Acculturated Me
I contributed to the freshly-published book, Acculturated, which was co-edited by the excellent and very patient Naomi Riley -- and when I say "patient," I mean she's waited rather politely for pieces from me that have been, on occasion, weeks late -- and she's given me permission to reprint my piece here.
The book's subtitle says it all: "23 Savvy Writers Find Hidden Virtue in Reality TV, Chic Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture."
Before the excerpt, a pitch: it's really a great read. What I especially admire is how Naomi and her co-editor, Christine Rosen, went after some terrific and off-beat names to contribute. Jonathan Last; our own Emily Esfahani Smith; good friends of mine and co-executive producers of ABC's hit comedy "Modern Family," Paul Corrigan and Brad Walsh; and a host of other great writers pitched in to create a very smart, very hip volume of pop culture criticism.
Here's what I wrote:
Not long ago, I was enjoying an episode of Bravo-TV’s repellent, grotesque, and thoroughly addictive “Real Housewives of New York City.”
(Please stay with me, here. I could waste time claiming merely to have been “flipping around” the dial; I could say that it “was on in an airport lounge;” I could even blame, outlandishly, some kind of “TiVo malfunction.” But the truth is, I was watching it, at home, by choice. Don’t judge me.)
“Real Housewives of New York City,” for those who aren’t familiar, is a reality television program that follows the exploits of self-described “society women” in the Big Apple. Each episode records in garish detail their petty squabbles and minor triumphs—the whole awful tacky tapestry of their deeply middle-class lives, the striving and social climbing and back-stabbing, the shrieking hissy-fits and unhinged behavior. The entire series—and its sisters, The Real Housewives of Orange County; Atlanta; New Jersey; and now Washington, DC—emits such a nasty, sulfurous pong and displays behavior so offensive and sociopathic that it’s a mystery to me why it’s not an even bigger hit.
One of the housewives, though, wasn’t really a housewife at all: she was a single career gal when the episode was shot—I think her tagline in the credits is something like, “New York City is my playground”—but at the time, she was in a relationship with a guy whom she described as shy and reserved.
When he appeared on camera, however, he didn’t seem shy or reserved, he just seemed like a guy who didn’t really want to appear on camera in a reality TV show. He seemed like a guy who was dating a woman who announced to him, one day, that she had been asked by some producers from Bravo-TV to do a show called “The Real Housewives of New York City,” and instead of saying, like a decent person, “Are you out of your mind?” said, instead, “Sure! When can we start rolling?”
In every scene he’s in, he keeps avoiding the lens, keeps ducking behind stuff. He seems painfully aware that there are several cameras whirring around him, a boom mike pointed at his face, and that everything he says, does, or mumbles is going to be blasted on television for millions of people to watch (and then lie about watching).
In other words, he seems perfectly well-adjusted, which when edited properly by television professionals comes across as sullen and uncommunicative.
So in the episode of the “The Real Housewives of New York City” that I saw—I’m not sure why I was watching it, I think my TiVo messed up or something—the non-housewife sits her shy boyfriend down for a Serious Talk about Where This Relationship is Going, which she’s prepared herself for—unbeknownst to him but beknownst to the viewer—by drinking seven martinis.
It’s a very sloppy ambush.
“Don’t you think it’s time we moved in together?” she slurs. “Can we talk about where this relationship is going?” she asks, with the kind of elaborate composure only drunks can manage.
And his eyes dart around to the cameras and the microphones and he says the only smart thing I’ve ever heard anyone on a reality TV show ever say.
He says, “Can we talk about this later?”
“You don’t want to talk about this now?” she pleads.
“Can we talk about this later?” he repeats, as we watch him slowly, surely, fall deeply out of love with her.
And I think, after that, they break up or something—I’m not really sure because of course I never watch that kind of trash. But I loved that phrase.
“Can we talk about this later?”
Meaning, when the cameras aren’t on. Meaning, when every word and gesture isn’t getting recorded and saved, for some editor to clip and some music supervisor to score and some promo guy to cut and use 17 times. And if everyone—or at least one person—on every reality show—or at least on some reality shows—said those words—“Can we talk about this later?”—then reality television might not be so lurid and exhibitionist and creepy.
In other words, not so interesting.
Reality television stars always say the same thing, when they’re asked about it later. I’m not that awful, they claim, I’m just edited that way. The producers wanted me to pitch a fit/betray a friend/drink too much/create that scene. It’s television, they all say, when confronted on Oprah or Bravo-TV’s own “Reunion” series, in which feuding reality stars hit the sofa for more fireworks. Don’t hate us, they say. We’re just performers. In reality, we’re not so interesting. On reality-television, though, we’re compulsively watchable.
