Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  Skeggs and Wood conducted interviews with people from all over England who self-identified as watchers of an array of the nation’s most popular reality shows: the one where families of different classes switch moms; the one that follows the employees of exclusive vacation resorts; the one where a child psychologist helps parents deal with their terrible kids; the one that allows people who are “stuck in a rut” to “transform” and look ten years younger. They asked a series of questions to understand how each watcher interacted with the shows. The responses were varied, but a clear pattern could be traced in stated emotion, across demographics: sadness, which could be wielded as a judgment or offered up as an attempt at care, and often the two intentions blurred:

  …[It’s] really…sad, you know?

  Well, it’s sad. [Laughs]…It’s sad and it depresses me.

  How sad is that? Her problem is that she has no self-esteem.

  [I] just think you’re sad—get a life.

  * * *

  —

  After all these years, I can’t get enough of watching you sympathize. You sympathize often and well. I know your cringe; I know the sound that you let escape when a silent cringe is not enough to express just how bad you feel for a stranger. Lately we’ve been doing this thing where we lean against opposite sides of the long couch and let our legs entwine on the middle cushion, the soles of my feet warm on the swell of your ass. From here we can see each other, and it’s just a quick semiturn of the head to go from screen to face, then back.

  Sometimes I think the easiest thing in the world is to feel for someone. Take our favorite sociopath on Million Dollar Listing: Los Angeles. Josh. He’s unabashed old money: selfish, ruthless, his humor often skewing racist in small ways. We don’t care for the way he sees the world and behaves in it. But he did, for the show’s first four seasons, have a grandmother whom he loved, a mink-draped Holocaust survivor named Edith who died before season 7. She was ninety-something and sick, and she died happily, leaving her Beverly Hills penthouse to her grieving grandson, who certainly didn’t need it. The whole thing, as I think about it now, is a bit disgusting: hoarded generational wealth, and the fact that, instead of selling the property and giving the profit away or living in it to at least make use of it, Josh plans to keep it as a shrine to his grandmother and a testament to the fact that he isn’t concerned with anybody else’s wants or needs.

  And yet. One episode ends with a shot of him in the empty penthouse at night, lit by soft yellow bulbs, and his face is puffy and pale under his awful flat-brim hat, and his body is deflated. He sits, so small, on the corner of a massive vintage L-shaped couch, and he whispers, into the empty space around him, I miss you, wistful, blinking. Across from me you make a little sound and turn your bottom lip down to show sadness. I see you, you see me see you, then we turn again to the screen.

  15

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  first of all, looking for an energetic people person with the powers of attraction and an uncanny ability to improve the lives of humans around him?…I’m your guy. I put the social into a social gathering and have been told for years that there is something special about my presence—its about time I recognize it myself. Smile, you just met your next best friend.

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  Back to NeNe. Always back to NeNe. NeNe there; us watching.

  Andy Cohen, an executive vice president at Bravo, the man who conceived of the juggernaut housewife framework, speaks of NeNe as though she were art, meaning as though she were unreal. As Raquel Gates emphasizes in her essay “Keepin’ It Reality Television,” Cohen sees NeNe and her fellow housewives in the tradition that Sontag so famously defended: camp.

  Gates quotes an old Cohen interview from The Advocate: “ ‘Gays love the shows for the same reason gays love drag queens. They’re an exaggerated portrayal of women, what gay guys want women to be in their twisted fantasy lives.’ ”

  I want to pledge allegiance to his celebration of campiness, but I think it’s a bit pricklier than that. Sontag began “Notes on Camp” by saying that the topic she was going to attempt to discuss was hard to discuss because It is not a natural mode of sensibility….Indeed, the essence of camp is its love of the unnatural.

  What does it mean to say, then, that NeNe is unnatural, spectacularly so, particularly when her role is theoretically a performance of her life as she lives it? It’s a claim that only feels complimentary if you can say confidently that you’re in on the artifice. We both know how much I love being in on the artifice. But would Andy Cohen’s whole thing (and our whole thing as viewers) fall apart if NeNe started walking around calling herself camp? Would that open awareness kill the appeal? Does Cohen see NeNe as the person making the campy thing that we love, or is Cohen the maker and NeNe simply the thing he’s anointed as camp, as fantasy, as show? Sontag wrote, Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp…is usually less satisfying. I find it hard not to cringe when I read this.

  Yet amid the discomfort, or maybe because of it, I still love every detail of her performance. I love when NeNe says Honey. Or Child. To me, it seems like she calls everybody Honey or Child. This fact in itself is unremarkable. Really, it’s a bit on-the-nose, adhering to the kind of stereotype that even the lily-whitest of viewers (us) has access to. Or maybe she’s not adhering to any stereotype; maybe she’s just talking. I wouldn’t know. All I know is that, for me, she has made common words into catchphrases, not through the frequency with which she uses them but through the consistent, recognizable fullness with which she performs them—the commiserating exhaustion with which she says Child before catching a friend up on gossip; the way she separates the syllables of Honey with such precise intent, like she’s savoring the word.

