by Lucas Mann
I’m so over it, she says slowly. Like, I’m exhausted.
She doesn’t look at the doctor or the camera or the floor; she seems to look at nothing. We don’t exactly pity her or understand her, but her clenched face, the way she is referencing quiet dismay, so far from the former desires of a contentedly childless adulthood that we have spent a decade watching (and living)—it’s the welcoming expanse of the narrative that compels us. Her life, as ridiculous as it is, has moved the way ours do. Kind of. And it’s not even fair to call her life ridiculous—it’s a life.
Thirty seconds of situationally appropriate emotion, easy heartstring tugging, are anchored and bolstered by the many scenes of the many versions of herself that she’s made indelible in our minds. She is in the middle of performing a whole life; I guess that’s the best way to say it. A long, inevitable arc riddled with reinvention, and self-celebration and disappointment and reinvention again.
Someday she’ll die, and I want to see it. I don’t mean that as an insult.
* * *
—
For most of our lives together, anxiety woke me up early, while you slept in. When we were visiting family or friends were staying with us, I would spend hours with them in the morning talking but also listening for the sounds of you moving behind a closed door or up a flight of stairs. This could be stressful, as though I had to answer for why you were asleep, even though the only answer for why anyone is ever asleep is because they are. But I also felt a powerful closeness as I tiptoed in to wake you gently, like I was the translator between you and the morning, and I saw the first moment of so many of your days. You slept so heavily and your body radiated heat, and finally you’d blink up at me. We shared that.
Now you get up early for work, and I wake to the sound of you dressing or sighing as you scroll through e-mail. Sometimes you have to gently wake me, tapping your fingertips on my shoulder the way I once did for you. We both say that we can’t believe how I slept in, that you’re the one waking me, but it’s been like this for more than a year. I don’t know when the change will become unmentioned, then forgotten. I love opening my eyes now to you in purposeful movement, glancing at me in passing, but I also feel that something has been lost.
And lately I’ve been trying to remember the way you used to dance—the swift, graceful parabola of your hips, the sweat in your hair and on your shoulders, which are always bare in these memories. There was a time when you danced often, or it felt like it. You’d be at a place before I got there, and I’d walk in to the sight of you moving, cherish the moments before you caught my eyes.
You still dance, it’s still beautiful, and I still watch you, though more often now you get me to join, and then have to edit yourself into some sync with my woodenness. You think I’m reluctant out of embarrassment, but it’s more like nostalgia for what existed before my ubiquity caused a change in movement. When we dance, I’m buoyed despite myself, and I watch one strand of hair on your shoulder, and your best tattoo as you spin; it’s a repeated deviation in the way we most often move together, a comforting eroticism.
But when I have to acknowledge the slight change, it becomes another little loss to mourn; not even a loss, really, just a near-imperceptible shift. Something lived and observed is gone; there’s no concrete image of it, just the feeling of progress and absence.
4
[REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:
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The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Season 1, Episode 1: NeNe Leakes introduces herself: If you just ask anybody about me, pssh, NeNe, she’s real fun.
She says this alone, after we’ve pulled out of the action. Her intro segment begins with a lot of really fast cuts of party shots—NeNe in a cocktail dress, hollering hello, hugging, waving, champagne poured until it spills, a brown hand with an enormous, multidiamond ring holding a Cosmopolitan, a white Rolls-Royce outside a castle-size McMansion. In the midst of the glamour montage, the image of NeNe alone is jarring. For just a second, everyone else is gone, and so are the cars, the cocktails, the jeweled hands entwining. Suddenly, NeNe is describing herself as this worldly party girl from a corner of her suburban kitchen, not particularly well lit, almost overwhelmingly familiar.
Her empty kitchen counter looks like the nicest option among the model kitchens set up in every store we went to when furnishing our starter home. The kind you can just point to and transpose into your house if that’s the budget you’re carrying. We weren’t carrying that budget, but we made a point of saying we didn’t want those antiseptic model kitchens anyway, and whisper-giggled at the people running their hands over the blandly shiny, dark granite counters, oohing at the clear glass cabinet doors. So generic, we told each other. All this money to look like your moneyed neighbor. We promised ourselves we would find reclaimed beach wood for the counters, an old ship light for a chandelier. And in the end, when none of that happened and we had to cash in a lot of Lowe’s gift cards and fight our way through the IKEA parking lot, we still told each other that we weren’t like the other young couples around us, who behaved so similarly—Ask anyone; we’re fun.
As she introduces herself, NeNe has some candles lit behind her, shining off the countertop. The blinds are open, but nothing is visible in the window except the reflection of the dimly lit room. She sits on a stool in a gray cotton top, in a pose meant to suggest she’s engaged in a casual conversation. She talks about money and access, about the Atlanta community of black opulence that has welcomed her (once a small-town nobody), that she shines in.
