by Lucas Mann
In the literary world, there’s a paper trail for sneering at this kind of personal immediacy. In The New York Times Book Review, all the way back in 1987, William Gass tried to explain what he saw as the fast-eroding merit of literary writing, reading his way through the history of American letters.
As I advanced toward the present, he wrote, the number of women writers increased, as did the number of fictions in the first person and tales in the present tense. In a single sentence, the first person present (“Look at me now!”) was tied to the perspective of women. In the same essay, Gass railed: Adolescents consume more of their psyches than sodas, and more local feelings than junk food….Is no indulgence denied them?
As Laura Miller and Alexander Chee both pointed out decades later, Gass connects the feminine perspective to a lack of craftsmanship and reflection, then a sense of immaturity, all of which reeks of self-indulgence. Then all that is equated with the worst kind of consumption: empty calories. He pines for great literature, an old standard of bravery and curiosity, writing interested in expressing more than a self as shallow as a saucer.
This screed came a decade before the memoir boom, but I think it strikes the same derisive tone that would pop up in those critiques: a performed horror at self-indulgence, shallowness. To me, it also reads like a modern stock argument against the Kardashians.
“Are you saying that you think your work is dismissed?” Weber asks me. “Is that the issue here?”
I say no, but probably yes. That’s part of it. I’m worried that I see my every exploit or perceived hurt, or even the hurt I perpetrated, as important, for the mere reason that it has happened to me. It all feels so monumental—I tell it and I tell it and I tell it. I’m indignant that such an artistic gesture can be seen as lesser. I want to believe that the domestic or day-to-day can have value simply for being shown scrolling by, performed well, intensely. And I want to think that’s a moral stance, a democratic one. But I’m not sure. It’s just my part in the scramble for whose story is allowed to hold weight and whose life is seen as frivolous, filler.
Weber argues that ideas of seriousness, artfulness, shouldn’t matter; that those are projections of a flawed, biased system of cultural critique. And I think she’s right. But it’s easy to say that I think she’s right. Then it becomes a conversation about my taste, what I find in these shows of lives that are often dismissed; a conversation about the transformative power of the writer’s consideration, and, in my case, the cliché of the self-serious male writer thinking and brooding and expecting the benefit of the doubt—just the version that claims to eschew seriousness.
At an artist’s residency once, a composer complained to me that all residencies were being overrun by the cult of middle-aged-lady memoirists crying about themselves. I said that I wrote a memoir, and he assured me, No, come on, man, you know what I mean, and as much as I felt angry, I felt grateful to be safe from the critique.
In truth I can’t conceive of being scrutinized the way so many I admire or claim kinship with are scrutinized. I can say I admire the act of exposure, the act of unrepentant autobiography (I do admire it! More than anything, maybe!), but that admiration, or attempted solidarity, brings so little risk. It’s like when I convince myself that we look at our bodies the same way, with the same pressure, as though growing up a fat boy was the same as growing up a girl, just because I recognize the general feeling. What starts as something like appreciation or desired identification begins to blur toward appropriation—again: all rush, no risk.
* * *
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Remember that NeNe Leakes line I always used to say? It was from early on in the show, the second or third season maybe. It was a throwaway line, or at least it was framed that way. NeNe walked into a restaurant to have lunch with her then-friend Kim, who was waiting with the cameras, and as she strolled into the shot, NeNe waved and called out, Woooh, it’s hot as fish grease out this motherfucker! Then she guffawed at herself, hugged her friend, sat down, let the scene commence.
I don’t know what it is exactly that I enjoyed so much—her volume? The specificity of fish grease, that expertise with types of greases and their heats? The fact that it all came so offhand? It felt like I had caught some sliver of realness in whatever contrivance the producers had set up for the scene. Like she was asserting NeNe, and I had the taste to appreciate it. I wasn’t seduced by the bickering or the real-estate talk. I was there for authenticity, NeNe’s voice and style—a glimpse of swaggering, New South black opulence, a world so far away from my own that I wanted to be allowed to see and interpret confidently.
I should admit that this repeated impression comes in a lineage of the many ways that I’ve obsessed about watching and—first alone, furtive, then with you, safe—parroting versions of blackness.
So many anecdotes: leaning against chain-link at street basketball games, too afraid to play but letting my lips move silently around the shit-talk spoken by players I never spoke to. Or when I made my mother buy me N.W.A.’s Greatest Hits and played the album on repeat in my bedroom, scowling in the mirror the way they scowled on the album cover, rapping every word, unable to contain a shiver and a grin when I hit that word.
It goes back further: she saved my assignments from first grade, when I was learning how to write. Top of the pile, on green construction paper, answering the question, “What would my name be if I could choose it?” I had scrawled: “Jamaal.”
I went through a very strange Richard Wright phase as an eleven-year-old, starting with Black Boy, then moving on to his short stories. I remember weeping on a bus at one story that ended with an African man who’d been quasi-adopted by a white couple, saying, Massa, you God, before murdering the adoptive father, thinking he would, like Christ, return. I didn’t understand the humor or subversion of the story (it was, I know now, satire); I saw only beauty, helplessness—a character that I wasn’t obligated to understand but that I could admire, fear a little, pity. When I wanted to feel sad, a weightier, more legitimate sadness than what I was already feeling, I said that character’s words and let myself cry over them.
