Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  You did not seem like you. Or you seemed like you were trying harder to be you. You seemed better than the you that my presence allowed for, which was disturbing but also mesmerizing. The two of you spoke of cold mothers and future freedom, and you cupped the bare skin on each other’s freckled summer shoulders as you spoke, a constant, silent, necessary validation of the weight of small traumas and the achievability of new adventures.

  You put on oversize sunglasses and vintage bathing suits and went to the public pool to smirk at preening lacrosse players cannonballing to hear their girlfriends squeal. She read Russian novels and you read Russian plays; you read passages out loud to each other, or at least you did the one time I joined you, keeping to the shade with my shirt on, due to all the lacrosse players. She looked at me and said, “You should never be embarrassed at a public pool; it’s not worth it,” and you agreed with her. You smiled at each other, and I watched the rest of the people at the pool looking at the two of you with your oversize sunglasses and vintage bathing suits, something among but apart from everyone else, a shared secret.

  You were going to take her to Italy, to your grandmother’s home on the Adriatic. You were going to rent one of those tiny Italian convertibles. When I heard you talking, I pictured your hair, long, black and blonde, trailing behind you on a mountain road overlooking the sea, something out of a movie, not a specific one, just the idea of a movie like that. None of it felt real, not what you spoke of, not what you lived. But it was beautiful to see and to imagine, and it seemed necessary to you, a closeness that was more immediate and weighted and performed than ours had become. It was like you were pining for something together, like you were each missing something and the shared missing felt so good, and I couldn’t replace whatever it was that you missed and I couldn’t make you feel as good as that pining did.

  When she stopped coming around, you grieved. When she got that born-again boyfriend, you grieved. When she completed her nurse’s assistant degree and you saw her one more time at a coffee shop, tired in her scrubs, with the born-again man rubbing her back and saying they’d be getting married as soon as she accumulated the vacation time, you grieved. I consoled you, rubbed your back.

  I was angry that I wasn’t enough and also sad for you that this other relationship was fleeting, so ultimately not enough either. That really nothing is enough for you, for anyone. I had been captivated, next to you yet from a distance. I had wanted to see you in that car by the Adriatic, new. And also, still, there’s this memory: a memory of the way you held your body like you weren’t thinking about it, stretching across our little patch of grass next to her.

  17

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  Hello,

  My name is _________. I am a working mom—a fun and majorly working mom! I have 3 boys (twins age 11 and a 6 year old boy). I’ve worked in a restaurant for the past 16 years and now I work at a construction firm also. Oh! And I have a husband—some say that’s the biggest kid of all! I have a fun, happy and witty personality and love to tell a story with sarcasm and spice! I think I would be an awesome candidate for your show. I can help women out there know that we all share the struggle of work, kids, sports, school, life! I would love to talk with you about this further.

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  In The New Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh once wrote that reality TV is the television of television. I think that’s a nice way to put it—the one thing that remains universally low in a medium that, for the first half century of its existence was the face of low culture. Now my university offers lectures called “Game of Thrones and Philosophy.” Netflix sitcoms apparently provide a submersion in some valuable critique of the way we live now. And beyond TV: Pop music is written about like revolution. Treacly Super Bowl ads are shared as short films.

  This is not a new observation, I know, and I don’t mean to be crotchety—this is all a good thing, if sometimes annoyingly self-congratulatory. There’s liberation in the freedom of low culture from the muck of its implications. But, amid the self-celebrating demolition of cultural hierarchy, there’s also a little comfort in the notion that something remains less-than, still forcing a consumer to face the worst implications of their tastes, and therefore maybe themselves.

  British scholar Annette Hill analyzed survey responses to TV consumption patterns and traced the way reality TV conversations took on the language and habits of addiction. Participants lied about what they watched—surprisingly small percentages of self-avowed TV fans would admit to watching shows whose ratings suggested a runaway hit. And the honest responders often adopted the tone of an addict’s confession, a sheepish exploration of the compulsive—I don’t know. I thought it was actually rubbish…but I was so hooked.

  Apologetic viewing, Hill called it.

  Again, it seems impossible to ignore that the shame is part of the form. After all, we who consume are part of the interaction—it’s the people who produce the stars, the stars, and then it’s us. Everyone is a little disappointed, a little embarrassed, yet still we return to what is both comfortable and not. We have to see ourselves returning each time, have to ask ourselves why. Have to ask ourselves if there’s something better out there to aspire to for those people on display, for us.

  * * *

  —

  In an episode of the latest season of Sister Wives, TLC’s drama about a clan of likable, progressive-seeming polygamists driven from their Utah homestead to set up camp in a stucco cul-de-sac in suburban Las Vegas, the family holds a meeting. These meetings play a central role in nearly every episode. Some involve just the wives, some the husband and the wives; some include everyone—twenty-some-odd humans of various sizes sprawled across one living-room floor.

