Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  I loved it as I lived it. I loved every quiet moment; I loved the marinade. And I picture a series of scenes, our mouths biting the curd from a thousand different angles on a thousand different days—the perfect cutaway shot. And our faces change, even as we don’t want them to. And we chew. And we chew. And we chew. And we yell. And we fuck. And we say kind things that need to be said. And we look at our bodies. And we look at other bodies. And we look for meaning. And we sit silent again for another thousand moments.

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  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  I am not normal. I don’t want to be normal. I know I am eccentric and flamboyant at the same time….I want a chance to show the world the being weird is the new normal!! #Diva

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  There was actual debate last night over whether we should watch the first episode of Jill and Jessa: Counting On. We vacillated, made vague suggestions for alternative activities. Eventually our conflictedness satisfactorily performed, we both refrained from changing the channel and settled in for the forced shame march.

  At first thought, it’s inconceivable that the Duggar family, stars of 19 Kids and Counting, could be back on television mere months after Josh Duggar’s teenage sexual-abuse revelations, followed by the breaking news that he habitually cheated on his wife in D.C. with escorts who were willing to go on the record about his particularly rough requests. You chose not to read most of the coverage of these revelations; I, of course, read it all. I mean no value judgment in the gulf between our reactions—there’s plenty to squirm about in both.

  Either way, we were resigned to watching the family only in reruns from then on—Jessa and Jill frozen in our memories as late teens, freshly married, newly pregnant, and excited for a life of many more pregnancies; the boys all gangly and identical, their voices cracking during monologues of their faith; the littlest daughters still angelic and cardboard in the way that all small children are on-screen; the family with endless reasons to host potlucks, a sea of women and girls taking tinfoil off of warming trays, a matching sea of men and boys with their hands shoved in their jeans pockets. It had been a show about the sincere innocence with which they performed and proselytized for their backward utopia, where birth control and public schools and professional women didn’t exist but love did. It would end that way.

  I wasn’t sure if we’d have a hard time watching with the new knowledge of the narrative’s underbelly. After all, it’s not as though we ever watched because we believed them. They advocated for destructive lunacy, sequestered caveman tribalism. We watched, as much as anything, for the way their carefully selected visuals conveyed to us none of the cheer that the tone of the show so sternly enforced. But also for the way that, despite a backdrop that read to us as bleak, there were moments when some of them, at least, seemed genuinely good. Not in the obvious way that they wanted to look good but in a subtler way, a common way, peeking out from under the spectacle of their belief.

  They cared for one another—the siblings more than the parents, who were usually too batshit to resonate much. We liked to watch them shop, en masse, descending on thrift stores in forlorn Arkansas strip malls like celebrity angels, so polite, praising every item in aisles filled with used, modest tops.

  * * *

  —

  Can I just say that it doesn’t make any sense to me the way real characters, those with birth certificates and bank accounts, who could conceivably (or, fine, often do) stand trial for a crime, inspire less forgiveness and understanding than made-up ones do? I don’t know why that’s so annoying to me, but it is.

  The mechanism of fiction builds off of the emotional power of the work to find good in figures whose behaviors display so much bad, but we can call the bad ambiguity. We watch Tony Soprano walk away from a murder, conflicted, and are asked to focus on the conflict written into his face, the implication that there’s more to him than whatever horrible things he has done, and then come to the grander, human-conditiony realization that everyone who has ever lived deserves that generosity, particularly since most haven’t, you know, murdered anyone.

  Don Draper is a bad father to a depressed daughter, but there are moments when he speaks to her kindly, even if he does so only to nurse his own loneliness, and anyway he was a fatherless child whose own past horrors still lie heavy in his every hungover sigh. He wants to be better than he is. Or at least he has some more depth to him than the surface of his action implies. That’s not seen as propaganda; that’s seen as the point of art, the joy that can be found in interacting with a life not our own, and perhaps messier. I think that’s all realism breaks down to: the approximation of humanness. To look for humanness is to make meaning.

  I’m not trying to be obtuse here; I know there’s some difference between a fictional character and the real people who keep showing up to be made into characters. I know that Don Draper doesn’t really have a well of wounded backstory to soften his performed edges because he has never existed; he’s something a writer thought up after working on The Sopranos and seeing how much everyone loves a male protagonist who behaves horribly. He has been made to make us feel, conceived of by a person who is not implicated by the horrible things he decided to make Don do and say. But that only succeeds because, when we watch, we deem him to be a believably human creation—flawed, selfish, threatening, petty, tragic.

  Why, then, is it so hard to feel for actual human Jim Bob Duggar? Or I guess not him—he seems like a monster—but at least his daughters, and really all the nonmolesting children who are either blandly obedient or trapped or afraid or believe every nightmarish word of what their father preaches? Maybe they feel all those things at once, to varying degrees, and why shouldn’t we consider that? They are humans, flawed, and we don’t know what they feel or what they want us to feel, but I like to watch them and wonder.