  She’s saying the things that any viewer of formulaic scripted sitcoms might assume that she says, and she’s saying them more consciously, somehow better, than you could ever anticipate anyone saying them. Which could be a compliment or a critique. Either way, I remain a tourist at the performance, with no authority to assess the merits or motivations or authenticity of her behavior, yet that’s what the show is inviting me to do every time we sit and watch.

  After all these seasons of the same schtick, it’s hard not to feel that Cohen is trying to make NeNe’s gifts his, his for noticing and framing her natural unnaturalness, and doling out a paycheck for it. And I don’t like that. How dare he?

  It feels good to say we’re growing tired of him, his whole jokey-yet-condescending bit, everybody’s pal but also everybody’s boss. We scoff about him to each other, point out the little seams we find in his nice-guy veneer, as though pointing at him deflects from the fact that we’re next down the unsettling line of predictable appropriation—a straight white couple setting aside our Tuesday nights to giggle along to a gay white man’s self-proclaimed fantasy of black femininity, still finding joy in the way we parrot lines back to each other in voices that are not our own, all too happy to dub our stolen performances problematic as we continue.

  It’s tempting to reach for more theory here, to try to add some sense of expansiveness and inquiry to this scenario, but honestly that seems like a cop-out for what I’m trying to express. What am I trying to express? A desire to have something authoritative to say about a performance of a life not my own, as though that desire were justification enough?

  This is where the gears of the narrative get stuck—same couch, same shows, same thoughts again. I’m in the confessional room, doing my bit about you and my fantasy of you, and us on the couch watching a fantasy of NeNe that’s filtered through so much distance and rationalization that it’s hard to understand the fantasy.

  * * *

  —

  A Sunday afternoon in Iowa:

  We’d been playing tennis—me and you as a doubles team against two friends—on the swampy public courts down by the river. The match was
, as I remember it, close and horribly played, a combination that left all participants irritable. We all went back to our house afterward to get drunk on G&Ts, and I got into some argument about something with one friend, a gay white man, the only person I’ve ever met who likes to talk about NeNe Leakes more than me. He had, I thought anyway, adopted some of her mannerisms; he consciously, publicly jacked her catchphrases and referenced her sensibility in ways that we only feel comfortable doing alone. And I loved him for the performance, which felt only one step removed from NeNe and therefore made me think and speak about NeNe in ways that didn’t make me feel guilty because this person who was at least closer to being a stakeholder in her affect was welcoming me into the conversation.

  Anyway. I think we were arguing over a book or a writer or a professor, because those were subjects of importance to us then. He started getting more and more animated about his dislike for whatever the subject was that I didn’t dislike, and that got me mad, and then suddenly I heard my own voice fall into a crude impression of his version of a black woman.

  “Oh, I’m sorry he ain’t real enough for you,” is what I said. Or something like that. I just remember that I said “real” like it was the most important word in the sentence, the only word that mattered, the way NeNe always says it. And I said it with what can only be described as appropriated blackness, and also, confusingly, appropriated gayness. I bobbled my head around on my neck as I said it, that kind of caricature shit.

  I remember the way you looked at me, with a little anger, and then the way you looked at him, with a silent gesture toward attempted apology on my behalf. I felt cruel and impotent at the same time.

  I said it because I was mad, and I wanted to lash out, and I guess in the moment I thought one way to lash out was to try to attack him for his appropriation—a white prep-school kid who was continually assuming the voice of a black woman, as though that were a voice authentic to his own experience. I wanted to hurt him with that, make him feel guilt for the way he took up the character, but the moment I said it, my voice hung out there like the worst kind of talk-radio host, with a combination of arrogance and ignorance, an assumption that from the total safety of a life lived without even a dent in my own privilege I could understand and assume every perspective.

  “You can’t do that,” he said to me. And you nodded. And our other friend nodded. And I know I shouldn’t do that. Of course I know it. I like to think I’ve grown, grown in awareness, anyway, but then there’s this action that is the same action, so careless, so dopily, cruelly, predictably unaware.

  All I remember feeling at the time was the particular petulance that straight white men feel when anyone suggests that any small corner of the human experience is off-limits to us. A familiar feeling. A familiar spectacle of my worst self, and the quick wallow in regret. A familiar confession to make.

  * * *

  —

  At a certain point the act of confession becomes too self-satisfied. If it’s thrilling, rather than painful, to reveal the things that have theoretically always been too tough to reveal, then the idea of pain becomes just another exaggeration to help raise the stakes. And I have to wonder, and you have to wonder about me, if there is any correlation between what experiences somebody is willing to share and how much those experiences mean.

  This is beyond commodifying experience; it’s commodifying shame.

  Of the many condescending descriptors applied to reality-TV stars and producers that I disagree with, the most annoying always involve the word shameless. Absolutely nothing could be further from an accurate assessment of the motives at play, both for the makers and the watchers. Shamelessness implies obliviousness, and obliviousness is almost never interesting.

