Against Everything

by Mark Greif

  But while it was ongoing, the viewer didn’t know what it was. I didn’t, at least. But that experience made clear the necessity of trying to think why the strange formats of shows might be influenced by inexplicable or invisible social facts rather than, as it were, social or philosophical inquiries. Since the 2008–09 collapse, we’ve had nearly eight years of shows driven by bidding on abandoned storage lockers and garages, for what treasures might be in them (e.g., Storage Wars). I’d already been wondering why so much of the American landscape seems to have been filled up with “self-storage” buildings, at a time when warehouses and factories of all sorts have been abandoned and gone to rust. If the housing shows suggested, in hindsight, an epidemic of careless mortgage origination, the quantity of new junk languishing in these storage lockers—the skis, golf clubs, gas grills, televisions, plus assorted “tradeable” junk in the guise of “memorabilia”—made clear the epidemic of credit-card and consumer debt that must have financed the imported junk Americans had been buying. Then they lost a job, couldn’t service a mortgage, had to allocate money elsewhere, or skipped town—whatever made them unable to keep up with the monthly payment for the storage locker and indifferent to the sunk cost of the goodies they were not bothering to retrieve.

  In 2015, the house-flipping shows are starting up again, now modestly, often with bank-foreclosed properties. But I wonder more about the steady beat of shows of wealthier but still desperate-seeming American or global-English-speaking “consultants,” engineers, and accountants, resettling their families in Macau or Dubai or elsewhere in the Gulf States, seeking the right rental for a few years—and we see their gated real-estate choices. What work is this diaspora actually performing? What to make of the vacation-and-retirement-house shows where Americans with one home already—not conspicuously classy, worldly, or patrician—buy a second, or third, on the shore, sometimes even a plane flight away? These shows would be our tea leaves or rabbit entrails for the next shock, if we knew how to read them.

  Unquestionably, watching reality TV right now seems to show a United States of people selling one another the last remains of its past, in the form of a vast trade in junk, in which the patrimony is just the chance that something in the attic would be of value to someone else—on the coasts, or abroad—with money. PBS, our only public broadcasting entity and putative disseminator of the best in art, investigative reports, and culture, has basically turned itself into a vehicle in primetime for Antiques Roadshow, a cavalcade of preserved garbage masquerading as history lessons. Mostly what I have learned in a decade of happy watching is how much antique guns and furniture are worth. The dark side of Antiques Roadshow was A&E’s Hoarders, a documentary of “pathological” people who piled up possessions in their houses (often dated newspapers, tin cans, glass bottles, “recyclables”), then had them forcibly taken away under the guise of a mental health intervention. This was a show so upsetting it gave several people I know nausea and nightmares (whether from the packed houses or their cruel emptying, I don’t know). A more lighthearted recent success is American Pickers, in which two jerks from a Los Angeles kitsch emporium drive through the American interior, acquiring beloved junk from the rural poor and elderly shut-ins in Midwestern ghost towns (“I can get two hundred dollars for this bowling shirt in LA—look at the quality of the stitching on this name ‘Edna’ here”). This is the show for which medical help should be mobilized—people in the interior are not looking well. Meanwhile, the labor economy of reality shows elsewhere has turned to fantasies of ephemeral pinnacles of service work: you have to wonder how many people in America can really become chefs, fashion designers, and high-end cake decorators, rather than depressed people eating refrigerated cookie dough. The only nonfantasy labor exalted on reality TV in these years has been Alaskan, preferably hazardous—Ice Road Truckers, Deadliest Catch (commercial fishing, a nearly extinct industry), Alaskan Bush People—as if blue-collar labor could be imagined only for backwoods primitives with nesting songbirds peeking out of their beards.

