Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto Read online

  Now, this dude who ate the hot dogs…he was an excellent roommate. He didn’t care about anything remotely practical. When two people live together, there’s typically an unconscious Odd Couple relationship: There’s always one fastidious guy who keeps life organized, and there’s always one chaotic guy who makes life wacky and interesting. Somehow, the hot dog eater and I both fit into the latter category. In our lives, there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. We would consciously choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available; we would write phone messages on the walls; we would vomit out the window. And this was a basement apartment.

  Obviously, we rarely argued about the living conditions.

  We did, however, argue about everything else. Constantly. We’d argue about H. Ross Perot’s chances in the upcoming presidential election, and we’d argue about whether there were fewer Jews in the NBA than logic should dictate. We argued about the merits of dog racing, dogfighting, cockfighting, affirmative action, legalized prostitution, the properties of ice, chaos theory, and whether or not water had a discernible flavor. We argued about how difficult it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled. We argued about partial-birth abortion, and we argued about the possibility of Trent Reznor committing suicide and/or being gay. We once got into a vicious argument over whether or not I had actually read all of an aggrandizing Guns N’ Roses biography within the scope of a single day, an achievement my hot dog–gorged roommate claimed was impossible (that particular debate extended for all of July). Mostly, we argued about which of us was better at arguing, and particularly about who had won the previous argument.

  Perhaps this is why we were both enraptured by that summer’s debut of MTV’s The Real World, an artistic product that mostly seemed like a TV show about people arguing. And these people were terrible arguers; the seven cast members thrown into that New York loft always made ill-conceived points and got unjustifiably emotional, and they all seemed to take everything much too personally. But the raw hot dog eater and I watched these people argue all summer long, and then we watched them argue again in the summer of 1993, and then again in the summer of 1994. Technically, these people were completely different every year, but they were also exactly the same. And pretty soon it became clear that the producers of The Real World weren’t sampling the youth of America—they were unintentionally creating it. By now, everyone I know is one of seven defined strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Real World is the real world is The Real World is the real world. It’s the same true story, even when it isn’t.

  I tend to consider myself an amateur Real World scholar. I say “amateur” because I’ve done no actual university study on this subject, but I still say “scholar” because I’ve stopped watching the show as entertainment. At this point, I only watch it in hopes of unlocking the questions that have haunted man since the dawn of civilization. I’ve seen every episode of every season, and I’ve seen them all a minimum of three times. This, of course, is the key to appreciating The Real World (and the rest of MTV’s programming): repetition. To really get it, you have to watch MTV so much that you know things you never tried to remember. You can’t try to deduce the day-to-day habits of Jon Brennan (he was the cowboy dude) from RW 2: Los Angeles. That would be ridiculous. You can’t consciously try to figure out what he likes and what he hates and how he lives; these are things you have to know without trying. You just have to “know” he constantly drinks cherry Kool-Aid. But you can’t try to learn that, because that would make you a weirdo. This kind of knowledge is like a vivid dream you suddenly pull out of the cosmic ether, eight hours after waking up. If someone asks you when Montana from RW 6: Boston exposed her breasts, you just sort of vaguely recall it was on a boat; if someone asks you who the effeminate black guy from Seattle slapped in the face, you inexplicably know it was the chick with Lyme disease. Yet these are not bits of information you actively acquired; these are things picked up the same way you sussed out how to get around on the subway, or the way you figured out how to properly mix Bloody Marys. One day, you just suddenly realize it’s something you know. And—somehow—there’s a cold logic to it. It’s an extension of your own life, even though you never tried to make it that way.

  In 1992, The Real World was supposed to be that kind of calculated accident; it was theoretically created as a seamless extension of reality. But somewhere that relationship became reversed; theory was replaced by practice. During that first RW summer, I saw kids on MTV who reminded me of people I knew in real life. By 1997, the opposite was starting to happen; I kept meeting new people who were like old Real World characters. I’ve met at least six Pucks in the past five years. This doesn’t mean they necessarily talk about snot or eat peanut butter with their hands; what it means is they play The Puck Role. In any given situation, they will provide The Puck Perspective, and they will force those around them to Confront The Puck Paradigm. If nothing else, The Real World has provided avenues for world views that are both specialized and universal, and it has particularly validated world views that are patently unreasonable.