Perhaps, more than all the bad behavior and the nasty words—more than Snooky—that has been reality television’s most significant cultural contribution. We seem no longer satisfied with living our day-to-day lives. We want always to be watchable.
Of course, the reality stars have editors. For years, the Writers Guild of America has claimed that the story editors—those sad souls tasked with watching endless footage and cutting it all down into hour-long powerplays of nastiness and psychosis—aren’t just editors, but writers, and as such covered by the basic agreement between the Guild and the studios. They shape unformed material into a story, says the Guild, and that’s what writers do. And the material, in turn, is shaped by on-set producers who goad and prod their subjects into being just a little more angry, just a little more crazy, just a little more…interesting.
The result is a creepy kind of feedback loop: the story editors try to identify and shape emerging storylines, which they relay back to the on-set producers, who manipulate their subjects into delivering satisfying moments of television based on those emerging storylines—big end-of-show blow-ups, promotable snippets of suspense—so that what is billed as “reality” is, in fact, carefully plotted, by everyone involved.
Reality television stars are in on this, too. I was just trying to give the producers what they wanted, they all say. My job was to be interesting, outlandish. “I know why I’m here,” one of the housewives said on one of the Housewives shows. “I’m supposed to be the crazy one.”
And we, of course, can tsk-tsk all we want. But in many ways we’re all living to be watched.
I have a friend who updates his Facebook status several times a day. Sometimes his updates are innocuous—“enjoying the new Ryan Adams CD” or “loving my chicken Caesar wrap”—but often they’re more complicated, mentioning certain restaurants, chic venues, glamorous locations. “Drinks at Chateau Marmont, then dinner at Lucques! I’m loving LA in April”—things like that.
In one amazing 24-hour span, his Facebook updates reported a power breakfast (“Omelets at Geoffrey’s in Malibu with my agent!”) and a business lunch (“Chipotle burritos with writing staff to work out this season’s storylines”) and a romantic end of day (“Grateful for Michelle and a beach sunset at the end of a busy day”) absolutely none of which was true, because on that day I happened to run into him at the E-Z Lube near my house, in shorts and a dirty t-shirt, getting his oil pump replaced, which was a four-hour job.
I confronted him about this later. “I’ve done all of those things,” he insisted. “Just not in one day.”
“But that’s lying,” I said. “You’re lying on Facebook!” I’m not sure, in retrospect, why I thought this was such a big deal. He certainly didn’t.
He looked at me strangely. “So?” he asked.
“So,” I said, “Facebook is supposed to be true. It’s supposed to be factual.”
“Oh,” he said, leaning back smugly. “So you really ‘like’ everything you ‘Like’ on Facebook?”
“Well….” I muttered.
“And you’re really ‘friends’ with all of your Facebook Friends?”
He had me there.
“Stop thinking of Facebook as something real,” he said. “It’s not. It’s just….” And here he paused for a moment, searching for the right word.
“It’s just….content,” he said. “That’s all. Just content.”
He shrugged. “I’m a Hollywood writer,” he said, “I’m just delivering what people want to think a Hollywood writer does all day. I’m just giving people something interesting to read.”
He’s just providing content, in other words, like one of the Real Housewives. He’s doing what he thinks he’s supposed to do, in the Reality Television series called “Facebook.”
And it’s not just Facebook. The same thing happens on internet services like Twitter—on which hundreds of millions of people worldwide announce their tiny insights to each other, in bursts of no more than 141 characters—and the rapidly growing Foursquare, a mobile phone application on which people broadcast their exact location, earn points and “badges” for being in a lot of cool places, and in general provide a narrative in which our deepest, most neurotic suspicion that all of our friends are doing more interesting things and having more interesting lives is utterly confirmed.
And if Twitter and Foursquare aren’t your thing, there’s Plurk, Gowalla, or StickyBits, all of which will tell random strangers what you’re thinking, what you’re doing, and where you are. (Oh, and it’ll tell advertisers, too.)
Phenomenally popular sites like Yelp.com allow users to review restaurants, merchants, outdoor venues—anything, really, that can be rated and discussed has a Yelp entry, complete with long, personal narratives (“My girlfriend and I were in the mood for great Chinese food….”) and lots of identity creation (“As you Yelpers know, I’m pretty much Old School when it comes to bike shops. So imagine my surprise when….”) Add Yelp together with Foursquare, and you can critique your day in real time. Channel all of those updates and reviews into Facebook—it’s easy to do; all of those services offer that option—and you can cyber-cobble an identity almost as irritating and narcissistic as a Real Housewife.