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  Yet the truly new form to arise and seize the center of reality TV (insofar as it can have a center), which my original diagnosis neither encompassed nor predicted, began with the nuclear family, oriented to some celebrity family head—usually outré in some way; say, from the most flamboyant and/or drug-addled realm of stadium rock ’n’ roll (as on The Osbournes, featuring a seemingly nerve-degenerated Ozzy Osbourne)—in which the focus swiftly shifted to the actually dominant, hold-the-family-together matriarch (on The Osbournes, Sharon Osbourne, the ur-type of the new star). A new era opened, more generally, of wives and mothers of wealth or celebrity: The Real Housewives of —, for example, visiting various new-wealth settings around the country (Beverly Hills, Atlanta, New York, Orange County) to see what cattiness and envy the wives of entrepreneurs and star athletes would manifest, and how they’d fight each other, when they’d acquired by marriage or inheritance a big pot of money. But the ultimate ruler of this range of shows could not have been anticipated, and constituted a mutation in the genre, itself—a genre that this same family continues to populate, with its amazing fertility. I’m thinking of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. The show makes one father absent, or, rather, dead (Robert Kardashian) and another (Bruce Jenner) neutered, at first only symbolically. It is a family born under the sign of plastic surgery. This sense of boundaries crossed—and remade—and becoming unrecognizable, impossible to remember, as ever having been boundaries for transgression, is essential to its glory and its mystery. The question about the Kardashians that first arose for people who didn’t feel the enjoyment of reality TV, eons ago, was “Why are these people televised? Did they do anything notable?”

  Corresponding to it was the clichéd logical paradox of people who were famous for being famous. The Kardashians take such a cliché, too, beyond all boundaries. For they really do nothing, even in an average episode or a week or month. It isn’t just not doing anything notable. Their essence is unproductivity, leagued with an utter absence of charisma. Snooki on Jersey Shore, in contrast, had proven that certain undiscovered people are purely magnetic, charismatic, mad. “Whom the gods love, get reality shows.” Their electric aura draws the camera’s eye, whatever small awkward form it mantles. Snooki had this in common with Adolf Hitler. Kardashians, by contrast, are inert and mostly indolent. Unproductivity extends to their failure to produce rants, comic flights of oratory, witticisms, outraged megalomania. Kardashians skip the attractions of the old charismatic nonentities of reality TV. Their utterances are secondhand and flat.

  To understand the Kardashians, you must dwell on the feeling they inspire and incarnate. It’s possible to watch the Kardashians hour after hour and feel only calm. They are tranquilizing, and seem personally tranquilized. The suggestion of minor sedatives in such terminology is perhaps less germane than the miracle, imaginable as a parable, in which one throws stones into a still pond—and no ripples issue. The Kardashians are constantly announcing emotions, fights, complaints, and grievances: yet none of them seem to be felt, exactly, or not in the ordinary way. The nearly meditative pleasure of the show is a cast of seemingly variable individuals who are still hard to tell apart, their nearly identical names hard to remember, all female, all closely related (Kris, Kim, Kourtney, Khloé, Kylie, Kendall—did I miss one? does it matter?), claiming to have significant conflicts with one another about relationships and slights and things uttered and actions taken, while all conflicts seem uninvested with significance, inevitably to be resolved, and unmoving in the resolution (“I just want you to be happy. I care about you. Okay, hugs”).

  Keeping Up with the Kardashians is the reality success of indifference—taking the term in its widest application. It depicts a world in which the “individual” persists, insofar as each Kardashian evinces some inner narration and subjectivity (proven by how each faces her own camera, in the familiar reality “confessional” format, to record her unique perspective on the action, though using the same s
hared banal terms and common language), but these individuals are basically the same, hard to tell apart, interchangeable, undifferentiated. Their differences make no difference. This surprising motif of “indifference” goes for actual difference, too, in a social sense—as in the blurring of racial difference in the American context, and the eradication of gender difference in the gynocracy of the show. I’m not a believer in the idea that America is in any meaningful sense yet a “postracial” culture, but I do believe that the Kardashians depict one sort of creation of one.

