Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television (4 page)

The Judd-Pam undercurrent is part of the reason I consider
Real World 3: San Francisco
the best-ever
RW,
but that’s not the only reason. Central to my affinity for
RW 3
is a wholly personal issue: The summer it premiered was the summer following my college graduation. I had just moved to a town where I knew almost no one, and my cable was installed the afternoon of
The Real World
season premiere. The first new friends I made were Cory and Pedro, and I rode with them on a train to California. And I pretty much hated both of them (or at least Cory) immediately.

In truth, there wasn’t any member of
RW 3
I particularly liked, and I couldn’t relate to any of them, except maybe Rachel (and only because she was a bad Catholic). But I became emotionally attached to these people in a very authentic way, and I think it was because I started noticing that the cast members on
RW 3
were not like people from my past. Instead, they seemed like new people I was meeting in the present.

Because
The Real World
has now been going on for a decade—and because of
Survivor
and
Big Brother
and
The Mole
and
Temptation Island
and
The Osbournes
—the idea of “reality TV” is now something everyone understands. Without even trying, American TV watchers have developed an amazingly sophisticated view of postmodernism, even if they would never use the word
postmodern
in any conversation (or even be able to define it).
¹⁴
However, this was still a new idea in 1994. And what’s important about
RW 3
is that it was the first time MTV quit trying to pretend it wasn’t on television.

Here’s what I mean by that: I once read a movie review by Roger Ebert for the film
Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back
. Early in the review, Ebert makes a tangential point about whether or not film characters are theoretically “aware” of
other
films and
other
movie characters. Ebert only touches on this issue casually, but it’s probably the most interesting philosophical question ever asked about film grammar. Could Harrison Ford’s character in
What Lies Beneath
rent
Raiders of the Lost Ark
? Could John Rambo draw personal inspiration from
Rocky
? In
Desperately Seeking Susan,
what is Madonna hearing when she goes to a club and dances to her own song? Within the reality of one specific fiction, how do other fictions exist?

The Real World
deals with an identical problem, but in a completely opposite way: They have a nonfiction situation that is supposed to have no relationship to other nonfictions. They have to behave as if what they’re doing hasn’t been done before.
Real World
ers always get into arguments, but you never hear them say, “Oh, you’re only saying that because you know this is going to be on TV,” even though that would be the best comeback 90 percent of the time. No one would ever compare a housemate to a cast member from a different season, even when such comparisons seem obvious. The kids talk directly into the camera every single day, but they are ceaselessly instructed to pretend as if they are not being videotaped whenever they’re outside the confessional. Most of all, they never openly recognize that they’re part of a cultural phenomenon; they never mention how weird it is that people are watching them exist. Every
Real World
cast exists in a vacuum.

That illusion started to crack in
RW 3
. That’s also when the show’s mentality started to leak into the social bloodstream.

The reason this occurred in San Francisco is because two of the housemates, Puck and Pedro, never allowed themselves to slip into
The Real World
’s fabricated portrait of reality; they were always keenly cognizant of how they could use this program to forward their goals. Depending on your attitude, Pedro’s agenda was either altruistic (i.e., personalizing the HIV epidemic), self-aggrandizing (he was doggedly focused on achieving martyrdom status), or a little of both (which is probably closest to the mark). Meanwhile, Puck’s agenda was entirely negative, any way you slice it; he wanted to become the show’s first “breakout star” (a
Real World
Fonzie, if you will), and he succeeded at that goal by actively trying to wreck the entire project. In a show about living together, he tried to be impossible to live with. But in at least one way, Pedro and Puck were identical: Both of these guys immediately saw that they could design their own TV show by developing a script within their head. They fashioned themselves as caricatures.

Ironically, they both attacked each other for doing this. By the ninth episode, Puck was breaking the fourth wall by suggesting that Pedro was trying to force his message down the throats of viewers; no one had ever implied something like this before. Without being too obvious,
The Real World
producers relaxed the reins and gave up on the notion that this show was somehow organic; a decision was made to let Puck and Pedro fight over the future identity of
The Real World
. Puck represented the idea of a show where everyone was openly fake and we all knew it was a sham; Pedro represented the aesthetic of a show where what we saw was mostly fake, but we would agree to watch it as if it was totally real. It was almost a social contract. To feel Pedro’s pain (as Bill Clinton supposedly did), you had to suspend your disbelief— a paradoxical requirement for a reality program.

In the end, Puck’s asinine subversion turned everyone against him with too much voracity. He was jettisoned from the house in episode eleven, appearing only sporadically for the remainder of the season. Pedro remained in the residence and became MTV’s shining moment of the 1990s; he proved himself as an educational hero with a mind-blowing flair for the dramatic (the fact that he died the day after the final episode aired is almost as eerie as Charles Schulz dying the day before the final
Peanuts
strip ran in newspapers). Though the second half of the
RW 3
season (after Puck’s departure) is considerably less entertaining than its first half, it’s probably good Puck was booted. He would have destroyed the show. In fact, whenever a member of a
Real World
cast has tried to subvert the premise of the program—Puck, Seattle’s Irene,
¹⁵
Hawaii’s Justin
¹⁶
—they’ve never made it through an entire season. If they did, it would have turned something charmingly silly into a complete farce. But as long as that unspoken agreement remains between the show and the audience— they pretend to be normal people, we pretend to believe them—
The Real World
works as both bubblegum sociology and a sculptor of human behavior… which brings me back to what I was saying about how almost everyone I meet has suddenly turned into a
Real World
cast member.