  Better to acknowledge that what is happening is the elevation of shame. I don’t want to say a reclamation because that term implies a lot of pride and do-goodery, and that’s not the sort of thing I’m talking about. I’m talking about the willingness to see each ugly memory, each questionable action, each pattern of worst behavior, each bit of chum fed into the gnashing teeth of a small and self-interested life, as something to exhibit because at least the exhibition might make you feel as though you’ve done something. I’m talking about getting one over on yourself.

  * * *

  —

  In most conversations I have about reality TV, along with the main expression of disbelief (the that-didn’t-really-happen kind), there is often a second strand: disbelief at the fact that anybody would still be willing to participate. Given all we’ve seen for decades now—the shame and lies and pain—how could anyone still want to offer themselves up? But disbelief does not affect desire. If there has been any dip, it has been in viewership, not in the people clamoring to be viewed.

  At the 2016 RealScreen Summit, more than two thousand people descend on a Marriott conference center to give panel talks about the future of nonfiction programming, and to make deals. It’s a trade show for content, the place where ideas and people are monetized or rejected. Every conference features countless thousands of projects being pitched, currently in production, or already picked up but looking for further development funding. Some are full-length documentaries about topical, terrifying things—example: Charlie Hebdo: Three Days of Terror. Most are meant to be serialized and are looking for a channel, trying to entice many seasons’ worth of attention.

  Skin Tight: An intimate look at twelve subjects recovering from gastric bypass surgery—one is struggling to train for an iron-man marathon, one is struggling to reconnect with his daughters, et cetera.

  Santas in the Barn: Ten Santas from across the United States will compete in a raft of Christmas-themed challenges (e.g., chimney climbing, gift wrapping, sleigh building).

  Railroad Alaska. Stripped Bare. The Bible Wars. Monsters: When Moms Go Bad. Facing My Accuser. So You Think You Want to Get Married. The Great American Veteran. The Romanians Are Coming. Sex Box. TransFatty Lives. The Real Strippers of Baltimore (hopefully spinning off into further cities). Rise of the Superstar Vloggers. Natural Born Outlaws. Klondike Trappers. Finding Love. Backstabbers. The Illegal Eater. How to Make Love to My Wife.

  The conference is biannual, nearing two decades of existence. Some of the shows have been pitched over and over for years running. Some people are pitching five or six shows all at once. Masses of attendees wait in lines for their meetings or speed-pitching roundtables, with identical “producer” badges, but the term’s meaning becomes diffuse—some are established hit makers; some represent small, fledgling companies from around the world; some represent themselves. Their portfolios are extensive—three ideas that might work for Discovery, a freaky family that might appeal to the Lifetime demographic, something macho about a bike shop that’s perfect for the Spike audience.

  The logic, one independent producer tells me, is to have so much content that it can’t be ignored.

  “Content volume,” he says. “Stake your claim on as many concepts as you can.”

  “Content, like people?” I ask him.

  He says, “Yeah, so when you meet someone weird, file that away in your brain. Then check back in with them and hope nobody got there first.”

  I ask producers if anyone says no, when approached about being used by or turned into a show. Almost never. Even if they’re hesitant or distrustful or scornful at first, if you make a person feel like someone wants to look at them, listen to them, eventually they come around. Call them, check in, film a test reel of their lives, make it look slick, play it back to them.

  At the conference, it seems as though everyone’s online bio, and also everyone’s in-person elevator pitch, begins with some variation of this: As long as I can remember, I’ve been a storyteller. As though that instinct can explain or absolve anything.

  * * *

  —

  Somewhere in here I’m telling our story, right? That’s at least part of the idea. B
ut look how it has become streamlined. Look at how little life there is—just sporadic emotional plot points—even as I felt I was revealing so much. Look how I focus on the loud bangs and the sulky silences, the fucked-up moments, the occasional bared body, refusing to let you and me be fully realized on the page, to be human in any way beyond broad, emotive strokes. I recognize us in those strokes, but also I don’t.

  At first I was tempted to describe this effect as unraveling because I like the drama in that word, but this is the opposite of unraveling. This is tightening—winding the moments we spend together into a neat little cylinder of two people who need each other and love each other and love watching and sometimes hate themselves. That’s not right. Or it’s partially right. It’s right enough, and incomplete enough to have order. It’s the thing that happens when the search for having something to say becomes consumed with the desire to say something.

  Last week, in the kitchen, after you’d read a draft of this, when you were draining and cutting the tofu and I was massaging the kale, you said that it’s like I’ve been taking notes on our life. Everything that you had assumed to be just us living was, all along, serving double duty. Like you thought you were just preparing a nutritious, home-cooked meal since we’ve been trying to move away from the hidden greases of eating out, but really I was shoving you into the role of the type of yuppie asshole who would make such a life plan. Like we were both a punch line to a lame joke or, worse, like we were a tragedy.

  “That’s not it,” I said. “That’s not it at all.”

  Then we fell silent and cooked the tofu, and then we ate, chewing sounds interrupted by the occasional comment about the marinade being almost perfect, needing more heat.