  I have witnessed more than one worldly conversation in which some skeptic—armed with genealogical information from Wikipedia—has tried to claim the Kardashians should be “white” (that vile term), only to meet fierce resistance from others. On the show, they clearly look indistinguishably something, racially or ethnically, not the nothing that is whiteness. No one knows quite what. Their surname is Armenian, acquired from the absent father. For the names of its clothing boutiques, the family contracts it to “Dash.” Surely the easier contraction is Kash, and money as a universal solvent of identity. Kris Kardashian, the mother, who started it all, was apparently born Kris Houghton, an American Airlines stewardess from San Diego. She married money in the form of lawyer Robert Kardashian (deceased some years prior to the reality show’s premiere). But the fact that the Kardashians can communicate so elegantly the flipped sense that tan is content, and paleness vacuity, without any explicit discussion, is really remarkable. Her daughters’ matrimonial alliances have been with African-American athletes or musicians: Kim made her leaked sex tape, so important to the family’s early fame, with the rapper Ray J, dated the NFL running back Reggie Bush, married the NBA star Kris Humphries (for ten weeks). Eventually, most amazingly, she married Kanye West, one of the true universal geniuses of our time. His first name, luckily, already started with K. Kim flaunts a booty of rare size, the likes of which is not possessed by waiflike “white” starlets, in our racial coding. And Kardashians, with their propensity for plastic surgery, are altogether in control of their form. The enlarged quasi-African-American lips of the youngest daughter, Kylie—which led to the shortlived online craze of the “Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge,” in which children of all ancestries expanded their lips by getting them stuck in soda bottles—turned out to have been surgically enhanced. Khloé married and divorced basketball player Lamar Odom. Kylie, as of this writing, is dating the rapper Tyga.

  The triumph over sexual difference, through the exclusive presence of mothers and daughters at the core of the show—with a variable roster of useless, collateral males, who are periodically expelled—may be linked to its “raced” universalism. There was ostensibly a male presence, in second husband and sometime father Bruce Jenner, who had been with the family for years. But he was exiled to the garage, the butt of jokes for most of the show’s run. Jenner was a surprising presence, because he had once been a model of training—someone who had made his body do the utmost, become a winning Olympian. Now he was a husk, a hollow reed. There was a son, too—impossible to remember his name—who once he ceased to want to appear on the show became an object of pity, as the sisters hinted at depression, or subtle mental illness. The surprising pleasure of a biological family of all women (like a hive with four to six queens) was that it reproduced the competitive surface tensions of The Real Housewives and yet no conflict could divide them for long. As in kin-selection theory, any relative sacrifice of one sister ensured the success of her genes through another, and it certainly seemed as if everyone’s earnings were going into a common pot. They were Olympic goddesses whose passions issued in no true battles and whose quiescence seemed only to increase their power.

  And maybe this was the ultimate fantasia of the Kardashians, and the ultimate pleasure of the show’s tranquilizing power: it displays the conceit of an economy in which “doing nothing,” or rather the hard work of sitting, choosing a restaurant, sipping cold beverages, traveling in a car, traveling on a plane, dressing and undressing, and mostly just being (sedentarily, except when on vacation), and being willing to be watched, is enough. Isn’t this what America will do to escape our productionlessness? We will be watched by the world. We’ll apply our names to things, our personal brands. Miraculously, our mere American being, all passions spent, will earn. This past year, Bruce Jenner played his trump card by becoming the only sort of figure who could wield power in a Kardashian world—a woman. As he had his Adam’s apple shaved down and breasts enhanced, he vowed in interviews that, after the completion of his transition, his new name wouldn’t begin with K. The joke in her arrival as Caitlyn is that, as we hear it spoken, in the context of Kris, Kim, Khloé, Kourtney, this “Cait” surely does start with a K. It’s not pronounced “Saitlin.” I Am Cait is either the ultimate self-assertion of the vanished patriarchal order, of achievement, contest, whiteness, maleness—the long-ago real Olympian proving he can do what it takes to stay on top, in the driver’s seat, even to the point of becoming female—or it is patriarchy’s ultimate abdication. Nietzsche told us a century ago about the coming of the Last Men. I don’t know if it occurred to him that the Last Men might be Kardashian.

  [2015]

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  * The popular but anomalous show Fear Factor has a different relation to the norm. Fear Factor adds an outside rule to sport. All the sports we watch on TV (football, baseball, golf, tennis) were invented and enjoyed by participants before being transposed to the small screen for the benefit of spectators. Fear Factor seems in contrast to be a show of “sports” devised on behalf of spectators rather than participants. Its goal is the pleasure of the viewer. And its standard turns out to be a kind of norm no one would dare articulate or declare respectable—that television, playing the role here of the industry, makes spectators long to see the human body in postures and activities it would pain individuals to see in person. How could we have known that it’s pleasurable to watch chiseled hardbodies and women in bikinis be forced to eat cow spleen or writhe in boxes of slugs, and that these delights of sexual sadism could go along with the wash-you-clean thrills of spinning platforms, ladders hanging from helicopters, and speedboat draggings, which end with the contestants’ bodies hurled into rivers or lakes?

