Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  “Who cares?” I tried to say like I meant it. “Let them look.”

  We sprinted to the car. We sat hidden behind the doors, scrubbing off wet sand. I was already thinking of how we might remember this scene, which couldn’t have lasted more than ten minutes. I wanted it so badly to be preserved as a happy memory, but I didn’t know how to say that, or why it mattered.

  3

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  Growing up I was always the shy and quiet kid. I never considered myself beautiful, and I feel like the opportunity would give me the boost I need to help with my self-esteem and confidence issues. If considered for a position I would give it my all at all times.

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  When I feel guilty about all the watching, what makes me most uncomfortable is the way other people look in front of the TV. They look vegetative, near dead. The body and the mind seem to be wholly at rest. Despite the fact that this is so often how we look, and despite the fact that I enjoy it, I have these flashes of shame; it’s hard to allow myself to embrace seeing you that way, acknowledging the joy in the image. I admire you onstage, in workout clothes, on the phone with your boss carefully enunciating your words, biting your lip when you read—each of these is, in some way, a pose of work.

  Once, when I was a boy, my mother told me that scientists said you burn more calories when you’re sleeping than when you’re watching TV, because even sleeping is more active than watching. This was the ultimate condemnation. I’ve never checked on whether she was telling the truth, but I have remembered the claim and relay it often, the information almost always unwelcome. She said it to get me to go to bed during a Real World marathon, and it worked. TV was, technically, making me fatter than I would be as a boy who turned off the TV and got a good night’s sleep. I would never look like the people I was watching if I kept watching them. That night in bed I tried to think of bad things as I began to dream, to ensure an optimal amount of tossing and turning. At least a nightmare would be a workout. At least I would be doing something.

  The first TV show I remember seeking out, watching in reruns every day after school, was American Gladiators. That can’t be an accident. All that accusatory, Reaganish optimism. All that slick, hard flesh. Blade and Gemini and Nitro flexing and taunting for so many years, wearing American flag–themed unitards and telling the story of the physical dominance that hard work can provide, looking into the camera and telling me—fat, inert, little-boy me—that this was manhood to emulate. Sometimes, by the end of an episode, I’d find my whole body clenched, as if that were a type of participation. A commercial would jostle me out of this fugue state, and I’d feel some combination of exhaustion, inspiration, and shame, a physical sensation that is still quite recognizable.

  The joy of watching reality TV has always fitted neatly into that dumbest cultural cliché: guilty pleasure. The guilt here references the participation in something so lowbrow, so vapid. But to me that’s always a less vivid guilt than what I feel as a watcher of other peoples’ actions—heightened awareness of my lack of effort, when those performing are, at the very least, effortful. Whatever the cultural value attached to the people on-screen, they’re doing something. I’m watching them do, and in watching the content of their lives I’m sacrificing some potential content in my own. I don’t think I’m escaping into other peoples’ efforts; I think that watching them makes me stew in what I’m not doing, what that nothingness feels like. I could be what I am seeing, or maybe I couldn’t, and maybe I don’t even want to be that, but ultimately how can anyone know—there are so many ways to be.

  There are so many ways to be, so how does one begin? We’ve never spoken that question, but it’s the one I feel most often, or if not most often, at least most acutely. It’s the one that can never really be answered, and maybe that’s why it’s so easy to stay still, wrapped up in the non-act of watching someone else try.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve been trying to find scholarship on reality TV (looking for gravitas, I guess). There’s a growing body of work, particularly from media and gender studies scholars like Brenda Weber, Helen Wood, and Beverley Skeggs. Many essays I’ve found, though, lead me back to a cultural critic named Mark Andrejevic, who wrote about the genre in the early-to-mid-2000s, when it was really beginning to boom and scholars were just starting to pay attention. Andrejevic dubbed the form the work of being watched.

  He saw it as the perfect storm of an alienated, subjugated labor force. The workers provide no valued skill; instead all they have to give are their lives, until life and work are interchangeable, both edging toward worthless.

  Of course, I got huffy when I read Andrejevic, and I think it was more than run-of-the-mill defensiveness. It felt like he just didn’t see what I think (or hope) we see on-screen. Written into his argument is a crucial assumption about the reality performer, one that has persisted: she is not doing anything. Instead, something is being done to her; specifically, she is being watched by people like us. She’s just living, existing on-screen, and she can’t exist artfully, or even intentionally. So the performer’s contribution is only sacrificial, like selling a kidney, if the kidney had no biological value to anyone.

  To Andrejevic all reality TV does is provide the invitation…to become famous by play-acting the role of the celebrity. This means that we focus attention on the apparatus of celebrity production rather than the intrinsic qualities of the star. The aura of the individual talent is undermined.

  He frames reality stars as the embodiment of Daniel Boorstin’s warnings from the 1960s: a coming culture of manufactured illusions, creating a new celebrity monster who is known for his well-knownness. Which, it’s assumed, is a universally bad thing.