  Maybe I’m being too generous—to them for their unrelenting display of the party line and also to us for being willing spectators. But that’s no shallower a reaction than to assume the worst, to assume that there’s nothing worth watching for, nothing beyond the most cynical motivations we can so easily read into them.

  I think it comes down to this: No matter what these real people are doing, they’re doing it to be seen. Alongside any other desires they have, there’s that desire, one that fiction never has to acknowledge. Any conflictedness or decency or pain is complicated by the rush to show it. When that desire is visible—its crassness, its desperation—it blocks everything else out. It’s the one quality that nobody seems to want to forgive.

  * * *

  —

  One by one the Duggars lined up on their new show to express surprise, then pain, and then hint at something closer to hope. Mostly the episode was a sea of identifiable, nearly identical faces, some looking wracked, others looking exhaustedly blank, each saying phrases like new normal with enough rote somberness to suggest that they were to become mantra.

  We agreed that Jill looked tired (new baby and all, plus an impending mission trip to what was referred to only as “Central America” and “a dangerous place”). And that Jessa looked as hot as she always looked. And that we had forgotten how interchangeable the sons were as the camera cut from one to the next, creating an optical illusion that even the youngest of them was going bald.

  The episode jumped from close-ups on individual faces taking long beats before admitting that, no, nothing is the same anymore, to extended shots of the group behaving as though nothing at all had changed. Case in point: Four daughters walk the aisle of a secondhand store. They’re looking for clothes to donate to a Central American orphanage and also for baby-shower presents for Jessa. They bemoan (as cheerfully as one can possibly bemoan) how difficult it is to find gender-neutral toys—Jessa has not revealed the sex of her baby, so they’re shopping blind.

  Does brown count as gender neutral?

  I mean, I guess, but it�
��s brown.

  Laughter.

  Daughters who used to be tweens, silent in the background, are now strolling next to their other sisters as equals. They all seem to enjoy this dynamic. Time has passed, in a hurry, in many bad directions, but also there’s this.

  They stop and crowd around a little hat made to look like a football. This football hat, they decide, is perfect. Not one person dissents because, for one thing, the show isn’t big on dissent, and for another, any baby of any gender is adorable dressed up as a football. If there’s a new son, maybe he’ll be a quarterback someday; if there’s a daughter, maybe she’ll be a quarterback’s wife.

  Get a little clip bow for it if it’s a girl.

  Y’all! That is so cute!

  Their cheer has turned into something like the last couple of miles of a marathon—they’ve done it for so long and so unflinchingly that it would be a disservice to their own commitment to stop at this point. Which doesn’t make it seem false—not to me, anyway; it just makes it seem earned. The camera lingers long enough to capture the sisters saying Thank you so much to the store employees before lugging bins of clothing toward the door.

  Over the course of the episode, interspersed between the shots of their daily lives, each Duggar faces the camera in formal wear, alone—the daughters in thick, orangey makeup that they would not have worn in the first season, staring straight ahead, sad but steeled. They answer a producer we can’t see:

  It’s not like any of us would have known that my brother was living such a secret life.

  People are like, “Y’all ain’t perfect?” We never claimed to be perfect.

  I kept thinking I’d wake up and things would be how they were.

  Some tough days, but as each week goes by I feel healing in this.

  The boys don’t cry because they’re not supposed to. The girls do, quietly.

  When we watched them, part of me wanted to tell them all to leave this place, to scream that their new normal probably shouldn’t so closely resemble the old one. Maybe they anticipated that skepticism because the episode ends on another church potluck, that thing they do best—female hands pulling tinfoil, blond boys holding footballs, everyone talking about future births and missions and joy, Jim Bob at the mike leading the blessing. They’re ready to continue in front of our eyes, and we are already an hour past our original protestations, ready to continue watching. I end up admiring their resilience.

  * * *

  —

  In Brooklyn—Bushwick, of course—I left a bunch of friends watching football at a bar to go to an event at a “center for documentary art,” nestled into a perfectly mid-gentrification block, between a boulangerie and a dilapidated bodega.

  The place was packed. From what I could tell, the crowd was me, some people who would describe themselves as video artists, and a bunch of NYU kids. I was there for a panel discussion about “method acting in documentary,” for obvious reasons.

  Shonni Enelow, the scholar leading the panel, began the discussion by saying that we who make and critique art should no longer entertain concerns of authenticity. That we shouldn’t have come to sit in this room to discuss something as overdiscussed and ultimately regressive as the distinction between falseness and authenticity. Contemporary culture has already figured out that there is no such thing as authenticity, she said, and maybe that means that nothing is really false.

  There was a lot of nodding around me. I felt antsy.

  Enelow proposed a new way of assessing honest performance: We must think not about the space between the false and the authentic; we must think in terms of confinement and transformation.

  It’s not enough, she said, to ask if a performer is achieving something like reality. That goal is stagnant, safe—art does not lie in those words. Falseness, or maybe a better way to put it is lack of true expression, is a cage, and the performer must transform to break free. More nodding.

