Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  I’m a drooler, Mama June says.

  That’s the truth, Sugar Bear says.

  Sugar Bear gives his trademark knowing underbite grin, and Mama June gives her trademark throaty guffaw. Thus ends another minute-long block of the foolproof formula of putting this family into yet another situation foreign to them (nonmobile home buying, wedding planning, dieting) and watching them do exactly what they always do in that new situation. They are the way they are—genuine, pathologically uncouth, stereotypically obese, charming. They are the opposite of calculating and certainly the opposite of sinister, which is part of the appeal. They can’t help but be exactly themselves. Which made the dark revelations even darker—the notion that they, the incapable, could cover something up. That in the very same double-wide to which we’d been given access there had once lurked a body not sweetly and noisily bared but instead committing secret atrocities.

  I’m ready to not think about it again. I’m excited to watch them again, with you; there’s no way around that truth. I want the lights to come back on in the double-wide; I want to see Honey Boo Boo, maybe in the beginnings of some awkward preteen phase by now, opening the door in a too-snug T-shirt, smiling with brand-new neon braces, and farting like she’s been holding it in just for us. Mama June and Sugar Bear and all the other daughters will be on the couch behind her, and they will still be the way that they can’t help being, with subtitles running on the bottom of the screen to make sure we can penetrate their authentic Appalachian dialogue as they share the joy of a body’s gasses.

  Cue the montage of all their faces: ample cheeks scrunched as they squeeze, then release, doing what it is that they do so well, that I’m expecting them to do, that will never disappoint.

  14

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  Hey, I am eager to play any role!

  Age: 14

  Height: 5’2

  Weight: 125

  Hair: Brown, medium length. (Past collar bone)

  Eyes: Blue

  Body: Fit / Ex Cheerleader

  Sex: Female

  Race: White

  State: GA

  Again, ready to play any part!

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  I’ve seen you in probably thirty plays by now. I’ve seen you in Shakespeare and Caryl Churchill, and this movement piece in honor of Wole Soyinka, and some grad-student stuff that didn’t make any sense. Most recently, I watched your original adaptation of The Yellow Wallpaper and was so overwhelmed with fear that I had to decompress in the stairwell after the show. I’d never seen something so visceral. Whenever I am writing adjacent to our lives, you are rehearsing; we return to each other, in front of the television, sink into one another and debrief, or sometimes don’t.

  I never write about your plays. They’re hard even to talk about intelligently—your acting, my writing; these things are our own, the contributions we try to make to the world, to ourselves, away from each other. When I run lines with you, it’s like eavesdropping on a stranger’s conversation, not just because you’re playing a character but because you are this different person engaging with a character, making a character live, and that engagement is so all-encompassing, so impressive and separate from ours.

  My favorite performance of yours was the one you did in the failing mall at the edge of town. Your theater company filled an empty storefront with chairs and an ad hoc raised stage, and pulled together a three-week run. You and your friend did Parallel Lives because you wanted to do a two-woman show, and how many two-woman shows are there? You controlled every facet of producing the play. You met with the mall manager and convinced him there was nothing to lose in filling one of the empty storefronts with art. You got that weird guy who worked as a money counter at the trucker casino to run the lights. When the sound guy dropped out, you recruited me, and I was proud to perform my small role, cuing the iPod and then, for that one scene, firing blanks from a starter pistol, my ears ringing in the closet backstage.

  Your knees were skinned from the movement rehearsals. You were furious at home some nights because you felt off with your performance, and you were losing the accents as you switched among them. It was like there was this finite moment to grasp the perfect show, but it was floating in the air around you and you couldn’t close your fist fast enough. God, when you hit it you were good—these perfect gestures, the shrugs and hand waves as you disappeared into a Brooklyn yenta, then a fallen angel. You were so intuitive, so seamlessly concrete. When you and your costar embraced at the end, exhausted, the audience stood up from their folding chairs and clapped, meaning it.

  The scene I loved most was just you onstage alone, wordless. The idea was that you were performing the frantic, grueling task of being a woman waking and preparing for your day. I’d cue up a jittery, violin-heavy classical song on the iPod and then peek out from the wings to see you time your movements to its pace. Your eyes were crazed; you held your neck tight, thick veins running along the edges like tree roots. You used your body as evidence, as a weapon, and you were fearless. It brings me an overwhelming joy whenever I see you that way and also a nagging sadness at how brief the moment is.

  You mimed what it is to squeeze into leggings, to pull your eyes tight before applying the liner, to stand in front of a mirror and inspect. It lasted four minutes and twenty-three seconds, exactly as long as the song, and there was a heavy downbeat of completion, a last step that you took on the last note. The audience collectively exhaled, as though the final noise and movement allowed them to release the anxiety that had been mounting as they watched you, and then the money counter dimmed the lights and you exited, triumphant.

