Authors: John Jeremiah Sullivan
The Miz pursed his lips and slowly shook his head. He’d been here before—he’s here all the time. You can’t give away secrets about upcoming episodes. Corporate no-no with immediate consequences. One of the girls said, “There’s one I don’t like. Who’s that girl, the one—not Veronica, but she kinda reminds you of Veronica. Kinda short. Kinda busty brunet.”
The Miz looked perplexed. Who could look like Veronica? Vicious little Veronica, queen of the bathtub threesome, that petite and pneumatic perhaps-lesbian who almost fell to her death after Julie the psychotic Mormon fucked with her safety harness during a heated rope-race challenge?
“You mean Tina?” I asked.
“Yeah, Tina!” the girl said.
The Miz looked at me. He goes, “Damn, dude … you’re good.”
“Yeah, well…”
* * *
There was a time when people liked to point out that reality TV isn’t really real. “They’re just acting up for the cameras.” “That’s staged.” “The producers are telling them what to do!” “I hate those motherfuckers!” and so forth. Then there was a sort of
deuxième naïveté
when people thought, Maybe there is something real about it. “Because you know, we can be narcissistic like that.” “It’s our culture.” “It gives us a window onto certain…” And such things. But I would argue that
all
these different straw people I’ve invented are missing the single most interesting thing about reality TV, which is the way it has successfully
appropriated reality
.
In the beginning, back in ’92, when
The Real World
debuted, establishing in the process the pattern on which all future reality shows would be based, the game was rather crude and obvious—was a character “aware of the cameras,” or did he or she momentarily “forget about the cameras”? Those were your subtle shades. That was before the reality-show form itself went kudzu on the televised landscape, its insta-ratings and all but nonexistent production costs allowing it to proliferate, till pretty soon everybody had a mom or brother-in-law or ex-girlfriend on a show; that was before being cast on a reality show had become a rite of passage, like getting your first apartment or your calf implants. I switched on one new show a few months ago, Richard Branson’s
The Rebel Billionaire
, and found one of my oldest childhood friends having tea on top of a hot-air balloon with that weird and whispery mogul-faun, Sir Richard, then saying things I’d never heard him say but had heard so many others say in identical tones, things like, “I am not going to lose a second of this experience worrying about tomorrow.” Was he smiling
ironically
when he said it? Impossible to tell.
Came a point at which the people being cast on the shows were for the most part people who thrilled back home to watch the shows, people (especially among the younger generation) whose very consciousness had been formed by the shows. Somewhere, far below, a switch was flipped. Now, when you watch a reality show—when you follow
The Real World
, for instance—you’re not watching a bunch of people who’ve been hurled into some contrived scenario and are getting filmed, you’re watching people caught in the act of
being on a reality show
. This is now the
plot
of all reality shows, no matter their cooked-up themes.
Here’s the surprising thing about this shift toward greater self-consciousness, this increased awareness of complicity in the falseness of it all—it made things more real. Because, of course, people being on a reality show is precisely what these people are. Think of it this way: if you come to my office and film me doing my job (I don’t have one, but that only makes this thought experiment more rigorous), you wouldn’t really see what it was like to watch me doing my job, because you’d be there watching me (the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, interior auto-mediation, and so forth). But now add this: What if my job were to be on a reality show, being filmed, having you watching me, interior auto-mediation, and so forth? What if that were my reality, bros? Are your faces melting yet?
This is where we are, as a people. And not just that. No, the other exciting thing that’s happened—really just in the last few years—involves the ramping acceleration of a self-reinforcing system that’s been in place since the birth of reality TV. Because the population from which producers and casting directors can draw to get bodies onto these shows has come to comprise almost exclusively persons who “get” reality shows and are therefore hip to the fact that one is all but certain to be humiliated and irrevocably compromised on such a show, the producers and casting directors, who’ve always had to be careful to screen out candidates who are overly self-aware and therefore prone to freeze up and act all “dignified” in front of the cameras, are forever having to work harder and harder to locate “spontaneous” individuals, people who, as the Miz says approvingly, “just can’t help being who they are.”
