#19: Is reality TV bad? Don't answer that.
Death By Consumption
9/10/24 - 9/16/24
Folks, we've got a relatively long email today! Hope you don't have plans for the rest of the afternoon. Turns out I had a lot of thoughts about what I watched and read last week. I saw a new movie that was meh, an old movie that was stunning, and read three books somehow ("You read a lot..." my friend said over the weekend — ok just call me a loser without a life, Bennett!!), one book I loved, one that made me question my TV consumption habits, and one I hated. Delicious!
Beetlejuice Beetlejuice (2024) — at Nitehawk Prospect Park
I didn't realize this was mostly a movie for children until I had already popped an edible, so it was too late as I watched in horror as the theater filled up with, like, 9-year-olds. The children seemed to enjoy the movie, though! I really have zero memorable feelings about the experience. It's serviceable. It's definitely a movie. Parts are enjoyable. But it never really does anything to prove why this movie needed to be made, other than general nostalgia and/or money. Still, it's always fun to see Winona Ryder doing her goggle-eyed thing. Michael Keaton doesn't age. And Jenna Ortega... I still don't get it. Why do people love her so much? I'm sorry, but I do not see it! Perhaps I'm simply too old and grumpy for this movie. I can live with that!
Klute (1971) — on Criterion
Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland: now these are actors! I had no idea this was Jane Fonda's first Oscar-winning role, but it doesn't take long to see why. In lesser hands, the story — about a "high-priced call girl" working with a private eye investigating a missing john who may or may not be stalking her — could have dismissed her character as a damsel in distress, someone to be pitied, or a joke. Instead, Jane gives a shocking amount of depth to the character, way more than was written into the script. Sure, the film's view of sex work is a bit dated and simplistic, if not moralistic, but Jane makes her character feel larger than the movie, like a real woman, not just a Hollywood portrayal of a sex worker. (Reportedly, Jane Fonda tried to back out of the movie and get them to cast Faye Dunaway instead, since she didn't feel comfortable playing a sex worker as a feminist. Which is just some very good Faye Dunaway shade from Jane.)
The movie is a tense, paranoid thriller, but one where the mystery and central plot barely factor into your enjoyment — instead, it's all about vibes and character development, and capturing the mood of the times. It's shot beautifully, all shadows and angles and tension, with a score that adds to the creeping feeling that something or someone bad lurks just around the corner. It's a movie perfectly made for the Nixon era, but also our own — 50 years later, there's still nothing more likely to make an American spiral into paranoia than your phone ringing from an unknown number.
"Love Is Blind: UK" season 1 — on Netflix
Unfortunately, I remain obsessed with this series. I don't know why it has managed to capture me, over pretty much all other dating shows (I've only ever seen one episode of The Bachelor in my life!). Perhaps it's the structure: the way we go from "the pods" (lol), to the vacation where the couples get to know each other in person, to real life, to the altar, is just a simple way to gradually unspool their different personalities and preferences, and to steadily ratchet up the tension. By the end of each season, I always have strong feelings about exactly what is wrong with each person, and I feel so certain in my impressions of their personality issues that I truly believe I should receive an honorary psych PhD.
The UK version provided a few welcome twists on the US version — for one, the accents. I know almost nothing about the UK class system, but that didn't stop me from loudly proclaiming things like, "Tom and Maria will never work, her accent is too poor for him!" (I was right btw.) But more importantly, these people were almost all in their 30s, rather than the early-20s idiots the US casts, so it felt like there were real stakes involved for many of them. Some of these people had gray (sorry, grey) hair! Many of them felt like they were actually there to find a spouse, which is, of course, insane. In a few weeks, we'll be treated to another US season, with people from DC, and I am genuinely terrified to encounter them.
To Shake The Sleeping Self: A Journey From Oregon to Patagonia, and a Quest for a Life with No Regret, by Jedediah Jenkins (2018) — paperback
Some books shouldn’t be written. First, let me defend myself: I’ve had this on my bookshelf for longer than I can remember, with no recollection of picking it up. There was a bookmark shoved inside, which had the contact info for a bookstore in Marrakech, so maybe I got it there? But I don’t even remember stepping foot inside a bookstore in Marrakech, and now that I think of it, I was in Morocco before this book was published. Perhaps, as author Jedediah Jenkins would tell me, the book arrived on my shelf via divine intervention. However it showed up in my house, I decided to bring it along on my hiking trip last week because I love a themed consumption moment so why not read about someone who biked from Oregon to Patagonia? That’s kind of like hiking for a couple days in Washington, right?