  * * *

  —

  When the three-week run was over, we packed all the folding chairs into a friend’s pickup before taking them to our garage. We gave the key back to the mall manager. We went to the Mexican restaurant, the only thing open late at the mall besides the movie theater, got syrupy margaritas and gooey quesadillas. As the rest of our little group celebrated, you went quiet.

  “I wish more people saw it,” you said. “It’s over and no one knows.”

  “That’s not what it was about,” your costar reminded you.

  She was right, of course—it was about expression, a pure kind, the exhaustion of trying to create and sustain a little glimmer of a new universe in one empty room. It was total invention, imagining something new, something alive, into public being. But the purity didn’t make it any less finished, any less small in the moment. You asked me if you were good, if you seemed truly human up there, and I told you of course, the people in that room couldn’t take their eyes off you. I told you because it was true.

  But it was over, and so you no longer trusted that it happened, that moment when you lost the shackles of yourself and became something that resembled you but went beyond you, in that empty room in the mall, with blankets over the windows to ordain it a theater. There’s nothing new about this story, a story that is both of ours, the clash between the work one wants to make and the attention one doesn’t receive, the breakdowns, the gentle encouragement that it’s worth it. These are the emotions that underpin so much of what we do for each other, always the first eyes on each other’s work, reiterating its value until the maker begins to believe. And of course we’ve had those searching, kind-of-kidding conversations about how much easier our collective life would be without the anxiety of wanting to make things, things that are ours and that resonate—art, that’s what I’m talking about; why can’t I just say it?

  I’ve asked you if you feel any connection to our favorite reality performers when they’re at their best. You answered with a hard no. You’re an actress, and they’re only approximating what you do. As much as you enjoy them, there’s still that bristle. They’re doing something else, something that just is, or not exactly, but it’s closer to that than it is to the effort of
invention—you would never want to be judged for what they do as an artist, as a person either. You want to be judged for the transformation. I agreed when you said it, that the aim to chase is that transformation, but how can that be true when my work is a retreading of what we’ve just lived? I’ve seen you embody and then shed so many new roles, and alongside you I have burrowed deeper into what’s there, afraid to shed anything. Certainly, when you ask me to run lines with you, it’s a less interautobiographically charged experience than when I read you the beginnings of a scene about jerking off in the shower with your fancy shampoo. You ask, Why this? And I answer, Was it not funny? I saw you laugh.

  What I don’t vocalize is the desperation to believe that if we’ve lived something, it deserves to be worth something. And I worry that desperation turns into assumption, which begins to strangle any other possibility, stunt any chance for transformation. And look, we’ve moved our lives across the country and back to support my endeavor. And look at those days when you knelt beside me as I melted down on the living-room carpet, hyperventilating and going on about how nobody would ever give a shit—They will, baby, shh, they will, you told me.

  You’re a better actor than I am a writer—another thing I’ve never said that’s true. And I like to romanticize the way that you do what you do for art’s sake, juxtapose it with me tantruming after a poorly attended reading, as though either image contains anything close to the full truth of the experience.

  I’ve been thinking about the first time I ever felt good about something I made. My mother signed me up for an acting class when I was maybe fourteen. My brother had just died, and my TV watching was more worrying when it could be seen as a numbing balm for something real. So I took this class after school and sulked through it. The students were all supposed to pick scenes from plays to perform or write our own material. I did neither, couldn’t think of anything to bring to those endeavors. During the public performance that ended the class, I sat backstage with the teacher yelling at me that I had to do something. She shoved me onstage last, and as if using muscle memory that I didn’t know I had, I began speaking in detail about all the girls who’d rejected me, all the little shames, the boners hidden under classroom desks, and on and on. When people laughed at me, I went into greater detail. The audience kept laughing, also cringed. This was a joy for me—none of my classmates’ clumsy, sincere versions of Fences or Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? garnered such a response.

  I don’t remember many specifics of the performance, only that it was liked. And I know a teenage variety show doesn’t mean anything, but lately I can’t help but see it as the beginning of a perpetually perpetrated act, the only one I feel equipped to perform or to watch. Here it is again—showing off the flaw to abdicate responsibility for changing it, reveling in the power of the reveal, offering up that static intimacy on repeat.

  I will read you this passage, and I think you’ll say that you like it, and I’m already anticipating how good that will feel.

  Some Real Housewives taglines:

  Seasons may change, but I never go out of style.

  I’m stronger than anything in my way. Holla!

  I may not be the sharpest tool in the shed…but I’m pretty!

  In a town full of phonies, I’m not afraid to be me.

  Money is what I have, not who I am.

  Whoever said blondes have more fun hasn’t met me.

  If you think I’m a bitch, then bring it on.

  I can hold my own. I’m my own person.

  My husband is the top plastic surgeon in this town, and I’m his best creation.

  If I were a housewife, my tagline would be: Say what you want about me…I probably said it first!

  * * *

  —

  When Kim Kardashian was still engaged to Kris Humphries, the baritone journeyman basketball player who would be her husband for fifty-nine days, he tossed her into the ocean in Tahiti, and one of her diamond earrings fell to the bottom, out of reach. Kim reacted.