As she talks, we dip in and out of the glamour montage. Whenever the shot returns to NeNe alone, she looks unsettled, straining, apart, somehow, from the words she speaks and the scrolling clips of her life. She doesn’t look like she feels particularly fun. Over the course of the episode she is repeatedly pained, or at least never at ease, more powerfully so because she refuses to acknowledge it.
We meet her husband through more quick cuts of a dinner scene—she orders mashed potatoes and bread for sides, and then he says quietly, No bread, and she cancels both orders of carbs and he nods, says, Wonderful. Then cut back to NeNe in her model kitchen, holding up her wedding ring—Ten years of love, honey. Nothing but love and hard work.
We’re introduced to her son at his birthday party. NeNe stands with a plastic smile on, eyeing the camera as the boy screams that candle wax is getting on his cake—Mom! Oh my God! Then she stands silent as her husband presents the boy with a thousand-dollar check “toward your first investment,” and the crowd applauds father and son. Then another cut back to NeNe in her kitchen, nodding extravehemently—Gregg has definitely provided a good life for me and the kids.
It’s instantly obvious that NeNe is the most interesting, most gifted performer among the housewives. We could tell in real time, when we first met her—there was, well, something voraciously watchable about her. There still is. As I rewatch, I think the hook lies in her subtext, the gap between the life we’re shown in montage and the life NeNe narrates from her kitchen, NeNe’s resolute navigation of that gap, an unwillingness to be static or silent.
Throughout the episode, as she drives and mothers and gets made up and bullshits with friends, she is talking herself into our lives. No matter how bland the action, she voices herself toward viv
id, unspecified dominance, a constant statement of her special self that also feels so recognizable—I think of De Niro in Raging Bull as he thumps his chest and says he’s the boss. Pressure mounts.
At the end of the episode, NeNe arrives at a frenemy’s party late, so as to create buzz. She’s informed that she’s not on the guest list. It’s a simple plot construction—anticipation, anticipation, anticipation, then the cringey, satisfying twist. Really, nothing has happened other than the only thing that made sense. But it’s NeNe and her rage that make the scene compelling, standing outside this giant home that looks like her own, barred from the scene inside. It’s her face, as she relents and leaves. In the last shot of the episode she stands in the cold on the street, speaking with an operatic fury, both hopeless and forceful—There’s no forgiveness, she tells us.
* * *
—
In Camera Lucida, Barthes coined the term punctum when trying to articulate the unintended (or maybe subconscious) personal bit of meaning that moves him in any photograph. The punctum is that stabbing sensation, that little unexpected detail that cuts deep, the wound—this element which rises from the scene, shoots out of it like an arrow, and pierces me.
When I first learned the term, it felt like the only thing that ever needed to be said, like a secret code I’d been given, along the lines of agency in my sophomore year of college. Such is the way—you learn that a word was oversaturated before you ever got to it, and then you have to relove it without the motivation of feeling unique. I didn’t even come to punctum through Barthes; I came to it through Wayne Koestenbaum quoting Barthes in a master class in grad school. Koestenbaum preached punctum, and wrote about it often; a whole book, even, on every photograph taken of Jackie O. For him she was the punctum, the pain, the enigma: No matter how incongruous the setting around her—the photograph always captured this mystery.
Koestenbaum encouraged us fledgling writers to facilitate the punctum, and to look for it as readers of any text—that naked, subjective bit of hurt, the detail you can’t help but notice, so hard to understand. It was this fault line that mattered more than anything: the place you had to find to show what makes you look, and what makes you writhe a little as you look.
The conversation exploded as we all tried to impress him with our punctum discoveries. It was, like so many writing classes, a taste contest, our observations standing in for ourselves. I mostly stayed quiet (a rarity) because all I could think of was NeNe—the furious force with which she speaks words that are meant to be cheerful; the backdrop that she advertises over the underlying anxiety that it’s never enough; the way her posture, her face, her whole person convey this swirling, potent contradiction every time the camera reaches for her. It felt cheap to think of her then, one of those antipretentious stances that come back around to being extrapretentious. I’m wary of that now, too, still thinking about NeNe, finally writing about her—her magnetism doesn’t need academic jargon to be validated. But it doesn’t feel academic now; it’s autobiographical. She’s been in my life, and I still lean close to watch her, and when I first heard the word, I understood its meaning best when she embodied it.
When I left the master class, I returned home to you. We drifted back to the TV and watched NeNe (I think it was season 3 then, the divorce season), and there was that feeling. The shot, the stab—nothing that we could articulate, just simmering pleasurable tension that we shared, or it felt like we did.
She is repeatedly, glamorously wounded; refusing to wallow, but there are the wounds peeking out. Why look at anyone if not to see their wounds? To see their wounds and feel your own?