  Part of me is hesitant to write about cast members from The Real World in any specific sense, because I realize few Americans have studied (or even seen) all twelve seasons of the show. You hear a lot of people say things like they watched most of the first two seasons, or that they watched every season up until Miami, or that they never started watching until the San Francisco season, or that they’ve only seen bits and pieces of the last three years and tend to get the casts mixed up. For most normal TV watchers, The Real World is an obsession that fades at roughly the same rate as denim. I’ve noticed that much of the program’s original 1992 audience gets especially bored whenever a modern cast starts to talk like teenage aliens.1 Last year, an old friend told me she’s grown to hate the Real World because, “MTV used to pick people for that show who I could relate to. Now they just have these stupid little kids who act like selfish twits.” This was said by a woman—now a responsible twenty-nine-year-old software specialist—who once threw a drink into the face of her college roommate for reasons that could never be explained. It’s hard for most people to hang with a show that so deeply bathes in a fountain of youth.

  However, another part of me realizes there’s no risk whatsoever in pointing out specific RW cast members, even to people who’ve never seen the show once: You don’t need to know the people I’m talking about, because you know the people I’m talking about. And I don’t mean you know them in the ham-fisted way MTV casts them (i.e., “The Angry Black Militant”2 or “The Gay One”3 or “The Naive Virginal Southerner Who’s Vaguely Foxy”4 When I say “you know these people,” it’s because the personalities on The Real World have become the only available personalities for everyone who’s (a) alive and (b) under the age of twenty-nine.

  Our cultural preparation for a Real World universe actually started in movie theaters during the eighties, particularly with two films that both came out in 1985: The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. These seminal portraits were what The Real World was supposed to be like, assuming MTV could find nonfictional people who would have interesting conversations on a semiregular basis. Like most RW casts, The Breakfast Club broke teen culture into five segments that were laughably stereotypical (and—just in case you somehow missed what they were—Anthony Michael Hall pedantically explains it all in the closing scene). St. Elmo’s Fire used many of the same actors, but it evolved their personalities by five years and made them more (ahem) “philosophically complex.” Here is where we see the true genesis of future Real World ians. With Judd Nelson, we have the respected social climber doomed to fail ethically;5 with Andrew McCarthy, the sensitive, self-absorbed guy who works hard at being bitter.6 Rob Lowe is the self-destru
ctive guy we’re somehow supposed to envy;7 Emilio Estevez is the romantic that all chumps are supposed to identify with, mostly because he’s obsessed with his own obviousness.8 Demi Moore is fucked up and pathetic,9 but Mare Winningham is even more pathetic because she aspires to be fucked up.10 Ally Sheedy is too normal to have these friends11 (or, I suppose, to be in this particular movie).

  If we were to combine these two films—in other words, if we were to throw the St. Elmo’s kids into all-day Saturday detention—we’d have a pretty good Real World. It’s been noted that one of the keys to Alfred Hitchcock’s success as a filmmaker was that he didn’t draw characters as much as he drew character types; this is how he normalized the cinematic experience. It’s the same way with The Real World. The show succeeds because it edits malleable personalities into flat, twenty-something archetypes. What interests me is the way those archetypes so quickly became the normal way for people of my generation to behave.

  It’s become popular for Real World revisionists to claim that the first season was the only truly transcendent RW, the argument being that this was the singular year its cast members actually acted “real.” In a broad sense, that’s accurate: Since that first Real World was entirely new, no one knew what it was going to look like (or how it would be received). Nobody in the original New York loft was able to formulate an agenda on purpose. Logically, this should make for great television. In practice, it doesn’t translate: In truth, RW 1 is mostly dull. It was fascinating in 1992 because of the novelty, but it doesn’t stand up over time.

  I’ll concede that the cast on the first Real World were the only ones who didn’t constantly play to the camera; only hunky model Eric Neis did so on an episode-to-episode basis, but one gets the impression this was just his normal behavior. While the actual filming was taking place, I have no doubt the seven loft-dwellers were clueless about what the final product would look like on television; that certainly fostered the possibility for spontaneous “reality,” and there are glimpses of that throughout RW 1. The problem is that hard reality tends to be static: On paper, the conversations from that virgin Real World would make for a terrible script. In fact, the greatest moments from the first Real World are when nothing is going on at all—the awkwardness becomes transfixing, not unlike the sensation of sitting in an airport and watching someone read a newspaper. Yet if every cast of The Real World has been as “real” as that first New York ensemble, the show would have only lasted two seasons.