  Her greatest strength has always been the way she appears so comically blank but then can convert that blankness into disparate and extreme emotions very quickly. It’s the implication of someone who is only affect, as though she’s waiting, inert, for an inciting event to respond to, and then her whole being contorts to the intensity of that scenario.

  Cue the extravagant horseplay-gone-too-far sequence: cavorting joy into frozen worry into exploding sadness into stiffened rage.

  Kim is dressed in what can only be described as a beachy ball gown, a clinging black dress worn over her bikini, with flesh-toned racing stripes running along the curvature of her sides. Kris is in his frat-boy-casual vacation trunks, his torso bare and muscled. He is hard where she is soft; she curves and he is straight; when he picks her up she squeals with a combination of fear and excitement and that makes him give a throaty dude-chuckle because what does a dude like more than making a chick feel happy and afraid at the same time?

  They’re vacationing at a small, private resort built on stilts over pristine Pacific water. Kris drops Kim from the deck down into that water. She falls elegantly, lands with only a small splash, and breaks back through the surface with her hair floating in slick tendrils behind her like Daryl Hannah in Splash.

  She reaches up to her head, at first to say in this flirty accusatory way that she’s going to have a headache. But then as her fingertips touch a bare earlobe, her body seizes, and it becomes clear that we are watching someone’s day change significantly. She gasps. She screams that her earring is gone, and then it’s as though hearing herself vocalize it finally allows her to believe that the worst has indeed happened. She says, Oh my God I’m gonna cry, and then lets herself give in to that action. Her facial features pinch and then turn down, as though the precise mechanism that holds everything in perfect symmetrical order has been physically damaged by the emotional trauma and all physiological equilibrium is lost. She throws her head back into the water. She looks up at Kris and pleads with him, saying just the word seriously, letting it hang out there, begging him to believe that she’s really hurt. He doesn’t seem to believe. She switches from sadness to rage. She splashes at the water. She says seriously again, this time with bite. Everything about her face and body, the tone of her voice, is becoming unhinged.

  That’s seventy-five thousand dollars! she screams. Her face is still contorted for tears, though none seem to be coming. She’s justifying the legitimacy of her emotion while experiencing it and also attaching specific monetary value to it, until the justification becomes the emotion, and it’s all happening in a matter of seconds, in the postcard waters of an exclusive Tahitian resort where, despite it all, she can’t find peace. She climbs out of the water, pulls her dripping hair away from her face, and heaves and gasps as she hurries past the camera, turning around to scream, I’m not faking!

  The camera tracks her along the maze of decks, until she finds her mother and unloads. Her fists are balled and her body sort of bounces as she howls out her description of the events. Her head shakes furiously when her mother tries to suggest that maybe they can find the earring. It’s in the fucking ocean! she screams. Her mother holds her as Kim keeps her elbows in to be embraceable and softens her face just for a moment. She keeps explaining herself, searching for allies. From a distant cabana, her sister calls out, Kim, there’s people that are dying, and Kim’s cheeks flush with more rage, contort for more tears.

  The scene became hugely popular, mostly for the ease with which so many people could ridicule it—Kim’s embodiment of pure privilege, the perspective that everyone assumes a Beverly Hills girl to have being confirmed and advertised in the creases of her pouting face, as she so sincerely mourns the loss of one tiny bit of opulence while surrounded by so much more of it. We ridiculed it when we first saw it. We couldn’t get enough. We compared impressions of this icky self she’d invited us to see�
�her pout, the constricted warbling of her wails, screaming at each other: Seventy-five thousand dollars!

  * * *

  —

  The problem with intimacy is that it can make everything other than the intimate object blurry. A person’s face, beautiful or strained or silly, a person’s body—in close-up these are powerful enough to satisfy. Watch for an eye dart, listen for a catch of breath, and it becomes harder to see the scope of what is causing the darting, the catching.

  It’s a question of what we do with the access to intimacy, where we’re meant to look and what we see. And that’s always been the question when viewers have been allowed to see a life—ever since the first film of a man sneezing, ever since Robert Flaherty zoomed in from a safe distance with a telephoto lens, ever since seven strangers all met in a loft to stop being polite and start getting real.

  The smaller the screen, the closer the face; the scope narrows and it’s like you can reach out and punch the face, or wipe the tears off the face. The face is in your home, demanding your reaction. There is a story, the specific story of that face and the emotion it conveys, and you are a witness to it, up close, and that makes you a participant in, a captive to, the emotion.

  Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood describe it like this: Television can produce a ‘beside-ness,’ a binding to others as well as a dramatic distancing.

  Our stars are beside us, but they’re not with us. So if they’re greedy or selfish or cruel, if they lash out or if they lie docile, what does that say about us? Always, it’s about us in that space so seminear them and so near each other; always, it’s visceral.