Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  “Khloé, start singing,” Kourtney said, and everyone laughed in that exact way that people laugh when there’s nothing of them in the punch line. And then there was Rob at the edge of the shot. Rob leaning away but letting his eyes turn back to his sisters, as though waiting for one of them to notice, hiding, exposed.

  * * *

  —

  I thought of Rob when we got our engagement photos. Why, I’m not sure—maybe the anxious pleasure of having to pose myself; maybe a weird feeling of satisfaction, like I’d progressed past him, this world-famous multimillionaire I’d never met. First I tried to protest our getting the photos at all, but they came complimentary with our wedding package, you said, and the photographer pointed out that they presented a chance for us to begin to tell the story, our story.

  I watched you lay my outfits on the bed. I booked a last-minute salon appointment just for a beard trim—I wanted to be a bearded man, not an unshaven one; you smiled and said you understood perfectly what that meant. Then you stood in front of the TV in your underwear, holding potential dresses over your body, one in each hand, back and forth, asking me to decide, with Say Yes to the Dress playing on the screen behind you. I told you that you were beautiful, effortlessly. I emphasized the effortlessness because it felt kind to do so, but that was condescending and not the point. We were going to put in a lot of effort. And it was going to be effort made to appear seamless, effort designed to show us as we would like everyone to believe we are when no one is looking.

  I flipped pancakes in one picture. We read on the couch together in another. You read Plath and I read Foster Wallace, two writers who offed themselves, of course, which meant that we were winking at the whole situation, a very important aspect of us to show. We asked the photographer to make sure he got the book covers in focus, and he didn’t understand why, and we giggled—typical; no one gets it.

  We walked around the neighborhood we’d just moved to, held hands on the stoops of brightly painted old Victorians, kissed in front of coarse brick walls covered with graffiti messages that weren’t meant for us. We stopped at the coffee shop that we always stopped at, and as neighbors ate their hangover scones they watched the photographer crouch to the ground for new angles, stalk in slow circles around our outdoor table while we pretended to talk to each other. The dog weaved between our legs and looked at the camera when we told her to.

  We ended up with a zip drive of 460 photographs, a two-hour narrative in which we moved between staring deeply at each other and playfully at the camera. You put the best seventy-eight shots into a Facebook album titled, “Hey, it came with the package,” which I thought was a nice, diffusing touch.

  We’d scrolled through together to pare down the material. No. No. No. No. You look good but I look old. I have murderer eyes in this one; do my eyes always look like that? Jesus, is that really my face? This one is okay.

  We read all the comments people made on all the photos, and when they began to dwindle after a few days, the throbbing disappointment settled in. It’s too easy to say we’d first felt validation, so we were disappointed when the validation went away. More that every image held so many implications, every overproduced scene a narrative of implied change, forward momentum toward a life that might be enviable, that appeared permanent. The kitchen where I made banana pancakes was nicer than any kitchen we’d ever had. And we looked good, newly wrinkling in a not-yet-weathered way. And we were dog owners, which meant we were successfully keeping something alive. And the way we held each other on the couch in that one picture, so different from Rob Kardashian on his mother’s couch, tense and alone—our comfort together, staged and captured, the care displayed back to us. How nice to be loved the way that love looked, to be the people that those people there in the photos appeared to be.

  9

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  I grew up an athlete playing all sports. when I graduated high school I missed competing so I played softball golf and pool I took to pool cuz it it was all year round and fairly cheap to play. I practiced my heart out and in 2010 I won the Pennsylvania state championships took 2nd 2011 I moved into semi pro but I was then hit with a devorce my life changed dramaticly I ended up traveling for work climbing towers for AT&T I did that for 3 years shooting pool very little but now I’m back in Pennsylvania and my dream is to return to playing championship pool and playing in the pro circuit thank you

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  The second season of My Big Fat Fabulous Life was starting last night, so there was a marathon of the first season to bring us up to speed. It was unnecessary, but we watched anyway.

  I’ll admit that I was skeptical when you started watching MBFFL. I pretend to distrust feel-good realities, and I do get bored with their constant victories, but something about this show captivated me almost instantly—its star, who owned the predictable narrative parameters in which she worked, who seemed a near virtuoso at inhabiting herself.

  Whitney Thore is morbidly (though I suppose she’d quibble with this adverb) obese, due (at least in part) to a weird gland thing called polycystic ovarian syndrome. The disease is the engine for the show. She would not have a show if she hadn’t gained 200 pounds one year in college, and if she wasn’t now fluctuating between 375 and 400 pounds, and if she hadn’t posted a wildly successful YouTube video of herself dancing-while-obese. Either the name of her disease or her exact weight is brought up every episode. During her confessionals, the invisible producer feels very present, and I cannot help but imagine a steady prodding—Remind them what’s wrong with you after the commercial break. For a new viewer, give them a number to work with. Call yourself fat; show them you’re okay with it.