* * *
—
My father makes fun of what we watch. I mean, everyone we know makes fun of what we watch, but my father especially. My father’s television watching is restricted to an obscene amount of Yankees games, and also Jets games on winter Sundays. Let’s leave, for now, the narrative investment he makes in these real people performing in contrived scenarios, celebrities due to a wholly unnecessary skill set. Let’s leave, for now, the fact that the Yankees arbitrarily don’t allow their players to wear beards because that is not “the Yankee way,” and that my father appreciates the purity of this aesthetic. The hours pass, the action trundles, sometimes there is a surprise, and he enjoys it.
He watched the first reality show, he told me once, but hasn’t returned to the genre since. An American Family debuted on PBS in 1973, and followed an upwardly mobile white American family in California. My father was the upwardly mobile patriarch of a splintering American family in New York. He and his were the target demographic; PBS was betting that viewers might be interested in seeing a probing investigation into a reflection of something like themselves.
The family watched together, on the couch. My father remembers one scene the most, the one everyone remembers, when the beginnings of a divorce played out in front of ten million strangers, during the first generation when it felt like divorce was a step that anyone could take. He remembers, specifically, the way the husband looked at his wife in the Mexican restaurant after she asked him to leave. His slight sneer, the flat rage in his voice when he said, What’s your problem? How viciousness exploded from cluelessness, and how pure a moment it was because he really had no idea; he really hadn’t been paying attention at all.
I’ve begun to think that the punctum is where a person sees himself. In my father’s case, this seems obvious—the way his race and age and income bracket matched up with those of a man enscreened. But I don’t think the punctum is chained to mere obvious demographic relatability. It moves beyond that, expansive in what images it might encompass, yet that sensation, the stab of sudden, overwhelming recognition, has to be personal—what you see or maybe don’t want to see in yourself, hidden in the image of another. Which is why it’s such a risk to be moved by any detail, the same way it’s a risk to love anyone: It’s a public declaration of where you manifest who you are.
My father watched the unthinking expression on an angry stranger’s face, oblivious to the ways that he could hurt people, confusion and cruelty blending. There was a stirring in the space between himself and the image. Forty years later that interaction has remained indelible; he can still see it, feel it. Now that he no longer watches such petty, public, personal pain, it means that it no longer implicates him, which I think is a common motivation among those who don’t engage with reality shows—if you ignore it, then no part of you can be reflected in it. When he sees me watching, I know the question he wants to ask me, one he never seems comfortable enough to fully voice: You see yourself in that?
* * *
—
On The Real World, I’ve seen a man come out as HIV positive; then I saw that man marry, and I saw the hollow contours of his face as his illness worsened. I’ve seen a man call another man a faggot, a man call another man a nigger, many men call many women a bitch. I’ve seen a man rip a barely clothed woman’s blanket off her, and the resulting house meeting to discuss why that type of menace is unacceptable. I’ve seen a sweating, weeping meathead confess to a cocaine relapse, begging his housemates for forgiveness.
I like to think, and have said out loud, drunkenly, confidently, that the show has taught me about difficult stuff, the kind of stuff that human adults need at least a cursory knowledge of. That I have returned to it for moral and educational reasons. This is a pretty generous reading of the relationship. What I remember best, and the scenes that were featured prominently in my favorite seasons, are night-vision moments either right before or right after sex, occasionally during. Moments of infused extraintimacy when the people involved actually seemed to think, or at least tried to behave as if they thought, that no one was watching, even as their words and gestures were so conscious, even labored. That impossibility was part of the thrill, the thought of My God, I can’t believe they’re saying this when they know I’m right here, and then the thought that maybe they’
re only reaching for those words because they know there’s an audience. And then the inevitable question of whether I could ever bring myself to do the same. Or whether I might sound like that in stolen moments if anyone cared to listen.
Somehow, amid the predictable booze-fueled preening, the slurred come-ons, limbs contorting sheets, there was accidental tenderness. I was watching and rewatching the ways that people try to express the desire for contact, or the desire to be wanted, or the desire to be watched; bodies rushing together, then apart, arrogance and fear and ecstasy interwoven. For a quarter of a century that appeal was repeated, amplified, as each successive cast knew more of what they were getting into and still had to negotiate what they would show and how they might be seen. I watched alone for many years, and then for many years next to you, and that tension built through each new season. Awareness could never erase the awkwardness of the body; that never failed to comfort me.
In the first episode of the Las Vegas season, every cast member gets drunk and piles into a small Jacuzzi because they are young and beautiful and they’ve been selected to be in a place that has a Jacuzzi in it. For a moment, after getting themselves in position, so close, so exposed, they all look around like they’re not sure what to do. They are noticeably tense still with the cameras pushing in on them, although a couple of them are taking pictures of the action, as though they need to make sure it isn’t forgotten, which is really cute and adds a sense of genuineness, or at least naïveté.
In this lull, the viewer can feel the anticipation of what will be half a year of exposure, the excitement of standing on the brink of something. Then a threesome breaks out—not fully, but we see two women and one man begin to kiss and rub soapy water on one another while their new housemates stare and giggle nervously and make semishocked noises. The passion ends quickly, furtively. It’s like they wanted to see if they could do it.
