by Lucas Mann
I remember calling my parents into the room as the bald man writhed. None of us could look away. I remember feeling lucky to be witnessing what I was witnessing.
* * *
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I recently reread a piece by Andy Denhart, one of the few television critics who seems to actually like reality, or at least is willing to explore how such shows might succeed. For him, success hinges on the promise of consequence.
In Denhart’s reading, those who perform are saying, “Look at what I risk for you.” And those of us watching are saying, “I want to see you get hurt.” Or, “I at least want to know that it’s a probability that you’ll get hurt.” This is a pretty common idea—how I assume people watch NASCAR to wait for a crash, or how I know I watch Internet clips of a moron about to jump off a house onto a trampoline because that trampoline is for sure going to break. Safe, primed, narrativeless vessels for our worst impulses.
But those are moments set up explicitly for horror. We look because we’re fairly certain something has just gone wrong, or will very soon. That’s not poignant or potent, necessarily. It’s just confirming a pleasurable expectation, scratching an itch. I’m not trying to separate myself from that instinct; I just think it’s different from what I’m getting at here. It’s a shallow pleasure, born from a guarantee. It leaves no room for anything besides the promised carnage.
I didn’t come to this Survivor episode for pain, not exactly, and that’s not even why I return to it. I return for how quickly the drama plays out, and how ever ready the apparatus of humanity is to perform it compellingly. I return to the evergreen realization that if anyone allows themselves to be watched for a decent period of time, something will really hurt and, even though pain is forever imminent, that hurt will be a surprise. This becomes its own narrative: the diffuse potential for something to go wrong, for a seam to crack on the carefully composed surface of the person or show, and also the potential for those in trouble to reach so gracefully for words and actions to express the trouble, as though those words and actions had always been there waiting.
In conversations about the stageyness of reality, people like us, the fans among groups of ardent nonfans, are invariably asked how we find authentic emotion in there among the artifice, the gloss. But that’s a question you can ask anyone about anything that moves them. Emotion doesn’t dissipate amid the stageyness. Whenever a stage is built and people are asked to stand on it, there remains a pulsing unknown. Will the stage break? Will the people told to stand on it break down because of the glare on them? And how will they try to save themselves while I watch? Every moment is weighted with threat.
The fire-falling scene is surprisingly hard to find, but I find a clip on YouTube. It’s being used as a music video for someone’s ambient, didgeridoo-driven house music. The comments on the video range from the obvious (Ouch) to the pacifying (I know him and he’s a great guy and his hands are okay now) to the very specifically vengeful (He killed a female pig the episode before this; got what was coming to him). People take what they want from the material.
I take those eyes before they shut. I take the way he seems to acknowledge the camera on him and speaks to it, to me. There is so much feeling there, offered up. And if it’s offered up, is it wrong to accept that feeling as a gift? Is it, instead, just a guy living up to the duties in the exploitative contract he signed? Maybe. But then the narrative fills in around him—compatriots who love him in that moment because what else can they say? Who promise to catch him some fish to eat upon his impossible return.
* * *
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Robert Flaherty is one of the founding fathers of documentary, one of the first to film a narrative of another person’s life. He became an icon of the form the moment he voyaged to the Arctic to turn an Inuit man into a tragic hero in Nanook of the North. The word most often used to describe his work is ethnofiction, which has mostly fallen out of fashion. Ethnofiction attempts to express the uneasy combination of the anthropological and the contrived within a film—asking a group of people to serve as themselves and representatives of other people like them, performing a version of their truth on the fly, at an outsider’s conception and direction.
I’ve been reading some of Flaherty’s craft essays, little missives from a director trying to figure out something no one had figured out yet. I like this passage:
When shooting a scene I always look at it through several different lenses, and frequently I shoot a subject with different lenses from the same position. There is usually one shot that is right. The greater the focal length of the lens, the smaller the field, and, as a consequence, with the longer telephoto, the photographer is easily able to eliminate unnecessary details and to give his picture the emphasis he wants…good photography, like good writing, is largely a matter of emphasis.
I know there’s nothing particularly revelatory about this statement now, but I like the frankness with which he wrote in 1934 about a topic that has since become so shrill and convoluted. I like the idea of life rolling in front of him when that was still an uncharted experience to have, and then him calling cut, finding a better lens, a more intimate, more voyeuristic one, through which to see how he wanted to see, demanding that his subject do it again.
In the same essay, he talks about the long-focus lens providing him with the elimination of self-consciousness, in reference to Man of Aran, my favorite of his movies, about the people who scraped away at survival on a desolate island off the west coast of Ireland. An Aran Islander, Flaherty wrote, like Nanook, like anyone, felt freer to be naturally himself when the camera was farther from him. He could get used to being a person and a subject. Again, no great revelation. But, even through the paltry technology available to him, Flaherty was playing around with what it means to be, naturally, with a camera lurking, how to coax out or conjure that being and then capture it. What it might be used for.