It all became clear in 1994, during
RW 3
: I had just graduated from college the previous spring and was residing in Fargo, a town I was logistically familiar with despite knowing virtually no one who lived there. However, Fargo is only an hour’s drive from Grand Forks, North Dakota (the college town where I attended school), so I drove back to “rock” every other weekend. I’d cut out of work early and arrive in G.F. around 4:30 P.M.; I’d spring for a case of Busch pounders (I was now making $18,500 a year and was therefore unspeakably rich) and I’d sit around with a revolving door of acquaintances in someone’s shithole apartment. We’d load up on Busch until it was time to go to the local uncool sports bar (Jonesy’s) at 8:00, which was where you went before hitting the hipster bar (Whitey’s) at around 10:20. Not unlike the summer of 1992, there was no real activity: We’d just sit around and listen to the dying days of grunge, fondly reminiscing about things that had happened in the very recent past. But sometimes I’d notice something weird, especially if strangers stumbled into our posse: Everyone was adopting a singularity to their selfawareness. When I had first arrived at college in 1990, one of the things I loved was the discovery of people who seemed impossible to categorize; I’d meet a guy watching a Vikings-Packers game in the TV room, only to later discover that he was obsessed with Fugazi, only to eventually learn that he was a gay born-again Christian. There was a certain collegiate cachet to being a walking contradiction. But somehow
The Real World
leaked out of those TV sets when Puck shattered the glass barrier between his life and ours. People started becoming personality templates, devoid of complication and obsessed with melodrama. I distinctly recall drinking with two girls in a Grand Forks tavern while they discussed their plan to “confront” a third roommate about her “abrasive” behavior. How did that become a normal way to talk? Who makes plans to “confront” a roommate? To me, it was obvious where this stuff came from: It came from
Real World
people. It was
Real World
culture. It’s a microcosm of the United Nations, occupied by seven underdeveloped countries trying to force the others to recognize their right to exist.

During that very first summer of
The Real World,
everyone kept telling me I should try to get on
RW 2
. They gave the same advice to my hot dog–eating roommate. I suspect this was meant to be a compliment to both of us; when people tell you that you should be on a reality program, they’re basically saying you’re crazy enough to amuse total strangers. I was always flattered by this suggestion, and I used to fantasize about being cast on
The Real World,
imagining that it would make me famous. What I failed to realize is that being a former member of
The Real World
is the worst kind of fame. There is no financial upside; it offers no artistic credibility or mainstream adoration or easy sex. Basically, the only reward is that people will (a) point at you in public, and (b) ask you about absolutely nothing else until the day you die, when your participation in a cable television program becomes the lead item in your obituary. You will be the kind of person who suddenly gets recognized at places like Burger King, but you will still be the kind of person who eats at places like Burger King.

Once you’ve been on TV, nothing else matters. If Flora from Miami wrote the twenty-first-century version of
Anna Karenina,
she’d still be known as the loud-mouthed bitch who fell through the bathroom window. Almost a dozen ex–
Real World
ers have pursued careers in music, all with a jump-start from MTV. None have succeeded; their combined album sales would be dwarfed by Arrested Development’s live album. Eric Nies and Puck managed to stay in the spotlight for a few extra milliseconds, but they both went bankrupt. It appears that the highest residual success one can achieve from a
Real World
stint is that of being asked to compete in a
Real World
/
Road Rules
challenge. All these people are forever doomed to the one-dimensional qualities that made them famous nobodies. The idea that they could do anything else seems impossible.

This is why I could never be on
The Real World,
no matter how much I love watching it. I could never filter every experience through my singular, self-conscious individuality. Yet part of me fears this will happen anyway; I fear that
The Real World
’s unipersonal approach will become so central to American life that I’ll need a singular persona just to make conversation with whatever media-saturated robot I end up marrying. Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable. I guess my only hope is to find myself an Alabama Julie, whose wonderfully one-dimensional naïveté will be impressed by the unpretentious way I vomit out the window.

1
. An obvious example: White kids using the word like
phat
unironically.

2
. Kevin from
RW 1,
Kameelah from
RW 6,
Coral from
RW 10,
etc.

3
. Norman, Beth, Pedro, Dan, Chris, et al.

4
. Julie, Elka, that big-toothed Mormon, the girl with perfect lips from Louisiana, and Trishelle.

5
. Joe from Miami.

6
. Judd from San Francisco.

7
. Dominic from L.A.

8
. Kind of like that dork from Hawaii who fell in love with the alcoholic lesbian and then dated her sister.

9
. Theoretically Ruthie, the drunk chick from Hawaii—although (in truth) she was actually more reasonable than everyone else in that house.

10
. Cory in San Fran, all the other girls from Hawaii, Tonya from Chicago, and every other female who spends at least two episodes of any season staring at a large body of water.

11
. Julie from the first NYC cast, the blonde from New Orleans, Kevin in the second set of New Yorkers, and Frank from Vegas.

12
. I say “seemingly” because this argument appears totally superficial— until you find out the context: It happened during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, a fact that MTV never mentioned. As a rule,
The Real World
does not deal with the issue of context very well, consciously skewing it much of the time. When David (the black comedian in Los Angeles
)
was kicked out for “sexually harassing” future NBA groupie Tami in
RW 2,
the viewing audience is given the impression that he had been living in the house for weeks. In truth, it happened almost immediately after everyone moved in.

13
. Relatively speaking.

14
. This is partially because everyone who
does
use
postmodern
in casual conversation seems to define it differently, usually in accordance with whatever argument they’re trying to illustrate. I think the best definition is the simplest: “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, art.” So when I refer to something as
postmodern,
that’s usually what I mean. I realize some would suggest that an even better definition is “Any art that is conscious of the fact that it is, in fact, product,” but that strikes me as needlessly cynical.