Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV

by Lucas Mann

  And what’s-her-name, that woman from college, she’s a corporate lawyer and training for a marathon, and she and her husband just closed on a Park Slope condo and everyone seems so happy about how well things are going for her, instead of envious, like me.

  And look at all these announcements and denouncements, all this material, all this silent noise, and I used to really like Matt Damon, no, you know what, I still like Matt Damon, but he keeps saying these maybe-racist things and everyone’s noticing, and there are memes now, and I feel like I want to defend him but that’s somehow dangerous and also I don’t even know him, he’ll be just fine without me, and look at all the suffering in this world and what are we doing about it, yeah, we’re vegetarians now but honestly that didn’t even get the social traction I thought it would because I don’t think people realize how much I loved hamburgers, like it was way harder for me to quit hamburgers than your average new veg, and you tell me to stop looking, just look at you, but then I look at you and you’re looking at that Instagram feed of senior dogs who need adoption and the thought of loving an animal that’s just going to die in two years makes me so hysterically sad even though I don’t love it yet, and I watched this show that was ostensibly about retired football players but was really about happiness, and this psychologist listed the three main determining factors for a happy life—community, a sense of value to world, and I forget the third one—and I had none of them, and 51 people wished me happy birthday this year and you know how many did last year, it was 127, and that’s an enormous drop-off, especially considering I read an article saying that twenty-nine is both the social peak of a person’s life and the beginning of their most fertile professional years, and I know I’m not supposed to take pop social science to heart, but fuck, it has to be kind of true.

  And what if the moments to focus on have already come and gone, and I’ve forgotten them?

  And what if you’re disappointed, and that’s what I’m too frightened to ask?

  * * *

  —

  I don’t particularly want to know NeNe Leakes offscreen, but I like to imagine her, though I only imagine her watching herself do the things that I’ve seen her do on-screen. I have a friend who saw her once at the airport, catching an early flight out of Atlanta, stopped at Starbucks for a latte. He loves her, so he went up to her, and he admits that maybe he looked a bit too eager or slobbery, but she put her hand right in his face and said, “No. No. It is too early for this.” Which is her right, I know, but it’s still a little disappointing.

  I mostly imagine her on the couch that I’ve seen in her house, or maybe it’s an image borrowed from a dozen other shows—one of those long, stiff couches, with gold-painted wood trim and off-white cushions. Her legs are crossed in stylishly washed-out jeans. She’s wearing sandals. Her toenails are reddish-orange, freshly painted. Her arms are stretched out over the couch. Her hair is from that blonde bob phase she tried for a while, which generally read Marilyn Monroe but occasionally skewed more Hillary Clinton. She is on an enormous TV that she is looking at. She’s watching all her reaction shots:

  NeNe’s eye roll, so sustained and vicious. She tilts her head down toward her collarbone while her eyes roll up, the tug between these poles emphasizing the emotion.

  NeNe’s withering scorn, the way she will speak of someone like they are immaterial, just an idea that God got wrong, and the way she’ll move her hands as though she’s ushering this distraction out of her shot or as though she’s a conductor silencing an orchestra.

  NeNe’s laugh, the genuine one, how it booms. Or maybe it’s not genuine, because who knows, but she seems to love laughing when she is laughing, and the way the sound carries as she tosses her head back and everyone else is looking at her, overwhelmed by the sound.

  NeNe’s near-apologies, when her voice gets quiet and she sustains her gaze, like she’s letting you know she feels for someone, can feel for someone, even as her words dance around any potential blame.

  NeNe, when her mother is brought up on a reunion episode, the way she is fidgeting, legs crossed, eyes down, until she finally stands, her voice breaking as she whispers that she won’t talk about it, and then the other women flock to her, hold her, and her head is above the rest of them, arms leaning on their shoulders as she exits the set, still whispering, whimpering; instantly sympathetic.

  I see her see each moment the way I have seen them—over and over, tweaked just slightly but enough to remain potent. She sees each one spectacular and near self-parody; each one intimate, even with the lights glaring and the makeup, the whole apparatus.

  A life. I wonder if she sees a life. I hope she does.

  * * *

  —

  When you go to work and I’m not teaching, I watch you through the living-room window, holding a book or my computer, or sometimes the dog because I know you like it when I make her wave good-bye. As soon as I see the car drive away, I turn on the TV. I enjoy that this is an illicit experience, something to hide even from you, like the tackier types of porn, the kind set in a van, or drinking alone. Or, for me specifically, the way I’d always eat a Häagen-Dazs bar when my parents went out on date night, then push my hand through coffee grounds and banana peels to hide the wrapper at the bottom of the trash. I was hungrier because there was nobody there to see me and shame me, except me. It’s all the same idea: watching people together is interactive; watching people alone is compulsive.

  In 2007, The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media published a report titled “An Exploratory Study of Reality Appeal: Uses and Gratifications of Reality TV Shows.” It’s the most recent study of its kind that I could turn up, yet it’s still woefully out of date. It’s hard for data to predict the trajectory of a fad; a fad is temporary and elusive until the moment it becomes old hat, when it no longer seems worth the effort to try to explain it.