  I’m trying to reconcile this with how I understand the world, and I think Andrejevic gives a bit too much credit to the notion of talent, and way too much to that of celebrity. Do they have that much to do with each other? Did people care about James Dean because he was a genius? Or put it this way: What is a celebrity other than someone whom many other people give a shit about? If one succeeds in becoming seen, then how are they playacting the role of celebrity as opposed to just being one?

  Our stars—the housewives, the Kardashians, et cetera—are the most successful examples of playacting celebrity; they do so in service of constant, often brilliant entrepreneurship, but the entrepreneurship exists only because of the playacting. All this focus on them as mere capitalizing existers, instead of actors, and the one thing that we see them acting at is the only thing they actually are. It becomes impossible to talk about whether they’re doing a good job at the thing they’re attempting if nobody seems to think they’re attempting anything. More than a decade after Andrejevic wrote these words, it’s still hard to make a distinction between who is talented at public being and who isn’t.

  Fellow media scholars Beverley Skeggs and Helen Wood have pointed to the anger that persists toward successful reality performers, an anger reserved almost exclusively for female stars: What seems most distasteful about the apparent success of these women is their ability to use the performances of their bodies, gestures and language as themselves to their own material advantage.

  It’s an ever-present double bind: How can they deserve to be successful for performing nothing but what they are? But then look at them, successful, performing—what is that?

  Skeggs and Wood point out that even when our stars are well compensated for their performances, their pay exists outside of any performer’s union. No matter how much they are of themselves, no matter the life and emotion they provide and profit from, there isn’t a name or institutional solidarity for their labor. Instead, the old invitation is there to reduce their actions to nothing but existence; the easy write-off that people need something to look at—anything, anyone. Just a body willing to be depleted by hungry eyes.

  * * *

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  I can remember the first time I watched you. You were smoking with your friend in a gazebo outside your dorm. Your dorm was in between my dorm and the dorm where most of my friends lived, so often I would hurry by you, sober and left out, then return, stumbling home, hours later. By that time you were usually out there alone. There was a light with moths in it that cast shadows over the lit part of the grass.

  You now tell people that even when we first looked at each other, you had inklings of what was to come. I say that when I think about it, I sort of felt the same way. I am definitely lying, and I’m pretty sure you are, too. Narratives, even the flimsiest ones, are comforting.

  I can’t remember much about the first time we fucked; only that we did and I loved it, and felt the instant need to try to describe and commemorate it, even just to myself. I wrote a poem about the experience that managed to include nothing sexy and leaned heavily on the image of waking up to a surprise snowfall (I blame Keats), letting that sit on the page as a metaphor for something. (Ejaculation? I don’t know.) I remember the poem only slightly better than the act it clumsily commemorated. It’s hard to acknowledge that spontaneous action must become rooted in meaning after the fact.

  Sometimes I like to think that every moment we’ve lived together is valuable. That if one second fell away, part of the meaning of all of it would be gone. Sometimes I’m terrified of the idea of remembering all the moments until each begins to sag under the weight of collective inspection.

  * * *

  —

  Here are some things that my students have called Kim Kardashian, either in casual conversation, a theoretical classroom debate, or an assigned essay:

  Useless. Dumb. Rich. Spoiled. Just kind of a selfish bitch. The thing that makes me wish I wasn’t born when I was born. A glorified porn star. Famous for being stupid. Famous for being greedy. Probably a bad mom. Talentless. A bad role model. The enemy of all feminists.

  This isn’t a trying-to-be-highbrow thing. In general, they seem to find the concept of varied brows to be pointless. I’ve received literary-analysis papers (students’ choice of topic!) on Nicholas Sparks novels. I had three students answer my standard introductory question, “Who is your favorite author?,” with “James Patterson,” and another tell me that studying Shakespeare over Divergent is pretentious, academic bullshit left over from dinosaur professors who don’t know how to have fun. They exhibit little of the obnoxious desire we had to pledge allegiance to art that was unheard of or, more important, difficult, as if that might validate their own perspectives. Most of them don’t even seem to be going through a smoking-makes-me-look-deeper phase.

  They like vampires, wizards. They like fantastical tales whose endings you can predict from the first sentence or shot. But for the most part, they don’t like Kim, who is not a vampire (despite a good deal of metaphorical accusation) and whose ending is still a mystery.

  Before I knew who Kim Kardashian was, when I was the same age as some of my students are now, I watched her fuck Ray J, Brandy’s little brother, in their self-produced, then stolen, piece of erotica, Kim K Superstar. Or, to be more exact, I sort of knew who she was, and that was crucial. She was recognizable-ish, a peripheral friend on Paris Hilton’s show, and therefore already famous enough for the implied desire to be more famous than she was. I remember you showing me her picture online and having some recognition of her face. I remember, too, that she sued the company that released the tape, but on the heels of Paris’s star-making sex tape, as her own grew even more popular, nobody believed that Kim wasn’t in on it. What a trauma that must have been for her, yet all I remember anyone feeling was the giddiness of the argument over whether she had always wanted to be seen like that, the excitement of pausing the video to try to pinpoint falseness or intentionality, a simultaneous lust, distrust, slight pity, fascination.

