Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [4]
With this book, I wasn’t terribly interested in trying to figure out just how real reality television is. I don’t actually care whether scenarios are scripted, if cast members are manipulated into behaving certain ways, or what shooting is like. I definitely don’t want to hear anymore from the reality show participants than I already have.
Instead, I wondered what we, as a culture, are getting from this form of entertainment. Why, in short, do we want to watch people we don’t know sing, sew dresses, eat maggots, lose weight, have sex, kick drugs, sob hysterically, or display their abs? What does this say about us—and the social, political, sexual, and psychological climate of the time we’re living in? While it would be impossible to come up with one definitive answer to these questions, I’m proud to say that the writers featured in this collection provide the most compelling theories and ideas on the matter I’ve ever seen while in the process addressing love, honesty, identity, denial, vanity, fame, and a great many other culturally relevant issues in unique and often quite hysterical ways.
Reality show aspirants—from the Balloon Boy’s parents to everyone’s favorite White House party crashers—have gotten a bad reputation as of late and have truly come to represent the nadir of our world today. But do we blame the form of entertainment that supposedly motivates them to pull their stunts or the public who can’t get enough information about them? Or do we just own up to the fact that many of us enjoy a glimpse into unreal reality? I say there’s nothing shameful about feeling genuinely disturbed by Adam Lambert’s Idol loss or gleeful over Kelly Bensimon’s numerous post-Housewives scandals. And just because our TiVos deliver us regular doses of What Not to Wear, Big Brother, or The Bachelor, that doesn’t mean we can’t listen to Beethoven or read Dostoyevsky.
It doesn’t mean we have to, either.
1
POVERTY IN THE TIME OF THE REAL HOUSEWIVES OF NEW YORK CITY
Stacey Grenrock Woods
“IF JILL CAN DROP sixteen thousand dollars on a bag,” beamed Kelly Bensimon, the newest housewife on Bravo’s The Real Housewives of New York City, “then I say, go for it!”
“Go for it” is excellent advice, especially from someone who designs owl jewelry and jogs in traffic. Bensimon was referring to her fellow housewife Jill Zarin’s televised purchase of a garish green handbag. It really was, as the price tag showed, sixteen thousand dollars. Most people, even the obscenely rich, wouldn’t go for such a thing so publicly in late 2008, when season two of the series was shot. But the Real Housewives will go for anything—parties, purchases, press lines, each other’s jugular veins—as long as it means more of that precious commodity: attention.
In late 2008, I was going for things too: enough change for a meal at McDonald’s, a lot of walks (my oxidized green 1991 Saab had long stopped going for it), and down to the mailbox, hoping vainly for a check. Work had been scarce for some time. I’m a writer and my husband, Kenny, owns a recording studio, so of course we are insurance-free. Unable to afford our antidepressants, we went off them, and our bodies seemed to turn wholly edematous within hours. Our new Top Ramen and Quarter Pounder diet was counterproductive to our health goals. Also, his teeth were steadily rotting. Each newly sprouted abscess thwarted our few remaining dreams. We couldn’t afford to take drugs, and even the plants curled up and died. Jill Zarin’s throwaway sixteen thousand would have made all the difference in the world to us, so it’s tempting, and it would be great fun, to rip the Real Housewives for having so much when so many have so little, but we all know things don’t work that way. Besides, I’d rather rip them for being stupid and awful. I feel it’s more appropriate.
The housewives brought this on themselves. Not content to be privately rich and terrible, they belong to that rare and now overrepresented class of