  WETUBE

  “Honey, what’s good on YouTube tonight?” The dancing, for starters. I’ve seen bootie dancing (var. sp. of “booty dancing”: belly dancing displaced). I’ve seen break dancing. I’ve seen birds dancing (the best-known a sulphur-crested cockatoo high-stepping to the Backstreet Boys). I’m not a particular aficionado of dance; this just happens to be where things lead. You go to America’s most popular nonpornographic video-uploading Web site and click through the rat-maze portals meant to guide your itinerary—“Videos being watched right now,” “Most popular, featured videos”—and what you see, after hours of what a friend of mine calls “click trance,” is endless music and dancing. Six-year-olds dancing to hardstep. Elementary-school children performing incredible sequences to “Dance Dance Revolution” in their living rooms. Then more adults: people dancing at pool parties; dancing at Slip ’n Slide parties; dancing at New Year’s Eve parties. Of course I’ve also seen YouTube’s most popular clip, “The Evolution of Dance.” This longtime holder of the title has been screened eighty-eight million times, at this writing. I can’t personally account for more than ten of those viewings, I’m sure. But I do find my way back to it, often.

  The utterly amateur “Evolution of Dance” has been made the single most-viewed clip of all time because it expresses the essence of most of the other fundamentally amateur content on YouTube—it incarnates the deep character of what, at least so far, viewers and especially the uploaders of videos look to YouTube to provide. I’m sure you’ve seen it already, but let me describe “The Evolution of Dance” for the edification of future generations. The onstage amateur being filmed is a man named Judson Laipply, who bills himself as an inspirational comedian. He is in a setting that can only be described as “talent-show minimal.” H
e stands on a cheap-looking black stage and is filmed from far away, presumably from a seat in the audience on the floor. This is not the simulation of crappy talent-show filming: the most popular YouTube clip of all time is, in fact, a crappily made talent video. He has a stool, as comedians do, to one side, and a microphone also to the side. You can hear the laughter and cheers of the crowd throughout the routine along with the tinny musical sound track coming over the room’s PA. Judson wears an Orange Crush T-shirt, jeans, and is a white guy with receding hair—perfectly ordinary, to all appearances, at the start. He’s in a spotlight that later follows him with a slight nervous or incompetent delay when he dances to the left. Because he is about to dance, to do “The Evolution of Dance”: what I expected when I first read the title was cavemen to Balanchine, but what transpires—from the beginning strains of a medley of music that runs from Elvis Presley and Chubby Checker to Eminem and Jay-Z—is that with super-elasticity, to every single snippet of these songs, in good synchrony and with a seamlessly choreographed transition from one posture into the next, inspirational comedian Judson, like a mannequin burst into motion, springs into a dance that perfectly fits. The incredible joy of the thing is manifold: first, seeing his Gumby-like ability to do so many different styles, to become anything and anyone; second, the ingenuity and athleticism with which such a kinetic medley was invented by which he would transform himself, recognizably to us, into everyone else; and third, shading into this, the fact of recognition that we just as instantly know each of the songs and each one of the dance moves that goes with it. For the defining feature of the music and its dances is that they cover “evolution” only through a period exactly coterminous with television: therefore, with dances known from screens like the one we are watching. These are not folk dances. This is not the reel or the quadrille leading to the waltz. We know how to Elvis-dance because of Ed Sullivan, and the unseen pelvis, and all of those movies, from Jailhouse Rock to Blue Hawaii; we know the twist from crowd footage of that mania. Then when Judson does John Travolta’s “I’ve got a finger in my pocket, I’d better point it” move to the Bee Gees; when he transitions to “Y.M.C.A.,” as taught by the Village People on Solid Gold and seventies TV, the letters carved with his body, we are seeing dances that we have also converted from television into our own dances at weddings and bar mitzvahs—and when he drops down and does “the worm,” it is the same effect; and again when he does “the robot” to Styx (“Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto!”); and when he does the “running man,” and MC Hammer’s “Hammer dance”—to when he definitively enters the last twenty years, getting huge laughs and cheers from the audience because the recognitions become more and more surprising, you see how much of all of our dancing is known to us now only from televised choreography, from music videos, from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” and from the marionette moves of ’N Sync.