  In this recent episode, Kody and all four wives sit around one of their dining room tables. They’re having a conversation about a family party in honor of Kody’s official adoption of Robyn’s children from a previous marriage. This is a growing-the-family meeting, the most important kind, but also it’s a meeting about food. All families, after all, must eat.

  The camera enters the shot like a guest entering the home, lingering over a painted sign in the foyer, with the words Together We Make a Family followed by the names of every family member somehow squeezed in. At first husband and wives are seen at a distance. Light fills all the windows so that they’re opaque, so that there’s no outside. The house appears strangely unlived-in, and this is common—in a show that, as much as anything, is about the constant, crushing, joyful presence of children, when children are absent from a scene there is no evidence of them ever existing. Some recliners and a leather sofa sit empty in the living room. The floors are clean, like they’ve been prepared for company.

  Every spouse has a notepad on the table. Kody is in his usual denim button-up shirt, no undershirt, chest skin winking out. His hair is long, wavy, and blond. It seems like he may color it in service of his boyishness and laid-back dudeness, which is in service of the central drama of the show, the question of how such blandly normal, generally easygoing Americans could participate in such an ancient taboo.

  Kody is talking about chicken. He says the wives are making salads, right, and so he’ll take care of the meat—he’s going to pick up killer, sauce-dripping wings. He seems pleased with himself. Robyn cuts him off, and the camera turns to her. She says that chicken wings were not at all what they’d talked about.

  Kody interrupts and says he hasn’t even ordered yet, chill out, and Robyn’s head pulls back because of how quickly his voice turned nasty. Kody’s tensed now, shoulders up a little, forearms flexing under his denim. Robyn continues to say that she wants a Sunday-dinner feel, this is a formal thing, a celebration, white tablecloths, nice napkins, and plus they’re all trying to be healthier, and how on earth would barbeque wings fit into this vision—which, again, she has already articulated to Kody?

  Another wife chimes in to say,
No wings, no drumsticks, let’s leave it at that. Then she looks at Kody, grins, and says, This must be eating you alive inside. All the wives are grinning now.

  Kody looks tired. He says that he’s not disagreeing with anybody, he’s just trying to help figure this out. Just ease up, he says to Robyn, and pushes his palms out over the table in the universal stop sign. Everyone stops, but they’re still grinning. The camera scans over all the faces, with the neon sunlight clouding the windows behind them, in the family room of their impossibly clean, nondescript home. My God, how many shows have we seen where people mill around in a house just like theirs? It never looks better, it never looks worse; it never looks lived-in, but that’s the only thing it’s meant to be: a place where we believe a family might live. And their family is just like all the other families, except not at all like them. And, man, a chicken dinner is hard to organize. And, man, a life of any kind is hard to sustain.

  * * *

  —

  Look, I’ll buy all the critiques about the unrepentant superficiality of reality television the moment someone looks like shit in a fictional show. I’m thinking specifically now of The Leftovers, which, I get it, is brilliant in a lot of ways, and is about pain and loss and the attempt to believe that you may be a redeemable person even when the universe seems orchestrated to make you believe that you aren’t. Heavy stuff. Interior kind of stuff. But all I think about when I watch it is the unacknowledged exterior. I mean, these people look incredible. And it goes beyond genetic fortune—these people are goddamn sculpted, and I never see a scene of any one of them doing that sculpting. They stress-eat a lot, and drink. The only character who exercises jogs a little and stops midjog to smoke. And not to make this all about me, but I’ve been jogging quite a bit lately and my obliques don’t look like his do, and really the only reason I don’t smoke anymore, beyond solidarity with your quitting efforts, is because it would slow down my jogging, and this fucking guy casually jogs and smokes his way through the apocalypse and I’m supposed to focus on his mental breakdown?

  Give me Kim’s constant droning on about her baby-weight fears; give me televised body augmentations and the bruised, bandaged after-scenes when a still-drugged star claims to feel more confident already. Give me Jax only drinking hard liquor for the reduced carbs and then forcing himself to face the gym as a near-middle-aged man with a permahangover, living up to the only obligation that he seems to consider important. Give me Kody and the wives at the grocery store, buying chicken in bulk, back home in lumpy sweatshirts, chewing, making small talk about needing a spa day, something indulgent, they deserve it.

  They are alive and looked at, willfully, resentfully. It’s a constant, high-pitched swell of strings, an unspoken panic that I recognize and believe. What I’m saying is that if the superficial and the interior are diametrically opposed, how come the superficial makes me feel so damn much?

  * * *

  —

  Yesterday, screen muted, I was reading Chris Kraus’s I Love Dick, and I thought I had an epiphany on this one line of hers: Bad art makes the viewer much more active….Bad characters invite invention.

  Jesus, how many pages has it taken me to try and fail to say that?

  There is so much possibility to be found in broad, surfacey characters; so many details waiting to be filled in. The problem is that I don’t have the confidence to call what I love bad and still love it. And I don’t know if I think bad is exactly the right word, but I certainly find it hard to own up to the fact that part of what I love is the total absolution from the feeling that what I’m watching might be too sophisticated for me.