  That’s really the whole dramatic tension of the show: Can she love herself and try to change herself all at once? She faces the camera, over and over, and speaks directly to the ways that her body is perfectly lovable; she moves with cheerful, unrestrained grace, yet the show leads with “big, fat” before ever throwing in “fabulous,” and when we watch, there’s always the tension of whether we might see any crack in her cheerful facade. Every smile seems to be an act of will, not because it seems hard or unnatural for Whitney to be happy, but because she steers that emotion safely through the constant public reminder of shame and danger. The cliffhanger at the end of season 1 was: Will Whitney get diabetes? The whole last episode draws out the sustained story of that concern, carrying us into season 2.

  The show is intentionally unremarkable in almost all aspects beyond the one malignant physical detail. I suppose that’s in the service of normalizing, or near-normalizing, creating that sense that she’s totally regular, except…Whitney is thirty-one, still trying to figure stuff out. She’s saving money living with her parents in Greensboro, North Carolina, which seems both small and big, a perfectly adequate place to live. Her parents are good people who love her. Her friends are good people, and one, a guy named Buddy, could maybe be more than a friend. Whitney’s still trying to navigate the implications of that relationship. We lean closer to each other whenever we get to watch them flirt.

  Scenes and episodes tend to run together in my mind: Buddy goes shopping with Whitney; they banter. Whitney talks to her parents about moving out; they will miss her, and they worry for her. She is grateful for them. At Starbucks, Whitney forgoes a Frappuccino and has only an iced decaf, while her friends get what they usually get. They acknowledge her willpower and she says she’s trying, and then one friend says when he gets hungry waiting for his food at a restaurant he’ll just eat a sugar packet.

  The rest of them say he’s sick.

  They all seem to like one another and their lives; well enough, anyway.

  In season 2, Whitney is right back at the doctor; the ever-present threat is highlighted again. As she stands on an industrial scale, the background music gets louder. Oh Lord! she says. In a confessional shot, she explains to the audience, patie
ntly yet emotively, that when you weigh what she weighs, you can gain twenty pounds and have no idea until the scale shows the number. She conveys this as truly terrifying. We go back to watching her stand, frozen, finally not smiling.

  I am wracked as we watch her. I feel my own body, feel it spilling over my teaching slacks in ways that bother me most when I’m sitting down watching TV. This is not to say that I’m seeking to relate or that I’m capable of understanding her situation, only that when the camera is closing in on her and she’s explaining what she’s feeling, trying to hold herself tall and proud, trying to keep smiling, it provides me with the recognizable sensation of a spring coiling tighter and tighter, and the cheesy music build and the gratuitous shot of the scale screen as it reads weighing don’t make the moment any less potent.

  She is coiled in feeling on-screen, and that is allowing me to feel—she’s done her job well. And you are next to me. We are looking at her, not each other, sharing the act of parallel feeling, which means that we’re not really sharing any of ourselves, but mere proximity begins to seem like a gift, like a risk, as we keep staring at her, hoping together for a small, temporary triumph.

  In the end we discover along with Whitney that she has lost three pounds. She dances in celebration—trademark! The lights in the office are nasty, invasive fluorescents. In the next scene, Whitney’s doctor is telling her that despite the weight loss, her blood tests are still edging toward diabetic. No dancing; she’s back to fighting away tears. Not much has changed—brief relief is followed by renewed terror.

  Her parents are worried and kind again; she embraces them. Her friends are fun and supportive again. She resteels herself. By the end of the episode, she rides a bike for the first time in years. Come at me! she screams to the world, between jagged breaths. What now?!

  She unleashes her full lovability, a nonirritating bubbliness that is an innate gift, a relentless charm that makes her inspirationally fat where others are depressingly so, even to those like me who convince themselves it’s somehow more intellectual to resist inspiration.

  There I am on the couch, crying. There you are next to me, crying. We glance over at each other’s tears, like always.

  “I love her,” you say.

  “I want to be her,” you say.

  I don’t know if you mean it, and you don’t elaborate, but we’re ready for more.

  * * *

  —

  Robert Galinsky looks stern, proud even, when he tells me it’s his job to empower naive aspirants to stand strong in the hellscape of exposure.

  The producers are all fucking monsters, he tells me. Every one of them. And everybody knows it. They’re looking for commodities, and the performer is looking to commodify herself while still retaining some dignity. Everything you say can be snatched up and ruined. That’s the game (every show is a game, is another point he emphasizes): try to make it through unruined.

  “I am armoring soldiers to battle for their very selves,” he tells me, and when I react with a smirk, he says, “Seriously.”

  “Show me a reality-television producer and I’ll show you a beast,” he says. “They are looking to annihilate peoples’ spirits and exploit their pain.”

  He continues with the battle metaphor and gives specific examples of the wars entered on-screen. A young blonde woman with great tits comes to him, proud of those tits, certain those tits deserve some attention. To Galinsky, she is naive when she walks into his studio. She prizes only attention, doesn’t think about the implications of what gratuitous tit shots can end up doing in the hands of the wrong producer. She doesn’t think about the fact that she’s giving herself over to an apparatus that doesn’t exactly work respectfully with those who have tits.

  Be aware, Galinsky tells fame-hungry young women like that. Be aware of who lurks on the other side of the camera, of what you will be asked to give over just for a chance to be seen.