Well, the effects of this sequence—by which casting directors must get crazier and crazier with their choices, resulting, once the show has aired and had its effect on the country, in a casting demographic in which one must scrape the barrel that much harder to find people who’d even go near a reality show—remained, for many years, gradual and nearly imperceptible. But now— Have you watched television recently? From what can be gathered, they’re essentially emptying group homes into the studio. It has all gotten so very real. Nobody’s acting anymore. I mean, sure, they’re acting, but it’s not like they’re ever
not
acting.
People hate these shows, but their hatred smacks of denial. It’s all there, all the old American grotesques, the test-tube babies of Whitman and Poe, a great gauntlet of doubtless eyes, big mouths spewing fantastic catchphrase fountains of impenetrable self-justification, muttering dark prayers, calling on God to strike down those who would fuck with their money, their cash, and always knowing, always preaching. Using weird phrases that nobody uses, except everybody uses them now. Constantly talking about “goals.” Throwing carbonic acid on our castmates because they used our special cup and then calling our mom to say, in a baby voice, “People don’t get me here.” Walking around half-naked with a butcher knife behind our backs. Telling it like it is, y’all (what-what). And never passive-aggressive, no. Saying it straight to your face. But crying … My God, there have been more tears shed on reality TV than by all the war widows of the world. Are we so raw? It must be so. There are simply too many of them—too many shows and too many people on the shows—for them not to be revealing something endemic. This is us, a people of savage sentimentality, weeping and lifting weights.
* * *
The club appearance wasn’t enough, reporting-wise. I asked them to dinner—the Miz, Melissa, and Coral. I was curious to see if they were real. If all those years spent being themselves for a living had left them with selves to be, or if they’d maybe begun to phase out of existence, like on a
Star Trek
episode. But then I got distracted. You know how it is, when you’re kicking it. I got to telling them about some of my all-time fave moments. I talked about the time Randy and Robin were drinking on the upstairs porch—it was the San Diego season. Big Ran was teaching Robin about his personal philosophical system, involving a positive acceptance of epistemological uncertainty, a little thing he liked to call “Agnostics.” When Robin (I thought very sweetly) complimented Ran on his philosophical side, which she hadn’t noticed up till then, Big Ran goes: “I have a lot of knowledge to share.”
I liked Big Ran. He was who he was—it’s like the Miz said, he couldn’t help it. He was the kind of guy who was always telling you what kind of guy he was. A few months before, I’d almost had a brush with him. A travel company announced there was a
Real World
cruise planned, in the Caribbean. Big Ran and Trishelle (greatest Southern slut in
Real World
history) were going to be on it. I got tickets. I got all excited. But in the end, I got mind-fucked. They canceled the cruise. I don’t know if it was for lack of ticket sales or what, but for a brief period, I wondered if maybe I’d been the only person to purchase a ticket. And then I imagined a scenario in which, for some nitpicky contractual reason, the cruise line had been forced to go through with the package anyway, and it was just me, Big Ran, and Trishelle out there on the seas, drifting around on our ghost ship, eating foam from the chaise cushions. Sure, there’d have been some tears, some wrestling and whatnot, but in the end …
The Miz, Coral, and Melissa didn’t remember that—they didn’t remember Big Ran saying, “I have a lot of knowledge to share.” I got the sense they don’t really watch the show, not since they were on it. “It’s hard,” said Coral, “’cause you know better. You know that that ain’t really like that.”
It took me about twenty minutes to put together what was off about our interview: I was enjoying it. Ordinarily, one is tense interrogating strangers, worried about freezing or forgetting to ask what’ll turn out to be the only important question. But since we’d all sat down, I’d been totally, totally at ease. Then I saw that this light, this tremulous, bluish light playing over their faces, was the very light by which I knew them best. I’d instinctively brought them to this place in Beverly Hills, Blue on Blue, that has open cabanas around a pool, and we were lounging in one, and the light was shining on their amazing, poreless skin. How many times had I sat with them like this, by pools and Jacuzzis? How often had we chilled like this, just drinking and making points? Thousands of times. My nervous system had convinced itself we were on the show.