You know all these stories because I told you all these stories—they came early, probably right on the heels of the red vacuum cleaner, the methadone clinic next door. It was all part of my origin story, being that predictably shameful kind of white boy, but it couldn’t have been that shameful if I told you about it all, replayed the performances for comedic or dramatic effect. You smiled, or we laughed together, or you told me I wasn’t as bad as memory suggested. I did the same for you, when the opportunity arose. So much of how I understand closeness is the reveal of what we formerly said and did alone, and then the creeping of a once-solitary language into collective language that is made up of so many voices and phrases and sensibilities that are not our own, that we look at and listen to together.
Remember the way I’d say that NeNe line? The way I’d walk into the room on a summer afternoon, push my hips out to one side, snap my fingers (so uncreative), and then holler my best impression of what a black woman from Atlanta might sound like, which is another way to say my best impression of NeNe?
We still do the same shit, but with a new line: Fix it, Jesus, the trademark of NeNe’s castmate Phaedra Parks: lawyer, mortician, felon’s wife, pastor’s daughter, self-proclaimed Southern belle. She says it almost earnestly, but with a grin—whenever anything is wrong or untoward, everyone knows what Phaedra’s going to say. You’ve mulled over using it as a hashtag on Instagram: capture a shot of something literally broken, then #fixitjesus. It’s always a funny idea. And I love when you work it into conversation, weary from work, sighing as you take your shoes off and plop down, commenting from the couch that you get these nagging headaches but still can’t bring yourself to drink enough water: Fix it, Jesus.
I’ve debated getting you a Phaedra Parks T-shirt as a present: an uncomfortably giant-lipped cartoon rendering of her
face with Fix it, Jesus written below, but then I think about us walking down the street of our fast-gentrifying neighborhood, you adorned with a cartoon image of a black woman across your breasts, and I hold off. We dance around at the borders of our own self-awareness, grinning to each other about that line we know we shouldn’t toe.
It’s tempting to see all this as only intimacy, to revel in these ways that we speak and behave that we wouldn’t show outside the walls of our little home. We are sharing something, after all. It’s harder to acknowledge that this interpersonal sweetness is built on a sort of unrepentant vampirism, a series of little joys extracted from strangers that we mutually appreciate or mutually gawk at—how uncomfortable to consider parsing the difference between those two words. Blackness, queerness, Southernness, Jerseyness, devout religiousness. We love them all, or “love” is the word we put on whatever it is that we really feel because love is participatory and hard to argue with.
We catch the snippets of these identities strategically performed on-screen, and then we try them on for each other. What the performers shout, we take and whisper, and that language becomes part of our story. We glance at each other and smile because we know we shouldn’t be doing it, but we’re doing it again—our little intimate transgression, a private language that was never ours.
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The thrill of the confessional form has never faded for me—both my own confession and the witnessing of whatever someone else wants to offer up. Augustine, Montaigne, Rousseau, De Quincey, Whitman, Ginsberg, Plath, Sexton. There’s something lively in the confessional voice, so swaggering in its willingness to tell you, even as it’s supposed to remain somber and contrite. And for all the blood left on the page, the blood that we read for, there’s so much left out, still hidden. It’s the incompleteness of the show of confession that is so appealing. The ongoingness. There will never be enough time or space to confess everything; you will never properly atone. It will always be a mode both surrendering and combative. The material is limitless.
But nobody wants to be reliant on his own wrongs, the inevitability of their recurrence and the potency of their retelling. What’s a greater tradition among confessional poets than asserting that their work has been mistakenly categorized as confessional? And here’s Meghan Daum bristling at the idea of her personal essays being confessional: I don’t confess in my work, because to me that implies that you’re dumping all your guilt and sins on the page and asking the reader to forgive you. Confessions are not processed or analyzed; they’re told in a moment of desperation.
Desperation, yes, but the pleasurable kind—like popping a zit when it’s grown too big, too painful, then wallowing in the relief of pus. What I’m saying is I don’t think she gives enough credit to these moments of desperation. As though desperation is only a lack of control. As though on-your-knees begging is only a last resort, never a style, or a joy, or an invitation, or a negotiation.
Judith Butler addresses the appeal of confession with this barrage: Is it a deed, a desire, an anxiety, and abiding guilt for which the confessional form serves as a balm?
A confession can be all of these, all at once, as it shifts and winks, gains momentum. Butler is writing specifically about sexual, bodily confession, but I think that tension permeates across the form, the twin intimate transgressions of the action, then the voicing of it. She writes that the confession becomes its own action, related to the act being confessed but distinct, an experience of its own, an experience of release but also with a new tension: pitiful, powerful, hostile, always incomplete.
