybe we fell flat. I don’t know. It’s too easy to second-guess. I refresh the page—a little spike of anticipation that settles back into disappointment.

  * * *

  —

  Another thing I’ve been doing on my computer lately: Googling “dog death.” I guess it’s an emotionally preparative measure, because whenever I think of the dog dying, my neck and face get really hot and I feel my breath constricting. I anticipate a moment where I achieve full and perhaps irreversible sadness, which is both terrifying and seductive. I once had a student turn in an essay about his dog dying and it was good, but I’m pretty sure not as good as I made it out to be. There was this paragraph where he described the dog near the end, sitting by the window when light came in, and he reached for this metaphor about divine light, which I’m not doing justice here—it was really lovely. I read it aloud to the class and said, This is the level of description that every paragraph should aspire to: Divinity! Death! Dogs! I read it again and thought of the finality of that dog dying, and one student was like, “Are you okay right now?”

  On Shahs of Sunset, when MJ’s dog dies, she holds a wake at her condo. The surprise is that the dog, Pablo, an obese Chihuahua, is still in her freezer because she hasn’t been able to deal with letting him go physically. It’s a nice bit of vulnerability—we laughed as we watched, but I also caught you tearing up. She pulls him out of the freezer, wrapped in a towel. She holds him to her bosom, as if he were a doll baby in a high school play. She sits, cradles.

  On Million Dollar Listing: Los Angeles, Madison, the beautiful real-estate agent who pretty much runs Malibu, loses his Lab mix, Rex, who had lovely sad-and-dumb eyes and was used to establish how naturally caring Madison is, despite his cutthroat work life. At a gathering on the beach for his dog’s friends and their humans, Madison stands and watches, arms folded across his chest, face pleasingly harried. He looks out at the Pacific and speaks slowly, gently: Rex was…Rex was good to me.

  On The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Kenya Moore’s Teacup Yorkie, Velvet, was attacked by a much larger dog and died from her wounds. We learn this information in a scene of Kenya under self-imposed bed rest, sequestered in the master suite of the McMansion she now lives in alone. She’s in full professional makeup, like in any other scene. But she’s wearing an oversize brandless gray T-shirt, which, it must be said, appears new enough that it could have been provided specifically for the grief look. The scene begins with Kenya’s aunt climbing the stairs to get to her because Kenya cannot bring herself to move. Kenya tells the story and begins weeping. When we first watched the scene, I wasn’t sure if there were tears, but when I looked closely there seemed to be, which was a relief in a way I can’t really explain. Kenya begins pinching and molding her left eyebrow, ensuring that it keeps its clean, arched shape, even as every part of her face below the eyebrows is contorted. She says, I had her and I told her not to leave me, and I could see her life just go away.

  * * *

  —

  After Kenya’s dog-tragedy episode, rumors started flying on the reality blogs that you wish I wouldn’t read about the death being a hoax—a calculated fabrication to position her as something other than the villain.

  What gets more pity than a dead dog? one blog asked. Please. We see through this, Kenya.

  The comment section got really mean, like extramean, and I had to stop reading. I guess Kenya’s friend had put an Instagram photo up of his dog playing with Velvet, with no indication at the time that it was an old photo, as he would later claim. People said that was really suspect. Kenya was asked by TMZ about the rumors, and she called them “evil.” She would know from evil, people said. Honestly. Making us think this innocent little animal got mauled so that you can bathe in the soft light of the aggrieved.

  I believe Kenya. Or I’m not exactly sure, but I don’t want to not believe her. I replay the scene. That poor dog. And poor Kenya, in her California king, gleaming violet pillows wa
lled behind her, eyebrows held in perfect shape, heart shattered.

  * * *

  —

  Did I ever tell you about the time I hit an animal on I-80? It was a possum, I think. It didn’t squelch or anything, just thudded. I was still an hour from home, and I had to stop for gas somewhere. When I did, I checked and there was blood splattered up the tires onto the bumper. I knelt and touched the blood with one finger, felt the lingering warmth. There was no one else at the gas station, just yellow lights on empty asphalt and me, alive and alone, and the insides of this thing I had killed. That part never happened, I think, though it’s been absorbed into the story. I got gas, but there was no blood. I did hit an animal, though. I did feel bad.

  Of course I told you the story; I told everyone I could. I fucking wrote about it. First book; I forget that sometimes. I drove all the whole way home thinking about telling you at the bar, and then you were sad with me and I walked home from the bar thinking about telling it again. I put it into a chapter that was languishing, toothless. I thought, This right here is teeth—a creature that was once real and alive died, how seismic. I felt the seismicity; I touched the blood, or something like that.

  * * *