Text too restrictive? Try video. You can become a star on YouTube—one of the fastest growing categories of videos is the “vlog,” in which people just…talk into the camera. Or go live at Ustream.tv (or Justin.tv or Kyte.tv….)
Thanks to an environment of near-unlimited bandwidth, we may not need stars anymore. We’re all busily creating content for each other, living up to (or down to, depending) our reputations. Or, sometimes, creating them out of whole cloth while we spend the day at the E-Z Lube.
And we’re doing it for much the same reason that the Real Housewives do it. We’re doing it because people are watching—either on Bravo or YouTube or Facebook or Twitter. We’re doing it because there’s a content vacuum that wants to be filled. We’re doing it because all of these tools allows us to be stars. They may call it “social networking,” but that doesn’t make it “social.” Social networks are All About Me.
Still, a lot of people, like the Real Housewife’s Boyfriend who insisted on “talking about this later,” are uncomfortable with all of this self-broadcasting. If you type “How Do I….” into Google, its auto-fill feature will return “…delete my Facebook account” in the top ten suggestions. So, clearly, lots of people want to know how to turn these systems off.
Yet nothing has slowed the growth of these services. Facebook has over 400 million active users. In 2007, Twitter served up about 5,000 Tweets per day. In early 2010, that number was 50 million. And reality television franchises like “The Real Housewives of….” continue to grow. The A&E cable network has a series called “Intervention,” about drug abusers, one called “Hoarders” about compulsive packrats, and an even more bleakly titled show, “The Incurables,” about people who are just plain nuts. A&E has streamlined the process: they don’t need to goad a Real Housewife into acting crazy; they just hire a crazy one in the first place.
So when the Real Housewife’s boyfriend squirmed uncomfortably in front of the camera, he was displaying something increasingly rare.
Shame. Embarrassment. An awareness that one’s public face was something worth protecting, worth holding back. A sense that there’s something dirty about creating “content” for other people out of your own life. That, ultimately, it’s more important to have a character than to be a character.
Of course she broke up with him.
Buy the book here. Worth every penny. On Kindle, too.
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Comments :
Re: Acculturated Me
I didn't have time to read that entire excerpt -- you guys have saddled me up with loads of work today -- but it was incredibly riveting and I read every last word. I found the dialog between you and your E-Z Lube friend to be especially interesting. Do lots of people do that? Just make up stories about what they're doing to be entertaining? Here's a question, Rob: Did you actually have that conversation with Mr. E-Z Lube, or did you make it up to have something entertaining to insert into your essay? I'm all of a sudden very suspicious of everything I read on the interwebs...
Looks like a fun book. So many of my favorite writers collected all in one place.
Mar '11
Re: Acculturated Me
I started to write a comment about how I rarely update my Facebook page because I really have nothing to say. Then I asked myself: "Do I really need to say that?"
Re: Acculturated Me
Better to have nothing to say and to not say anything than to have nothing to say and populate your facebook wall with Farmville updates.
Dec '10
Re: Acculturated Me
Diane Ellis, Ed.
Better to have nothing to say and to not say anything than to have nothing to say and populate your facebook wall with Farmville updates. · Jun 7 at 3:04pm
I hate all the useless crap that people broadcast from their facebook profile.
There is nothing in the world that I care less about than the fact that you earned 15 gold coins in "Civilization". Don't even ask if I want to play too.
The only reason I have an account at all is because it makes it easier to find guys from my fraternity who've landed in far flung places, well, that and it gives me a another free place to pimp my wares business wise.
And yes, I really do like everything I "like" and all the friends I have listed on facebook. That's why the lists are so short.
Honestly, I am constantly amazed at how many people actually notice or even read the stuff I post online. If it weren't for the free advertising component of posting on my work on most forums, I don't think I'd have ever bothered.
EDIT: Diane, that's the generic you, not speaking about you in particular.
I do that a lot, it seems, and it always confuses/enrages people.
Add it to the list of personal ticks I need to fix.
Edited on Jun 7, 2011 at 3:18pmMar '11
Re: Acculturated Me
Diane Ellis, Ed.
Better to have nothing to say and to not say anything than to have nothing to say and populate your facebook wall with Farmville updates. · Jun 7 at 3:04pm
I delete about 80% of the stuff that I'm going to post to this site because either I can't find the right words to express what I'm trying to say or because someone else has already posted something that is close enough to what I was trying to say that my addition seems to have little value.