“Yeah,” the Miz said, “that’s both the good and the bad about being on a reality-TV show.” He was drinking a vodka drink (everyone knows clear liquor is easier over time on the colon, prostate, et cetera—plus, as the Miz points out, it’s lower in calories). “We’ll be eating, and it’s ‘That muthafucka right THERE! What’s up, son?’ See, they’re not gonna do that to Tom Cruise. They’re not even going to do that to a B- or C-list actor. But they feel like they know us, so they can come up to us and say whatever they want…”
I was about to point out to the Miz that he might seem less approachable to folks like me if he’d quit taking money to party with us at places like the Avalon Nightclub, but that seemed like a real dick thing to say to a guy who’s given me so much joy over the years. And anyway, Melissa and Coral agreed with him.
Coral was in the Miz’s same cast, the “Back to New York” season. They’re sort of my generation’s Ozzie and Harriet, though as far as I can tell (and to the great chagrin of millions) they’ve never been “romantic.” Their friendship started off shaky. At breakfast one morning, back in 2001, conversation turned to that trusty standby “white people and black people.” The Miz let slip that his dad doesn’t like to hire black people at his Mr. Hero franchise back in northern Ohio because the inner-city schools there are bad, and black people there are “slow.” Coral—who’s black and beautiful and possesses a raw and somewhat terrifying intelligence—wasn’t really feeling that. The season’s main plot line became one of Coral mercilessly making Mike feel like a fool (which he already did). But then the two met up again on
The Real World/Road Rules Challenge
, succeeded in winning the first season’s competition together, and although they haven’t yet produced multiracial triplets, they do manifest a mutual and patently authentic affection. Coral calls the Miz “Mikey.”
Melissa, who is half African American and half Filipino—and blessed, one can’t help chastely adding, with an extraordinary upper lip—has been living with Coral, they told me, and they are best friends. Melissa was on the New Orleans season. She’s the one we all saw go off on Julie that time, for the speaking-engagement shadiness (our first clue that
The Real World
was a real world). Melissa and Julie had never really been super close, not since Melissa asked Julie to hand her a pudding cup one time, and Julie said, “See, back where I’m from, if somebody asked us to do that, we’d say, ‘What color do I look like?’”
The Miz, Coral, and Melissa had just come back from a speaking engagement at Texas Christian University. It was the three of them and David Burns (another former
Real World
er who, I’m told, is opening a bar in Myrtle Beach called Reality Bites that will be staffed by former cast members—and I might just drop in here the little facty-facty that I live an hour from Myrtle Beach, so y’all can sit on that).
Anyhoo, they did their thing, shared some knowledge, and then, at the end, students were invited to come forward and ask questions. This is the typical format. Also typical is that most students who come forward have the same question to ask, namely, “Can I have a hug?” So the Miz has taken to making an announcement before the question part. He’ll say, “Afterwards, we’re going to have a meet-’n’-greet. We can do hugs and pictures there. So don’t ask about hugs.”
Okay, so, the question thing was going good. They were almost out of time. The Miz said, “Last question. Something saucy.” This girl got up and goes, “I understand you’re not going to do any pictures or any hugs after the show, but I was wondering if I could just sit on your face.”
The Miz was staring, obviously still working with it. “I was really quite stunned,” he said. “This is Texas
Christian
University.”
I wish—for your sakes—that the Miz, Coral, and Melissa had turned out to be more fucked-up, as people. I have a vague sense of owing the reader that. I said some out-there things about people on TV—and it’s not like I take any of it back—but all three of these people were fairly well-adjusted-seeming. And smart. (Well, I mean,
smart
might not be a word with which I’d saddle the Miz, but nice and relatively together? Totally.) For an hour, I worked hard to force onto them my idea about post–
Real World
existence being essentially a form of fun slavery. I told them what the
Real World
über-agent Brian Monaco had told me, that he’s starting to hear from former cast members, twenty-eight-year-olds burnt out on the bar/club/speaking-engagement/
Challenge
circuit, who are coming to him and being like, “Bri, what do I do? I’ve got nothing on my résumé!” But that doesn’t really apply to any of the three I took to dinner. The Miz has his sweet wrestling deal (he will later become an actual huge famous wrestling star and send me a box of Cuban cigars); Coral hosts various shows on MTV; Melissa starred on another show, on the Oxygen channel, called
Girls Behaving Badly
, which produced the now-massive Chelsea Handler.