I first watched the shark fishing scenes of Aran in an enormous lecture hall in college. Flaherty had to instruct his subjects on how to enact this tradition because they hadn’t needed shark oil in decades. I don’t remember if I knew that as I watched; what I remember is how the waves moved in front of the camera, and how that made me feel like the camera and I were also bobbing hard on the chop, the way a stopped train feels like it’s moving backward when another train passes outside the window. I was seduced by that first, near-accidental sleight of hand. The waves swelled at the lens and then ebbed away, then a cut to a crew trying to pull a boat safely to shore, then another wave, from another time maybe, then back to the people, a family scrambling down the black slate seashore to drag a straggler out of the water, then crash, then people, then crash, and on and on like that. The wave means danger. Even if we don’t see it actually doing much damage, it could—there’s the wave and then there are the people in the same physical space on-screen: a narrative.
When the last person is helped out of the water and fishing nets are collected where they’ve washed up, the shot changes. The camera is steady, clearly safe, shooting from a vantage point high up on the shore, but zoomed in on the faces and torsos of a father, mother, and son as they drag a valuable net to safety. The audio is dubbed; we see their mouths moving over what I imagine to be breathless, indecipherable Gaelic, but the sound is clear: English spoken with a decently performed brogue, away from the action.
When the son, centered in the shot, looks up at his father, a man’s voice says to him, We’re all right now. Then the mother, trailing: We are, thank God. Then the scene follows them along the shore—parents watching their son run ahead, holding each other’s hand, letting go, then clasping again, as strings swell.
In class, after the screening, there was an argument about who actually spoke the dialogue, and who wrote it, and whose point of view it expressed; if any of it meant anything, filtered through so much stylized deception. I believe the phrase “classic noble-savage horseshit” w
as used by a pale guy in a bowler hat in the front row. Most people agreed with him, and I figured I would, too, but I didn’t at all. My instinct to bristle with journalistic indignation, to aim for the comfort of the moral high ground, had disappeared into pathos.
I thought that if Flaherty himself wrote the words, then he meant them. He felt them. I felt them. A close-up of a wave crashing, then a close-up of three faces, each with a seeming lack of self-consciousness, the way he wanted it, each formerly in danger and now briefly, blissfully, safe—what better to think or say over that shot than We’re all right now? When someone we love looks at us, whoever we are, wherever we are, what do we want that look to say other than that right now there is no wave crashing?
* * *
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This morning we were walking the dog, and I was saying how my T-shirt felt tighter than it used to, and that made me acutely aware of my fatness, like ground meat inexpertly fed into too small a sausage casing, a phrase I’ve honed and used often. You didn’t acknowledge my statement; you just said that you, in fact, could no longer bear even to look at yourself. Really, you said, it feels disgusting to be you.
I didn’t say but nearly said that just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you get some kind of exclusive ownership over hating yourself. That’s not the kind of thing I want to hear myself say out loud, but I think it sometimes—a panicked reach to validate the volume of my emotion next to yours. We stayed silent for a few blocks, then talked about the neighbors who don’t put their bins back after trash day and how such recklessness can make the whole neighborhood look unloved. Imagine caring so little, we said.
Last night we jostled for mirror time with the IKEA-bought naked bulbs that frame the vanity turned up to full brightness. We touched our own bare torsos and said, Look at this, and then, You’re not looking; you can’t even bring yourself to look.
That’s not true, I said first. I love the way you look.
And then you said, I love the way you look.
And then, in unison, I don’t believe you.
This is a conversation we have more than maybe any other, and it seems more constant than it used to, but maybe it was always like that. Repetition of emotion does nothing to dull it. We who see each other every day demand each other to look again; we say that we are exhibiting our flaws and we ask each other to confirm them, but I at least am sucking in; I am trying to look anything but what I think I look like, and if you ever told me what I imagine to be the truth I would be unspeakably hurt.
The greatest intimacy I can think of is allowing one’s self to be seen. Naked, especially, but also just in general, bared in any way. The first girl who ever saw me naked—this was in high school—lay next to me on a tiny lake beach the day after I lost my virginity to her (she not to me; it mattered at the time). She wasn’t looking at me; that’s what I remember the most. I was lying next to her, bared, and she was looking out at other bodies, watching them run and dive and surface in still water. They didn’t even notice her watching; they didn’t seem to think about being watched at all. I picked a fight later that night, and in the heat of it I said something about her being unwilling to look at me, and she said, I’ve never complained about your body, and it’s still the most hurtful thing anyone has ever said to me—the way she spoke the words, the self-congratulation and pity in her tone.
Sometimes I think we work because we understand the stakes of eyes on body, everything that is risked and everything we plead for. How many times the same question can be asked without losing its importance. When we watch together, each alone in our own eyes, our own breathing, I know we share that.
* * *
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Early on in his book Ways of Seeing, John Berger describes the nude portrait like this: To be naked is to be oneself. To be nude is to be seen naked by others and yet not recognized for oneself. A naked body has to be seen as an object in order to become a nude….Nudity is placed on display. To be naked is to be without disguise.