This site is a lot different from others -- the people are all disturbingly intelligent and well-read. Even the posts or comments that I disagree with are worth thinking about.
That is what annoys me the most about social networking services. They are a little like placer mining -- you get an occasional nugget, a few flakes, and a lot of dross.
Aug '10
Re: Acculturated Me
That is one fine piece of writng Rob, thank you! My copy is on the way.
I have my suspicions about how the sausage is made over at the cable news outlets as well, I suspect a similar dynamic is in place.
Re: Acculturated Me
Percival
Diane Ellis, Ed.
Better to have nothing to say and to not say anything than to have nothing to say and populate your facebook wall with Farmville updates.
I delete about 80% of the stuff that I'm going to post to this site because either I can't find the right words to express what I'm trying to say or because someone else has already posted something that is close enough to what I was trying to say that my addition seems to have little value.
This site is a lot different from others -- the people are all disturbingly intelligent and well-read. Even the posts or comments that I disagree with are worth thinking about.
I say you shouldn't let that stop you from posting. As you've just seen, your initial comment has led to a unique train of thought that sucked in both me and CoolHand. Not to mention, three people "liked" your comment.
Post away!
Oct '10
Re: Acculturated Me
Rob I liked your post, but a minor quibble. You said "That, ultimately, it’s more important to have a character than to be a character." Wouldn't it be better to say 'have character' or 'good character?'
I also belong to Facebook but I rarely post and then usually it's a link to an interesting article on Ricochet or Steynonline.com.
Edited on Jun 7, 2011 at 4:41pmRe: Acculturated Me
TeamAmerica: Rob I liked your post, but a minor quibble. You said "That, ultimately, it’s more important to have a character than to be a character." Wouldn't it be better to say 'have character' or 'good character?'
I also belong to Facebook but I rarely post and then usually it's a link to an interesting article on Ricochet or Steynonline.com. · Jun 7 at 4:40pm
Edited on Jun 07 at 04:41 pm
You're probably right, but I just like the music of the line.
And I'm the same with Facebook -- I never, ever post. Not sure why. I think it's just too exhausting to contemplate all of those responses.
Re: Acculturated Me
Please note my non-response to this question.
May '10
Re: Acculturated Me
Rob Long
TeamAmerica: Rob I liked your post, but a minor quibble. You said "That, ultimately, it’s more important to have a character than to be a character." Wouldn't it be better to say 'have character' or 'good character?'
I also belong to Facebook but I rarely post and then usually it's a link to an interesting article on Ricochet or Steynonline.com. · Jun 7 at 4:40pm
Edited on Jun 07 at 04:41 pm
You're probably right, but I just like the music of the line.
And I'm the same with Facebook -- I never, ever post. Not sure why. I think it's just too exhausting to contemplate all of those responses. · Jun 7 at 4:59pm
Speaking of sharing Ricochet articles on Facebook, the pictures all come out as the blank-faced hat man! You guys have gotta fix that. Make the Facebook interface more seamless and I would share Ricochet articles probably every day.
Jun '10
Re: Acculturated Me
Rob: I think you captured something that bugs me about so-called "reality TV." The only thing "real" about it that non-actors play the roles. But real people don't end up in an exotic locale where they engage in immunity challenges. Real people don't get sent on an international scavenger hunt. Don't get me wrong, while I don't watch regularly I've found Survivor and The Amazing Race to be the most watchable of the reality shows.
Real Wives, on the other hand, is the slimy side of reality TV. Real people live their lives, for the most part, in private. Given that, I find shows like the Real Wives to be exhibitionism by the people on the show and creepily voyeuristic in the audience.
The fact that the boyfriend wanted to discuss their relationship in private is evidence that he has some character and dignity.
Jun '10
Re: Acculturated Me
Searching Amazon for your book and came across what must surely be the nugget from which the Ricochet Code of Conduct sprang: The Rob Long Omnibus Edition of Better Behaviour. Only $43.96, too! What a bargain.
Jun '10
Re: Acculturated Me
Darn it--I can never make these links work!
Sep '10
Re: Acculturated Me
Rob, I've heard that great artists (like Bach) steal from themselves--using and re-working material they've written for other occasions. The reality show boyfriend appeared on your Martini Shot podcast of 4/2/08, and some of the other paragraphs (like the friend at E-Z Lube) on the 3/23/11 podcast, helpfully titled "Lying on Facebook".
No problem with that--it's good material and deserves a bigger audience!
Re: Acculturated Me
It's not stealing. It's repurposing.
(Actually, it was trying out the material...)