  Anyway, the researchers wanted to know why a person watches, and the primary response was disappointing: the most salient motives for watching reality TV were habitual time pass. Those last three words are, even in their clinical tone, pretty vicious.

  The researchers were expecting to find a confirmation of the hypothesis that there was a powerful appeal for an audience watching shows about “regular” people, and thus being allowed to fantasize realistically(ish) that they had the ability to be a part of the show, as Andrejevic and others predicted. They acknowledged surprise when neither voyeurism nor fantasy were chief motivations. They were present, yes, but secondary. The main sensation was that of time passing imperceptibly, and the genre was most popular among those lacking in social interaction, hoping to find some background companionship as the time passed. To feel this satisfaction, viewers needed to view the meticulously edited and frequently preplanned content of reality interaction as realistic.

  The researchers didn’t make a distinction between belief and acceptance, though, which is a crucial one. I don’t have to believe that the material looks like life, unadulterated, but I do enjoy accepting that it all happened, is happening, will continue to happen, even if that is technically impossible. These are lives of some sort, and they stay available to me. I like to think of flying a helicopter all by myself, over an ocean dotted with a thousand little islands, and on every island is a group of people holding signs and waving up to me, banging coconut shells for my attention, shouting, We’re here, we’re here! And if they’re reaching up to me, then I’m there too. That confirmation feels necessary, sometimes.

  When I’m alone, I watch strangers dropped naked into the jungle trying to help one another “survive.” I watch men in buckled loafers and tailored suits negotiate the prices of luxury town houses. I watch formerly Amish twentysomethings stumble, newly drunk, around Atlantic City during their first bachelor party. I watch giant, blond Dog Chapman hunt meth heads out on bond, catching them in the alleys of Hawaiian trailer parks and forcing them to pray. I watch a teenage Alas
kan fisher-boy try to grapple with starting at the bottom rung of the crab-boat ecosystem. I watch the wives of athletes drink in the afternoon on a deck in San Diego, passing the time like I am passing the time.

  The material runs together through the form—the speed of each scene, the confessional asides, and the cliffhangers that promise a drama that never fully materializes, only lingers until there can be the swell of the next cliffhanger: Will he be crushed by a poorly stacked crab cage when the squall hits? Will the fleeing meth head have a gun? Will she get pregnant, and will that make him pay attention? Will he close on the condo now that the offer is all cash?

  Will they win? Will they survive? Will I ever see them again?

  The essayist Olivia Laing writes: Loneliness centers on the act of being seen.

  She locates loneliness in the tension of so deeply wanting to be noticed and so deeply fearing exposure. And yes, I know that feeling—everyone must know that feeling—but what about the act of seeing? Laing writes about the seduction of the screen as a protective membrane, but I don’t feel the promise of safety as I watch, just the promise that, when I want to, I will always have something to see. Someone to see. Masses of those someones, contained and postproduced, instantly timeless, unable to look back at me. Hundreds of people who were there and are already gone, and who I can assume are clamoring to return. Who offer up so much and expect no reciprocation beyond my watching. I can’t tell if their constancy makes me feel more alone or less alone; I’m only certain that when I am lonely, they will be there.

  * * *

  —

  I’m generalizing here, conflating a lot of different shows into one pixelated loop of existence keeping my eyes open. The industry would disagree. With longevity has come specialization, a plethora of target demographics, each with its own sweet spot to aim for. Reality even has its own awards, presented by RealScreen, an organization that “sets the definitive global market for the business of unscripted and non-fiction entertainment.”

  Within that global market, RealScreen has identified and solidified a staggering amount of subgenres. The awards offer prizes for, among other categories, Competition: Game, Competition: Lifestyle, Competition: Shiny Floor Game Show; Lifestyle: Food, Lifestyle: Well-Being, Lifestyle: Home; Nonfiction: Arts and Culture, Nonfiction: Environmental Programming, Nonfiction: Social Issues/Current Affairs; Reality: Docuformat, Reality: Docureality, Reality: Docusoap.

  Scroll down on the website; the list is endless.

  Each category has an explanation, but the distinctions often feel thin, particularly when nominated shows seem like they could fit into ten different categories. The only discernible difference between Docusoap and Docureality, for instance, seems to be that the ones called soaps are about women’s lives and all the nonsoaps are the same exact show, except about men, often men who support themselves through some sort of interaction with large machinery, and cater to an audience of men who might not want to think that they enjoy anything with “soap” in the title.

  Some of the Lifestyle shows have competition in them; sometimes Arts and Culture bleeds into Current Affairs, and sometimes those are competitions, too, each with definite soap-opera elements. It’s confusing.

  Robert Galinsky would say they’re all game shows—whether the game is to win a prize or outlast the competition or simply comport yourself sympathetically, each performer is playing at something rigged and has an enormous amount to lose.

  Brenda Weber would say they all borrow from the structure of soaps—so many dramas packed into twenty- or forty-minute chunks; always the explosion, then the cliffhanger for another explosion.