  He tells me plenty of his students leave having paid him for the experience of renouncing their desire to be on these shows. That can be its own kind of success. Or they soldier on in the lust for exposure, with at least slightly clearer eyes. I’m not going to go so far as to say there’s a nobility in that, but there is, at least, a hard honesty.

  We start talking about the alternative prospect of a hypothetical (or, really, composite) young woman trying to become an actress in the traditional sense. Would those casting calls be somehow less demeaning, the elusive roles less pigeonholing, the corporate interests less evil? The only difference, Galinsky says, would be the lack of friction in the interaction, a slick distance born from embodying a named fiction. And the words, if she happened to land a speaking part, would be written for her—she would read them as a character and make them real enough for an audience to believe as that type of character she was meant to portray, and that’s all. There’s safety in playing fictional characters, the assumption of artistic intentions and ethical decency that can cover up what is often unethical and shitty art. Nobody’s looking to find the worst in it.

  When Galinsky announced that he was training hopefuls in the finer points of reality, a lot of former friends lined up to call him a sellout. These were actors and directors, practitioners of an art form, and he had once been part of that noble endeavor, but he chose instead to become an active participant in the ruination of modern culture. You’re training the people who will be the death of us actors, they told him. The people who want to steal our screen time without putting in any of the effort, who are in it for the wrong reasons.

  Galinsky thinks that often what is anointed acting is just faking. And those people who shit on him, he tells me quietly, have a pretty romantic view of the industry of fakers. Faking is just as nasty—demeaning roles filled by hungry bodies, offered up for consumption—but nobody thinks about the nastiness, and that makes it static, numbed, self-satisfied. Don’t act like the fakers are doing something more than the people entering battle with their real names, Galinsky says. Don’t act like he’s the bad guy for meeting his students at their ambitions, and showing them how much it will hurt, asking them if they want to do it anyway.

  * * *

  —

  When you broke your back in the bike accident, I was working on the unload crew at a Kohl’s. Three days a week, before sunrise, I’d climb into the truck and face the boxes that reached from floor to ceiling, wall to wall, all the way back. The boxes were full of content branded by famous or semifamous people. We needed to have the unloading complete before the doors opened to customers, so we worked fast, floodlights trained on us in the bowels of the trucks.

  Randy, the shift manager, who took his job as seriously as all shift managers seem to, would read out the number of items supposedly packed into each delivery. “Sixteen-twelve today, guys,” he’d say, like that meant something to us. We would race with one another to see which team could toss the most merchandise out of the truck and sort it down the conveyor belts the fastest.

  The heaviest boxes were cookware: stacks of authentic Rachael Ray Dutch ovens and Bobby Flay grill sets, each with a tag saying something like, “You’ve seen Bobby use this!” Jimmy Buffett’s Margaritaville margarita blenders.

  Lots of space was taken up with bedroom sets: the Jennifer Lopez LA Nights collection. And reasonably priced formal wear: Marc Anthony’s Slim-Fit evening-out ensemble.

  Of them all, the biggest product producer was Lauren Conrad, LC from The Hills (when she was a young, rich suburban girl interning and going to fashion school in LA) and, before that, from Laguna Beach (when she was a young, rich suburban girl who aspired to someday work in fashion but more pressingly aspired to have Stephen see her as more than a friend).

  I moved a lot of LC merch. Some days Randy would say, “Jesus Jones, how much shit is this chick making? Who the hell is she anyways?” The two college bros on the crew were the only ones who admitted to know besides me, and they clai
med never to have seen her work; they just were generally aware of popular culture through their girlfriends and could confirm that Lauren Conrad was a fucking smokeshow. Once, in the break room, when the truck was finally empty, I tried to explain her. She’s this girl who grew up rich in California. She was on a show about her and her friends in high school. Then she was on a show about living in LA and interning. She’s generically sweet but clearly more tenacious than her demeanor and packaging would suggest, which is why I think she held people’s attention for so long. She has a penchant for dating fuckups.

  Randy made a disgusted sound and said, “I’m giving myself a hernia lugging her shit around?”

  There were laughs, followed by the grudging acknowledgment that at least she was making herself some money.

  The LC collection covered everything—skinny jeans, maxidresses, lightweight overcoats, boyfriend sweaters. It was all nice enough and sold well as a compromise for high school girls and their conservative mothers. For this fact Conrad was, and is, considered a reality-TV success story—she made it out. She no longer has to parade herself and instead has used her self-parades to set up a platform for her actual career, the thing she always aspired to. She did it thoroughly: a full, ploddingly executed transition.

  All I can say is that it made me really sad to hoist boxes with “Lauren Conrad” and “Made in China” stamped on the side; even sadder to X-acto those boxes open to find neat stacks of lilac polyester-blend long-sleeved Ts, each shrouded in rippling, membrane-thin plastic. Every time, I thought, This is it? All those shows—the self-deprecating hangover coffees, the friendship-ending blowouts, the Saturday-night perseverance, the crushingly conversationless dinners with alcoholic Jason—tossed aside for a steady, well-planned empire of cheap stitching, safe styling, an eighteen-to-eighty-five-dollar price point?