Lately I can’t stand a narrator who isn’t confessing to something. I think that if it doesn’t feel, even just for a moment, like a secret joy or burden to unload, then why say it? Desperation is more comfortable than reason, a more inexhaustible resource. Sometimes I let myself think that every action is excusable or interesting or even valuable, as long as you’re willing to confess. Let it linger, let it squirm, and it’s beautiful. And I know that’s not right, but the seduction is real. What is being confessed fades, as the act of confession swallows me. It feels like intimacy, which is the whole point.
* * *
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Reality TV is the first narrative medium I can think of that isn’t merely open to confession but demands it. And the act must be repeatable. The one thing a performer must do is live publicly and comment back on that living with some show of revealing what should be hidden, being moved by it, then repeating the process.
The confession is the most important part of the performance, even (or especially) when the performer feels compelled to resist the act. There are even two distinct types of confession—the OTF (on-the-fly) shot and the formal interview. The formal sets the performer down days later to reflect on what they did; the OTF seeks them out just moments after the action and asks, before the sweat or tears have even dried, What have you done? The answer is always impassioned, always incomplete. Always hedging. Often annoyed. And so the tension continues—how many times can one be forced to see one’s self and still not atone for anything?
As reality narratives have matured and solidified, a characterization of that development has been the shortening of every action scene. I’ve been concentrating on this of late, trying to find a scene where the audience is allowed to linger for more than a minute. Impossible. Instead, a two-second pause passes for a linger; all is compressed, heightened, so a single gesture or glance carries weight. When critics bemoan the formulaic nature of reality shows, the surfacey predictability of the narrative movement, I think they’re referring to this.
The scissors cutting through the action, and also the glue to the story line, is the confessional scene. The comment is so much more important than the action being commented on. It’s become impossible to watch any significant moment of action without stepping out of the action at least once, usually anywhere between two and ten times, to see a character prodded into accounting for her own behavior, hoping the account is sympathetic or at least compelling. Everything they do is just fodder for what they might have to answer for. And so each response is an act of desperation, the desperation of being sat down and told to see yourself, to assess.
There’s rarely full contrition. There’s self-defense, waffling, deflection, exaggeration. There is, amazingly, the attempt to say that what was filmed didn’t really happen. Atonement glints through, fleeting, incomplete. It is confession at its most desperate, the strong-armed and endless kind, and as such the confessors all bristle and shrug and snap back. Usually it’s these moments that grip us and, in turn, make us the kind of audience members we don’t like to see ourselves as.
Just own it! we whisper at the TV.
Every fucking time, we say, shaking our heads. Every fucking time, it’s the same thing with her.
I remember laughing once as you addressed the person on-screen the way you have so often addressed me when there’s nothing left to say: Cut the shit; for once, cut the shit.
* * *
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Ramona Singer (The Real Housewives of New York, Season 4): I’m sorry, I’d like to kick the shit out of her, okay?
Phaedra Parks (The Real Housewives of Atlanta, Season 5): Me? What did I do wrong? Really. You tell me.
Teresa Giudice (The Real Housewives of New Jersey, Season 2): There’s a saying: Don’t throw stones, or whatever.
Shannon Beador (The Real Housewives of Orange County, Season 8): I’m just here for one reason and one reason only; can we get to my issue?
The producers’ questions are rarely left in, but their implied power is felt in each answer. I imagine them always beginning with, Don’t you think…? Or, Isn’t it time to…? The invitation, the prodding, is there offscreen, forcing the response.
It’s a mistake to think that such moments are simply a reflection of badness or shallowness or, worse, unaware stupidity. Their coarseness, their absolu
te refusal to perform the kind of humanity that makes me feel good about humanity, is what keeps me watching. Truth shimmers within every one of these semiconfessions, even if the performer is outright lying—truth within their consistency, their concern for self-preservation and self-promotion, their confusion, their anger. We return for so many seasons to see if these moments of reflection lead to better, more sympathetic moments of reflection, and they never do. The glib are glib, the cruel cruel, the angry perpetually waiting to burst. Every word is a justification, a negotiation, a plea to be seen as something better, and most of the time that’s the way I feel when I worry that I can’t, won’t, let myself evolve. Is there ever a moment of reflection that isn’t at least a little bit disappointing?
7
[REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:
I feel I would be great for this because of many reasons. I’m a full time student majoring in psychology. I’m very into to the mind, behavior, mental issues, cause and effect. I’m also a club host for a very popular night club; in which I’m so different. I’m a construction worker. Most of all I have major commitment issues in which I’m very aware of in can’t change. I have never dated just one female no matter if I was with one for years I still had other girlfriends whom I dated thru out that same year. This cause me a lot of money due to crazy drama; I mean CRAZY DRAMA. From my school to work place but they always stay. O yea I’m a lesbian. My parents are deep in the church which is another issue. My mom hold on wishing and praying I will get delivered. I just feel I got a lot to offer situations some can learn from and be so interested in. It’s so many parts of me and my life, crazy part is I realize my issues, understand them, know where they come from and yet i refuse to do something about them….One I’m sure I will but now I jus want to live learn n have so much fun
