by Lucas Mann
Dombek, in an excerpt published in Harper’s Magazine, homes in on the moment of encountering a reality performer at their worst, when we are invited to think, briefly, that [their] performance doesn’t resemble ours. It’s the tension offered up every time we tune in. Trump is the worst performance come to life, empowered. Breathless, we watch him in barrages of clips at the end of the day, each displaying the affect of his disinterest for any interest other than his own, an affect so familiar. Fidgeting, we watch his face contort at the indignity of a question, marvel at how quickly he can seem so certain that he is under attack, the righteousness he conjures in his own defense. We say it’s funny; we say it’s tragic; we say it’s scary; we say it’s unbelievable.
Sometimes it feels like the whole act of watching balances on that little phrase of Dombek’s, on that little precipice she sets up, teetering. That’s what it feels like, but then that feeling is just a metaphor—I’m too safe to fall; I’m almost always sitting down.
* * *
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All I have wanted to do lately is look at you. It feels good to do that—good because I know your face so well, and your body, and how each contorts with a different type of movement or mood, and how that feels like frankness, honesty, since I know it well enough to trust what I’m seeing and its beauty.
Solmaz Sharif’s incredible poem “Look” begins like this: It matters what you call a thing.
It’s a poem about pain and bigotry and terror, and the danger of America acting upon the poet’s Iranian American body without looking, or looking at her body without seeing her. She traces the sixteen seconds that it might take between a button pressed in Las Vegas and a Hellfire missile hitting Mazar-e-Sharif, how casually and quietly our nation can kill a type of person we’ve decided to name an enemy. Then she ends with this:
Let it matter what we call a thing.
Let it be the exquisite face for at least sixteen seconds.
Let me LOOK at you.
Let me look at you in a light that takes years to get here.
I had forgotten about the poem until I read it in a coffee shop while trying to write about reality television. I was having a hard time focusing and I was on Twitter and I was scrolling and glancing and occasionally reading, and then Jia Tolentino, a writer I really admire, said that this was the poem that kept her sane in these times, and I wanted to be attached to her attempt, her wisdom, so I read the poem. And I was so moved—I am so moved writing this; tears on my fucking keyboard and all that, literal tears, no metaphor.
Look. I want to. LOOK.
When I see that word repeated—an invitation, a command—I want to be near you so I can look at you. Maybe that’s all I’m crying for. Or, worse, maybe I’m crying about the idea of myself LOOKING at you, about the absolving power of intimacy, context fading like fog in wind, even as the poem demands that context be unavoidable.
I do believe that the personal is always political, and even if I sometimes waver in that belief I trumpet it loudly enough to my students that I start believing again. After the election I handed out photocopies of Arendt’s “On Refugees,” Orwell’s “Why I Write,” held them up as cajoling proof of the power and responsibility of a personal story in a dangerous world. Now I hear myself so often in class demanding the acknowledgment that the personal and political must run hand in hand, but usually my students’ responses suggest that the political is a burden to their personal narratives as opposed to an opportunity. The political doesn’t deepen what they want to say; it corrals it, it diffuses. Or defuses.
When my students write about love, they want it to be about just that, on the nose: love, and that should be enough. Or loss: just loss, the only story to tell. Or pain, or rage, or triumph. And sometimes that’s frustrating, and I know teachers who consider it their jobs to make a student leave their class with some diminished sense of his or her own importance in the face of the adult world. But sometimes I think, how can anything feel larger than their own feelings, their own heartbreaks? And in that way, what is intimate, what is entirely theirs to feel, blocks out everything; it’s the shadow of an eclipse edging its way across a sun that is every important thing that is happening to and for and with everyone else in the world. All the rest is too bright to look at head-on, anyway.
And I see myself in them, of course. I return to myself and the poem, and the command to look, and I think that I am looking, but when I think of the power of looking, there I am looking at you and then looking at the idea of myself looking at you.
The exquisite face for sixteen seconds.
A light that takes years to get here.
It is so much more than two faces pressed close, love-lit, staring. But it’s also that. And there is the shadow of an eclipse edging across the sun.
* * *
—
On Inauguration Day I was driving home to you through a leafy part of New Hampshire, from a reading I gave at a college. I was thinking about the impending overwhelm of the inaugural address, and I was feeling nauseous in anticipation. I was also feeling nauseous because at dinner the night before some other writers were saying I should do an op-ed about Trump’s reality-TV rhetoric; maybe the Times would even run it. I was in the middle of convincing myself that I wouldn’t write the piece out of some sense of decorum, not wanting to piggyback a personal victory on top of an international trauma, but really I was afraid that I had no insight to give other than general terror, and a pretty dull terror compared to that of most, what with the insulation of my privilege.
I turned on the radio right before he spoke, and, as for so many, I imagine, my internal monologue was subsumed by his external one. It’s infamous now what he spoke of—nothing subtle, nothing true. But the images were vivid: abandoned factories, cities aflame; the husk of a place, this place, and what could that make you feel beyond desperate? And yes it was what I expected, and yes it was a lie, but it was also imagery. More than that, it was intimacy. It whittled away any context—fact, history, perspective. It whittled it all away to an emotion, one face, one voice so loud that it suffocates all other sound.