Now I want to talk about Mercedes Javid, whom everyone calls MJ. MJ is a wealthy Angelena of Persian descent, and for these demographical reasons she and her posse star in a show called Shahs of Sunset. We like her and feel as if we know her a bit. We know these details at least: She’s a realtor who rarely seems to work but loves to party. She can often be rude to female friends but is fiercely loyal to her gay best friend, Reza (despite the fact that, at least to me, he seems to turn on her way too easily and somehow never gets called on it, which is bullshit). Also, she has been called fat many times on national television and in various cruel corners of the Internet.
We enjoy (have enjoyed for four seasons now) the abandon with which she eats and drinks on camera, and the delicate and transparent balance of bullying and pained sensitivity that she displays. I have begun to think that she behaves in ways that I like to believe I don’t but probably often do—aggressive, chest-puffing performances of shamelessness that are rooted in insecurity. She can be confounding, hilarious, pitiable, unforgivable, all in the span of a minute-long lunch chat.
In one brief scene of Shahs, MJ poses for boudoir portraits. She tells the camera, tells us, that these photos are a gift for her new man, a for-his-eyes-only reward. Specious premise, yes. The result is that we watch her nearly nude, posing for a private reveal. We have what somehow feels like unique access. We do not see what the photographer sees, we see (or are made to think we see) what is behind that pose: the self. She’s posing, after all, to be desirable for this one particular dude, but not us—we’re just there, leaning in, seeing her effort directed toward a different lens, effort for him and also herself.
She holds one arm across her breasts (so large that their largeness is kind of a running theme of the show) in a manner that is a practiced homage to Marilyn Monroe and every other bombshell who has posed this way. The photographer’s murmured encouragement is constant. MJ takes a strong, practical tone and says, I want a lot of length from my chin to my breasts. From the corner of the room, champagne in hand, a friend yells, You don’t want your tits in your chin; we get it! MJ laughs, a glamorous guffaw. At one point she offers a breathy question—So what am I supposed to do?—which is meant, I think, to seem falsely demure, like making fun of demure women, but is, at its core, a bit demure.
Her body is made up and oiled, her hair styled and sprayed into immobility, except for one strand that arcs down to her chin. Her body has changed a lot over the course of the show, due to a combination of diet changes and plastic surgery, and the ratio between the two is a hotly contested topic. We have seen these changes, each accompanied by pointed commentary, a reliable conflict generator in any scene. Her body has been made, very publicly, an object to both celebrate and defend. The contrived scenario of the filmed photo shoot, the double exhibition, feels like the ultimate defense.
At the end of the scene, MJ, wrapped in a silver negligee, leans over the camera screen, surrounded by friends, photographers, and makeup artists, and says, I’m so pretty. She says it with both certainty and surprise. This is the moment that feels most naked to me, so brief. This is a second portrait, that of a woman viewing her original portrait and finding defiant pleasure in the image, performing her pleasure for a second set of cameras, for a second audience, one made to feel as though the performance has ended.
We didn’t say anything about the scene when we watched it because what is there to say? It’s not exactly easy to talk about finding value, maybe even comfort, captured in the image of someone else’s staged narcissism. And what else to call it? She was on TV flaunting herself, framing herself just so—how can anything be captured when it’s being given away? She is professionally bared, and what an easy job that is to scorn.
Still, there’s triumph in the gesture; that’s what I thought as we watched. Triumph that also felt like intimacy, since she let us see and feel along with her, even if that intimacy came planned, edited, painstaking
ly produced. I let myself think that I found her there, buried in the pose of self-observation. I was moved. She not only showed herself; she showed herself seeing herself—each layer a risk and thrill. You cannot be more exposed than that, I thought.
* * *
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By a pond, on a little patch of beach, on the first vacation we ever took on our own together:
It was a Massachusetts kettle pond—I made us drive dirt roads through the woods to find it, an Emerson homage dulled a bit by reliance on GPS. When we found it, we were the only people in sight. It wasn’t high season, still cheap, chilly and overcast.
We stood next to each other on the little patch of beach, a moment that felt instantly distinct, in its silence and slight adventure and proximity to nature. I began to take off all my clothes, sucking in as my shirt came off, running my fingers over the ribs I was working so hard to make apparent. Goose bumps hardened my skin, which I liked. I raised my eyebrows at you and you were reluctant, but you joined me in stripping.
We said Brrr to each other, and you wrapped your arms around yourself, but I pried them off and replaced them with mine. We hugged close and I looked down at the space between us, and at the places where our flesh pressed. I ran to the water and stumbled in. From the cold, I begged you to join me, and you did, slowly, your body in perfect pantomimed resistance as more of it disappeared into the murk.
You said, “This is kind of gross,” your teeth chattering, but you stayed with me.
We told each other we were beautiful, and our protests back were half-assed, for once. We settled into the water and shivered, and I tried to keep smiling. Then you gasped and pointed past me at people milling on the docks below the fancy houses on the opposite shore, looking our way. You fled, and I watched the water drip from your ass. I held my hand over my dick on the way out, and you laughed at the goofiness of that pose as you tried to cover yourself with crossed arms. I moved my hand, briefly.