  John Jeremiah Sullivan, writing for GQ, says they’re all about all of us: This is us, bros. This is our nation. A people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.

  Perhaps my favorite conflating description comes from Kelefa Sanneh, in The New Yorker: Reality shows have a tendency to blur into a single orgy of joy and disappointment and recrimination.

  I agree with all of this—that the shows are all games; they’re all soaps; they’re all full of American grotesquery, joyful and disappointing, the mincemeat of emotion and vanity crammed each time into a slightly new conceptual patty. Part of me wants to say that I don’t care what the differences are, that what matters is the constancy and the reliable volume of it all, but that kind of sidetracks me from the notion that these shows can be good or bad, transcendent or unworthy, and instead suggests a mountain of indistinguishable shit; literally: human waste.

  I will say this: We used to love the competition shows. Remember? There was something invigorating about that particular premise—to want to be the best chef, the best designer. Now we’ve grown tired of a winner in every episode or season, of a theoretically objective set of criteria to organize the emotions of success and failure. Now we seek the drama of people attempting only to live dramatically and by any means necessary, whether it’s through the isolation of a bizarre detail (My strange addiction is chewing on used diapers!), or an entire way of being (I’m from Beverly Hills! I’m obese! I’m a polygamist! I used to be Amish!). These are people with nothing to win but more screen time, more seasons, maybe a spin-off—our continued participation in their lives.

  Split them into whatever demographic you like—Male 18–24; Female 35–50; Redneck Comedy; Urban Drama—the point is they’re there, and maybe they’re pretty good at being there. They want to stay, or maybe they need to stay, or maybe they think they do but really they need to get the fuck out of there. Either way, their faces capture that strain and hold our attention, and when you’re not with me, they hold my attention. Such a variety of difference becomes diffuse familiarity, constant companionship, until it feels like when you’re a kid and you doze off in the back of the car, and then you wake up to the same voices you fell asleep to, and you’re a little bit frightened but also soothed.

  * * *

  —

  What frightens me sometimes is how fast an emotion can settle in and block everything else out. Now I look back and read a rant about loneliness, as though loneliness is the only thing felt worth expressing, but really it’s just that when I feel it, there’s no feeling louder and therefore no feeling easier to express.

  What I want to express, too, is what it feels like to drive together, free from the couch, on a highway, for any distance in any direction—cross-country moves, or visits to my parents, or just the long weekend getaway drive that still seems like a novelty.

  When I drive, you tell me how I’m doing it wrong, and I say, “I got it.”

  “Do you?” you ask.

  When I turn to glare at you, you’re waiting for it, smiling.

  “Come on,” you say, and when I still pout you say it again. You point out that it’s ridiculous that I can be offended about being instructed at something that I admit that I’m bad at, and I point out that you aren’t exactly open to my tennis advice, and you remind me of the one time we swam a race against each other and by the time I wheezed my way to the finish, you were sitting at the edge of the pool with a smile very similar to your driving-critique smile. Eventually if you hold a smile it’s contagious.

  We stop for pretzels. I get a Snapple and chug it, and you say we’ll have to stop again for me to pee, and twenty to forty minutes later you’re proved right.

  When we drive, we look out at all the people in all the cars passing and we ask each other, Who are they? Where are they going? If we look at them while they’re looking at us, we say, What the fuck are they looking at? And laugh. Fuck you, we say to ourselves, at them. Hey, fuck you, guy, do you know who you’re looking at?

  In motion, between destinations, talk turns from speculation about passing cars to speculation about ourselves: What if we exited at the next town and that was where we lived—what would we do there? How did we end up where we are, and were we aware of it as it happened? What’s next? Maybe
nothing new, just a continuation, and wouldn’t that actually be pretty okay? Where would you be right now if you had the choice? Quick, before you can think about it.

  We can never think of anything instinctive, and it’s a looming, thrilling sensation to remember that we could be anywhere with anyone, but we are in the precise place where we are, with each other.

  Invariably, I say, “I mean, Seattle is cool,” and then you say, “Jesus Christ, you visited once.”

  Invariably, you doze off, and in the silence I return to loneliness, but not in a way that hurts. You wake up when I pull into another rest stop for another piss. Outside the car we stretch together and watch other people pile out of their cars to stretch together. I ask you to do a whispered impression of what their voices might sound like. I like to walk into the gas station convenience store laughing together and see if I can catch that image on the security cameras. That never loses its surprise pleasure—the two of us there, moving through the Quik Stop, surveilled, laughing.

  Why tell a composite story of a drive? To remind myself that it continues to exist and of the pleasure in it? Or to remind myself of pleasure, in general, when I feel myself falling down the rabbit hole of loud loneliness? Pleasure and loneliness can exist side by side, in the same life, the same moment. It feels important to remind myself of that, because of how easy it is to express the mournful, the frightened, the lonely, and how easy it is to fail at expressing happiness as you live it, and that failure feels lonely, too.

  So many cars on a highway, and in one of those cars there we are, and all the other cars keep passing. Maybe they see us and maybe they don’t, and we drive on. What an inexhaustible, lonely pleasure it is to ask each other to speculate on where they might be going.