  I thought of Marilyn Monroe and those legendary deep wounds that she brought to every limiting role she was given, how that pain and the way she made it visible was both her realness and her greatest performance, actively pushing against the confinement of her casting. Jacqueline Rose once wrote about the frustrated final film of Monroe’s career that her art is far from exhausted by this moment. Whatever the conditions around her acting, the limitations imposed by others, her performance burst through, providing something beyond the expectations of her captivity. I can watch Monroe and see that every time; it’s an inexhaustible pleasure.

  I thought of you, too, and the inexhaustible pleasure of seeing you transform onstage, how that transformation was brief transcendence. It lived outside you, beyond you, beyond what we have together in our lives. I’ve always focused so much of my love of your performances on the ways you remained yourself throughout them, that current of identifiability, and of course that’s part of the power, but it’s only the jumping-off point. When I asked if you felt kinship with our favorite reality performers, what was I really asking? See how they produce human emotion the way you do? As though crying the way you cry, laughing the way you laugh, repeating it, is all that performance is. As though you’re always limited, the way I am, by the conditions of being yourself.

  If I’d showed up here for validation, for a chance to think of our favorite reality stars as a next evolution of Marilyn and Marlon, that method school where performance was self, the word transformation ended up doing a beautiful job of highlighting the differences. On our shows, we watch people who perform in gilded shackles, who have sought out confinement and are fighting to stay confined. They say, Look at what I will do to stay here, enscreened. Look at what I will do to my face. Look at what I will admit about my past. Listen to the things I’ll say, and if you need me to mean them, I’ll mean them.

  When a performance is an extended act of being, the way mine so often feels, willingly showing up to repeat the gig of recognizable self, then the performer loses everything if they truly transform. The only narrative completion is death. Or, worse maybe, the narrative ends when people stop paying attention, even as it continues on—the living, the emoting, the calling out, waiting to be discovered intact once again.

  I just read an article called “See What Mike ‘The Situation’ Is Up to After Life on the Jersey Shore.” The answer seemed to be that he’s grown up a lot and also that he got convicted of tax fraud. On the plus side, the article ended with: We’re interested to see what [he’s] up to next! So there’s an argument to be made that the growing up and the tax fraud were worth it.

  * * *

  —

  Most of the time when I’m looking at my computer for too long without looking up and you ask me what I’m doing and I snap the screen shut and say Nothing very quickly, I’m Googling myself. Sometimes I read Amazon reviews (I know, I’m sorry), which makes my hands clam up, my pulse quicken. But in the long fallow periods, when reviews have stopped, I can’t be so targeted and I search the whole Internet for my name.

  This has become worse since a fellow self-Googler (name omitted out of respect) recommended refining my search to specific time periods—Has anybody said anything about me this month? This week? Today? This hour?

  This week there was nothing new. There was a podcast I did at a library six months ago, still archived on an ever-scrolling home page. There was my own Twitter bio. There was a website offering a pirated copy of a free PDF download of my first book. This upset me for days. And when you texted me from work, I thought, This is the only person who cares to text me. And when I returned from a run to report a brisk four miles and you said, Wow, nice job, I thought, This is the only person who knows or cares about my increased lung capacity.

  We have winnowed our audience down to be so small. That’s what real intimacy is, and that intimacy is the thing that makes me happiest. But the working definition of what intimacy can be has evolved, and intimacy can be a world of
people spreading your rumors and staring at your face and saying your name. Individual care, coupled care, can seem so small in the face of that. Even this realization, or admission, is small—how many missives are being sent at this moment saying something along the lines of: Why does nobody know that I’ve been here? That I’m still here? I feel myself swallowed up in the echo. I yell louder.

  Maybe I should be asking what happens when those questions stop or change. Can better questions replace them? What does transformation sound like on the page? Out loud? Or what does contentedness sound like? Or silence?

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes the most cherished memories are the ones that frighten me—the ones that feel too tender to broadcast, then too tender to not broadcast.

  The last time I watched you like I didn’t know you was when we moved into the little white church house in Iowa and you made a new best friend at the diner where you worked. I don’t even remember her name anymore, only that it felt more common than she deserved. She was from some tiny town in the cornfields, and she behaved both of that and above it. She was trying on cosmopolitanism, I think, and you were trying on country charm, in our little white house, biking to the diner gig, putting on plays at a 4H barn, and slugging rye at the dive bar around the corner where you shot pool with bemused old drunks.

  You fell in love. Or it looked like that. You had long, straight black hair and she had long, straight blonde hair, and you touched each other’s hair and talked about never cutting it. I was on the road a lot then, following the baseball team I was writing about, filling my hatchback with notepads of gibberish, the smell of Combos and Red Bull and farts. I was trying on a serious-journalist self, romantic in its own way but ultimately pretty miserable. I would arrive home to you and her sprawling on the little grass patch outside our house, her bike always parked under the dilapidated awning, its basket brimming with bread and local vegetables, goat cheese, the whole farm-to-table genre. I was more jealous than I realized, but more often than not I just liked to watch you.