Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [64]
So this is how it happened, pretty much:
On a warm April morning in 1997, I awoke and looked out the window of my second-story downtown apartment. Six feet of water was flowing through the street. It was not completely unexpected.
Most of the small Midwestern city had been under a mandatory evacuation zone for more than twenty-four hours. But I had decided to stay, because I am kind of an idiot. Every major news outlet showed up to chronicle what would become the largest evacuation of an American city in the twentieth century.
The next afternoon, as the water still flowed through the city, I was awakened from a nap by firemen yelling, “Fire! Fire! Everyone out!” The butts of their axes pounded on my door, and every door down the hallway, as they searched for stragglers. I was the only one in the building.
When I opened the door, they looked at me casually. “You have to leave,” one said with little haste in his voice.
They escorted me to the outdoor fire escape. Two buildings down the street, I could see a small fire coming out of the top floor. “You can put that out, right?”
“Nope,” replied the fireman. “This whole block is gonna go.” I swear he nearly yawned.
“Why?” I asked back, trying to match his Midwestern nonchalance.
He pointed. On the opposite corner, I could see two firemen diving off a boat into the water with their fire hoses. Because the city was under water, there was no way to get to the fire hydrants. It was tragicomedy pulled from Leviticus or Deuteronomy or any of those books where God hates people but is funny about it: a city under water couldn’t put out a fire.
At the base of the fire escape was a small boat. As I got in, the national guardsman asked, “Where would you like to go?”
“California,” I said. He dropped me off at campus, about a mile away.
I found the only building on campus with television, where I watched my apartment, along with other pieces of downtown, burn down live on CNN.
A month later, a television production company called. “Would you like to do a video reenactment of your story?”
“Sure. It wasn’t very scary, though.”
If you dislike reality television because you think it is fake, then you really hate The Hills.
As a hybrid “scripted reality” show, it practically begs for its legitimacy to be questioned. The show’s former blank-faced protagonist, Lauren Conrad, delivers lines with the speed and affectation of Vanna turning letters. Her nemesis, Heidi Montag, is better with the ad lib, but is still a less realistic cartoon than Jessica Rabbit.
But this is exactly why I love The Hills.
Media-saturated society is a messy place right now. Fake news is better than real news, Wikipedia is a definitive information source, and finding an image that hasn’t been Photoshopped is impossible. Even social situations (superficial parties, opportunistic dates, coy Facebook chats) all seem like theatrical rituals in which the best performances are handed lifetime Oscars—or more Twitter followers. This makes life feel like a cluttered assemblage of confusing pseudo-events. I barely remember what it was like to have an unmediated experience, something untainted by advance critical hype or societal backlash. Everything feels suspiciously fake, like Neo felt before he took the red pill.
That is why The Hills is genius. It is the most meta show on television. When I’m watching The Hills, I am keenly aware that I am watching The Hills. I never feel that way while watching Seinfeld or Scooby Doo or The Bachelor. With other shows, I never think, “How did they get the camera into that bar?” or “Was that conflict scripted beforehand?” or “How the fuck do Audrina’s boobs hover like that?” Precisely because it blends elements of the fake and the real, The Hills makes me think more about its own creation than anything I have ever watched. And by making me ponder this faux-reality, I begin to think about how real world rituals are similarly artificial. When Spencer delivers a Rabelaisian line that seems obviously scripted, you can say that’s fake—or you can