So many of the interviews that I did with reality producers now seem about as relevant as all the political podcasts I listened to in 2016. They were so certain that loud, mean, repetitive stageyness had oversaturated an audience until we were all ready to rebel into the arms of authenticity. But authenticity has proven too malleable a term to predict. Somebody can find Donald Trump authentic because he doesn’t stop to bother with honesty; somebody can believe in him not because they believe the truth of what he’s saying but because they believe the feeling of the pointlessness of factual belief. I recognize that vacillation, that rationalization, that pleasure.
When we watch him, we mutter the way we mutter at the most toxic cast members of our favorite shows. When he bullies a reporter—when he actually fucking yells at a reporter until they’ve been muted—he is reminiscent of any Housewives reunion episode, when warring stars are asked to explain themselves in the service of inevitable combustion. There’s no direction or resolution or truth; just a contest, just a scream played on a loop.
I’m back to my editor’s words about how we are all prisoners now. Part of me wants to say that this has nothing to do with reality TV, that reality TV is a convenient panacea for more serious questions—we’re trapped in the consequences of stoked white rage, gerrymandering, and maybe treason, not the consequences of The Apprentice. And that’s true. But there’s also the sensation of watching, the one I know so well, when you’re wracked in semibelief, staring at the face on-screen, and all you can do is match the volume of its emotion with your own.
Sometimes, next to me on the couch, you say, “I can’t, I can’t, I can’t,” and when I glance at you, you’re shaking your hands a little, as if trying to push the unavoidability of his image away, a pose I recognize from a death-in-the-family phone call and a cou
ple of our worst fights. You look like you really feel it, and you do really feel it, but it’s also a performance of that feeling, the anxiety of how to frame oneself in relationship to the image on the screen. I do it, too, with my own little affects. We do it back and forth at each other, and it’s so exhausting to watch that it begins to feel like action.
It is routine, now, to read and see political journalists yelling about a reality-TV world and turning to reality-TV producers to explain what the hell is happening. I hear the kinds of people I interviewed using the same language to describe the president—It’s just storytelling; he’s just a storyteller; people have always wanted a simple, close-up story to react to. And sure, that seems true, so true that it’s obvious, but also: so what? What’s next? Where does that explanation leave us, except back in the echo? The rush to point out the trick becomes part of the panic and self-definition and stagnation. What’s left to point out? I don’t know. All I really know is how it feels—that’s the truth and that’s also the problem.
I called you short of breath, sitting there in my car, hearing him. On the other end of the line you were crying. A scene: intimate, familiar.
* * *
—
The issue remains that I’m trying to write you, or at least us, through all this noise, or maybe rising out of all this noise, but I worry that I’m drowning you out. And I worry that’s all I do. I worry that there are built-in limits and corrosive flaws to the act of ascribing meaning. The act of storytelling. I tell and tell and tell and I ascribe and ascribe and ascribe the best-intended meaning, but that turns into a kind of muting.
I’m still unsure if the epistolary form is right, this pretense of me confessing moments that you were there for. It’s starting to feel like mansplaining again, hiding the smallness of my I by telling you about what we do and believe. Pontificating on a subject again—saying that there must be value in the crevasses of sex or sadness or meanness or stupidity or routine or simple care—but this time the subject is us. All the time, the subject is us. All the time, the subject is me.
What starts as cultural or sociological, what starts as inquiry, becomes personal, which then becomes some fantasy of you and me that I also don’t quite understand, can’t quite express. What I do know is this: There is violence in the passivity of watching. Of being able to feel that close. Like you can fade into someone else’s story if you want to, or you can absorb them into yours. That’s the feeling to chase, that’s being made and sold over and over: to be a semipermeable vessel lying in a warm bath, swelling.
Or maybe it’s just that you have to look away from the actual subject, at objects that can be turned into metaphor. And that’s what all these flickering stories are, in the background but sneaking into the foreground, too. At their best I convince myself that the shows we watch are offerings, little talismans of gnawing, insatiable desire piling up in our living room. I look at you over the pile—panicked, miniscule, ordinary, in love.
Author’s Note
This book moves through a series of scenes, both from my own life and from an array of reality TV shows. The narrative covers many years and often bounces around in nonchronological order. Some of the episodes I write about are very recent and some are many years old, and in each instance, I write what I thought and felt about the show at the time and the role it played in my own narrative. This book is not meant to provide an up-to-date account of every show, or even the genre, as a whole. For example, since I wrote about Rob Kardashian, he has returned to TV in his own show and exhibited horrifying, abusive behavior toward the mother of his child; since I wrote about Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, Mama June lost 300 pounds. The book doesn’t trace these developments or any others that have arisen (or may be arising right now). The plots and trends change so quickly and often in such extreme ways. That’s part of the experience of watching—a fragmented, fast-cutting, incomplete, personal experience—and that’s what I hope to chronicle here.
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