  Kraus writes of being a lover of a certain kind of bad art, which offers a transparency into the hopes and desires of the person who made it.

  That’s the feeling I recognize. That’s the feeling of rawness and power—to look at the surface of what someone is presenting and think you can see the naked self behind that construction, the valley between how they want to be interpreted and what they’re saying. Either way, the viewer gets to take ownership over how she feels about what she’s seeing and why. It’s even more of a rush when the performer doesn’t demand to be called an artist at all—what greater power than to be the one who projects all the meaning onto the work of a stranger who is so thoroughly, transparently desirous.

  Once you looked at me and said, “Do you realize your mouth is moving when you watch? I can’t hear anything, but it looks like you’re saying something.”

  I stiffened up and got pouty about it because you laughed, and I suppose that’s why you never brought it up again. But in retrospect I like the observation and that you made it. That you see me there in my particularities, unguarded, leaning in, the way I like to think I see you.

  18

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  I am very able to be in touch with my emotions and portray many types of characters. It is my dream to be in a romantic film or tv series. I would appreciate the opportunity to show you what i can bring to the table. Please help me accomplish my dreams. Thank you for your time.

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  The first time I spoke to Will Autry, he’d just suffered an accident on the job. I asked him, a bit too excited, if on the job meant on set. No, he said, and then chuckled. His job is working a Norfolk Southern freight train on a route between Atlanta and Macon. His inspiration is what happens when the train is parked in Macon and it’s other peoples’ job to unload the cargo. Will has hours to sit with his notebook and write ideas for reality shows.

  Here are some ideas:

  Waiting: Following engaged couples who are saving themselves for marriage.

  Closure: Each week an injured party confronts the person who injured them. The injurer has the chance to atone. The offenses can range from petty differences to heinous crimes.

  America’s Greatest Veteran: A show that both honors veterans and has them compete to exemplify valor. Compete, but in a supportive way. Everyone wins, kind of.

  Always, he starts with the title, works backward into concept, then theme, then character.

  Will has been trying to break into reality ever since somebody saw a feature documentary concept he wrote up and told him that if he wanted a chance at some money, he should try to find a way to make his ideas episodic. This was five or six years ago, when reality still felt wide open.

  “It doesn’t anymore?” I asked him.

  “Not really,” he said. “The bubble is bursting. Whenever there’s a bubble, it has to burst, right?”

  Will isn’t the only hopeful writer-producer to tell me this. Just as I’m getting around to writing about reality, the whole thing might be running its course—more than a few people have made this observation. I’ve heard a lot of nostalgia about the fertile period of the first decade of the twenty-first century, when any concept, no matter how absurd or derivative, had a chance. It began when people loved Survivor and Big Brother more than anything, and everyone rushed to catch that lightning. By 2005 scripted TV was trying to copy reality formulas, and in 2007, during the hundred days of the writers’ strike, reality filled the void with cheap, seductive, endless lives. But now, I mean, just turn on the TV: It’s oversaturated with these lives. The market is beginning to constrict.

  Will and I end up hanging out at the RealScreen Summit. He’s shopping concepts, but it’s harder and harder to get meetings with the big-shot networks without an agent. Still, he tries to stay hopeful. He has decided to see the bubble bursting as an opportunity. What has burst, he reasons, is a very narrow definition of what reality is supposed to look like. That means that there will be room for new ideas, new voices.

  “I hate to say it,” he tells me, “but what you’ve got now is four or five women drinking together, and then you can expect them to bicker and all that. That’s what people are sick of. I think the bicker bubble burst.”

  He laughs and com
mends himself for thinking of bicker bubble. I can’t bring myself to tell him that I don’t want the bicker bubble to burst.

  For now, Will is stuck with ideas, like most of the other attendees at this conference. So many ideas. He says, “I’ll be honest, what got me excited about reality TV was what I think gets a lot of people excited: You look at who is on TV and you’re like, man, that is watchable? I’m better than that.”

  He uses Honey Boo Boo as an example. What’s the idea there? Where’s the concept? He’s out at the station in Macon coming up with like three ideas an hour, ways to frame human life—that’s a gift that he has that for a long time he hadn’t thought to monetize—and apparently it’s so easy to get on TV that your whole idea can just be obese people with accents farting and drinking Mountain Dew.

  “What makes you better?” I ask him in a tone that I hope reads more curious, less doubtful.

  The short answer is resolution. When Will turns on the TV, he wants to see a problem, maybe even a life, resolved. If this is going to be reality, he says, maybe people are ready to see a hopeful reality.

  I’m struck by how little I want to see that. If I still find anything satisfactorily real about reality TV, it is its unendingness. Its constant manufacture of conflict and then a brief respite, temporary hope offered up just to keep the gears turning, then a cliffhanger promising that peace (both inner and outer) has not been and will not be achieved.