  Ironically, the reason RW flourished is because its telegenic humanoids became less complex with every passing season. Multifaceted people do not translate within The Real World format. Future cast members figured this out when that initial season finally aired and it was immediately obvious that only two personalities mattered: Alabama belle Julie and angry African-American Kevin. The only truly compelling episode from the first season came in week eleven, when Julie and Kevin had an outdoor screaming match over a seemingly random race issue.12 But the fight itself wasn’t the key. What was important was the way it galvanized two archetypes that would become cornerstones for late-twentieth-century youth: the educated automaton and the likable anti-intellectual. Those two personality sects are suddenly everywhere, and they’re both children of The Real World.

  Obviously, Kevin embodies the former attitude and Julie embodies the latter. And—almost as obviously—neither designation is particularly accurate. Kevin became a solid hip-hop writer for Vibe and Rolling Stone, and he’s far less robotic than he appears on The Real World. Meanwhile, Julie was never a backwater hick (I interviewed her in 1995, and I honestly suspect she might be the savviest person in the show’s history). But within the truncated course of those thirteen original episodes, we are led to believe that (a) Kevin is obsessed with racial identity and attempts to inject his blackness into every conversation, while (b) Julie adores anything remotely new and abhors everything remotely pretentious.

  Kevin’s Huey Newton–like image can’t be blamed entirely on him: The Real World is unnaturally obsessed with race. And what’s disheartening is that The Real World is so consumed with creating racial tension that it often makes black people look terrible: If your only exposure to diversity was Coral and Nicole from the 2001 “Back to New York” RW cast, you’d be forced to assume all black women are blithering idiots. This is partially because the only black characters who get valuable RW airtime are the ones who refuse to talk about anything else. It’s the same situation for homosexual cast members—their Q factor is completely dependent on how aggressively gay they’re willing to act. In that first NYC season, Norman is immediately identified as bisexual, but he’s not bisexual enough; he only gets major face time when he’s dating future TV talk-show host Charles Perez. Future queer cast members would not make this mistake; for people like AIDS victim Pedro Zamora and Dan from RW 5: Miami, being gay was pretty much their only personality trait. Perhaps more than anything else, this is the ultimate accomplishment of The Real World: It has validated the merits of having a one-dimensional personality. In fact, it has made that kind of persona desirable, because other one-dimensional personalities can more easily understand you.

  If you believe Real World producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jon Murray, they don’t look for troublemakers when they make casting decisions. They insist they simply cast for “diversity.” But this is only true in a macro sense—they want obvious diversity. They want physical diversity, or sexual diversity, or economic diversity. What they have no use for is intellectual diversity. A Renaissance man (or woman) need not apply to this program. You need to be able to deduce who a given Real World er represents socially before the second commercial break of the very first episode, which gives you about eighteen minutes of personality. It was very easy to make RW 1 Kevin appear one-dimensional, even if that portrayal wasn’t accurate; he gave them enough “race card” material to ignore everything else. Thus, Kevin became the inadvertent model for thousands and thousands of future Real World applicants—these are the people who looked at themselves in the mirror and thought, “I could get on that show. I could be the _____guy.”

  The “_____” became almost anything: race, gender, geographic origin, sexual appetite, etc. There was suddenly an unspoken understanding that every person in the Real World house was supposed to fit some kind of highly specific—but completely one-dimensional—persona. In his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers writes about how he tried to get on Real World 3: San Francisco, but was beaten out by Judd. Coincidentally, both of those guys were cartoonists. But the larger issue is that they were both liberal and sensitive, and they were both likely to be the kind of guy who would fall in love with a female housemate who only perceived him as a good friend. This is exactly the person Judd became; there is now a famous13 scene from that third season where Judd is rowing a boat and longingly stares at roommate Pam and her boyfriend, Christopher, as they paddle alongside in a similar watercraft. Months after the conclusion of RW 3, Pam broke up with Chris and fell in love with Judd, which is (a) kind of bizarre, but mostly (b) exactly what MTV dreams of having happen during any given season. Whenever I see repeat episodes of RW 3, I find myself deconstructing every casual conversation Judd and Pam have, because I know a secret they don’t—eighteen months later, they will have sex. It’s sort of like seeing old Judas Priest videos on VH1 Classic and looking for signs of Rob Halford’s homosexuality.

  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, a
nd 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.