  The sex tape itself is long and mostly boring. Kim and Ray J are on vacation, and they film each other by the pool, and then lying on an overpillowed bed in complementary terry-cloth robes. Ray J holds the camera while they kiss; his tongue is prominent in the shot. He sort of laps at her. His eyes are wide open the whole time, and at a certain point Kim opens hers as she’s breathing between tongue lappings. You can see her see herself, I assume in the little camera screen that’s turned back at them. There’s nervousness in her eyes, what I always took to be a brief instinct to resist the recording, or at least feign resistance, but there’s also the thrill of how she looks, the way her lips are moving as she kisses back, the way the camera angle stretches down along her neck to her clavicle, to the swell of her breasts barely held in rigid, tannish lingerie.

  Later she’s on her stomach and he’s on top of her, and she looks back, and again, there are her eyes on any of us who might ever watch. The bed is noisy, and over that noise her voice rises, the nasal and perpetually adolescent whine that would soon become famous, hated, parodied: Oh shit, baby, I’m gonna come, I’m gonna come, I’m coming.

  * * *

  —

  Sometimes I wonder if my students would feel differently about Kim if they’d met her at the start of everything she would become. It’s easy to write off those who have already achieved notoriety, without seeing how they made themselves, without that generating narrative of striving, however superficial the impetus to strive may have been. It’s easy to pretend, then, that there isn’t any narrative at all.

  When I watched Kim’s sex tape, there were already ads running for the first season of Keeping Up with the Kardashians. I watched the premiere episode of that show, like millions of others, with the sound of her narrating her own orgasm fresh in my mind, and I remember thinking of that over the credits, as cutesy whistle music played and her family assembled. Kim entered last, the joke being that she wanted all the attention. She stood in front of her siblings and vamped for the camera. And then, as they complained about her screen hogging, her already recognizable voice intoned: Jealous?

  She was beginning a story about reinvention and ambition that has played out for more than a decade. I remember watching and thinking I could feel her testing what exposure is like, the rush and weight and danger of being looked at and just how watchable she could be, as she navigated herself from stolen intimacies to constant self-branding, committed to showing every benign and shameful and pained detail along the way.

  The best way I can think to describe Kim’s behavior on-screen is empowered desperation, which I guess is another way of saying ambition all over again. She vacillates between fearlessness and self-deprecation, an amateurism both performed and authentic, that somehow still exists even though she is so far from being an amateur. Now when her origins (the origins of her public self) are mentioned, the video is often the final point made in an argument against her cultural value that usually includes some euphemism for the word whore. It’s an argument that hinges on her being the kind of girl who is willing to do anything, an argument that was maybe never true but that has always made it hard to look away from her.

  I like to wallow in the exhausting triumph of her continued watchability. How we’ve been there from the very beginning, and seen how she has wrangled control of her narrative, kept it pulsing with change. I like to trace the sheer prolificacy of how many selves she is willing to put in front of us—the budding diva, the harsh sister doling out tough love, the mom, the spoiled rich kid, the pragmatic richer adult, the weeper, the hard-ass, the mogul, the ditzy, the cold, the naked, the briefly sweet, the unexpectedly prudish, the controlling, the exposed, the protective wife, the muse. I am different now than when I first watched her. You are, too, and that’s part of the watching. I want different things from my life, I want to be seen differently, and so there’s pleasure to be found in watching her make those same demands of millions of people. How many years has she been demanding that we follow her, shifting, beckoning to us, saying, I am this now?

  In 1990, in his essay “E Unib
us Pluram,” David Foster Wallace wrote: Television, from the surface on down, is about desire. At the time he was right, and in many ways he still is, but his TV = desire equation also seems pretty quaint now—bright lights making the lonely watcher want to buy, a one-way relationship. Now there’s Kim, who not only makes us desire but shows us her own; her desire is the mechanism, the show, the connection, the mirror. Her desire is more interesting than the desire a watcher might feel for her or her life; she seems always to have known that.

  Last Saturday you and I watched the episode where Kim sees yet another fertility doctor because she wants a second kid with Kanye, and this is one desire that seems increasingly out of reach. It was a quiet, flannelly afternoon. We’d just eaten grapefruits with those little serrated spoons we got from the wedding registry.

  Kim’s mother/manager (momager, in the contemporary professional vernacular) often accompanies her in doctor scenes, but in this one she’s alone. She’s wearing heavy makeup. She’s newly blonde, in a simple T-shirt, trying on a weirdly Waspy maternal identity. As expected, things get difficult. The doctor drones on about the upcoming challenges, the bad percentages, and the camera settles on Kim’s face as she twitches with nervous anger. She scratches her arm, then her back. In a close-up, we look to her makeup for some satisfying streaking, but there are no tears, just the effort against them, which feels more successfully emotional.