The book was, at best, a standard-issue travelogue, like a very long blog post, one in which the writing quality didn’t leave me surprised when the author bio at the end listed one of his jobs as “an Instagram personality.” (I honestly can’t say I’ve ever seen someone put that in their author bio before! Congrats?) Most bizarrely, he vaguely mentions how this all got started due to his involvement with a “documentary about a warlord in Uganda that went viral” which had me like… was this dude behind the Kony 2012 nonsense? And he’s just trying to sneak that by us?!
There was a shocking amount of God stuff in here, as the book sneakily transitions from a travelogue to a story of a man grappling with how to be gay and be a Christian at the same time. And then, like the trip itself, it just kind of ends. He still seems conflicted about being gay (he doesn’t so much as kiss a boy on the entire trip! For like 18 months!), and he’s definitely still a Christian. He agonizes about how his mother is handling the fact that he’s gay — she says a lot of vaguely hateful things to him throughout the book, with zero pushback from him — but he ends it all just kind of being like, my mom is amazing even though she won’t let me talk about the fact that I’m gay with her! Truly, such an inspiring lesson to leave us with. Memoirs don't need a pat, happy ending, but to arrive at the end basically in the same emotional place you started but with more Instagram followers, feels more than a little cheap. If you're going to write a book, it should at least feel like a book, you know?
I’m sure this must have appealed to someone out there. His Instagram followers, whoever they are? Gay Christian men who are scared of their mothers? Mostly, he’s just lucky that I was trapped in the wilderness with nothing else to read.
Walking Through Clear Water in a Pool Painted Black: Collected Stories, by Cookie Mueller (new edition, 2022) — paperback
Cookie Mueller, star of many of John Waters’ films, writer, NYC queer personality extraordinaire, was someone whose name was familiar to me but nothing much beyond that. I’m so glad I picked up this book on a whim, because now I can’t get Cookie’s delightful voice out of my head.
This collection, a new edition by independent press Semiotext(e), is called a collection of stories, which suggests fictional short stories, but the lines are blurred. I was never quite sure which story was a work of fiction, which was a factual retelling of something real from her life, and which was a blurring of both. Further complicating it, there are also parts of her writing for Details and for the Village Voice, tongue-in-cheek advice columns in which she mostly prescribes various teas and herbal remedies for even the worst problems (the cure for lethargy and/or syphilis? Vitamin D!). But I didn't mind any of the blurring of fact and fiction. I was happy to go anywhere Cookie would take me.
The stories are shocking at times — and here is where I should issue a trigger warning, as rapes happen almost casually in the book, though you can sense the characters (Cookie herself?) have more complicated feelings about it than we’re let in on — and laced with LCD, heroin, coke, meth, or some combo of those, plus whatever other drugs are lying around. It’s a wild, extremely enjoyable ride through the mind of a downtown NYC genius, the kind that doesn’t really exist anymore, and of the early queer scene. Things just seem to happen — all in the same day, Cookie meets the Manson Family girls, does LSD, rides with the Grateful Dead to San Quentin prison for a concert, does heroin, does peyote, meets a Satanist summoning a footman of Beelzebub, takes a bath, goes to a Jim Morrison concert, gets raped, and ends the night on cocaine and meth. In one day! As a reader, you just have to hang tight and try not get left in the dust by her, but as Cookie (or one of her characters?) shrugs, “Why does everybody think I’m so wild? I’m not wild. I happen to stumble into wildness. It gets in my path.” (God help us when the TikTok girlies discover this quote.)
Of course, because she was living and writing in the gay 70s and 80s, this means it all has to come to a brutal end with AIDS, which is what ultimately killed Cookie, too. Towards the end, she keeps circling back to the idea of mourning the cultural loss of all the brilliant gay men around her that we are losing to AIDS, perhaps writing it without yet knowing that she would soon join their ranks. Thankfully we have this monument to her distinct and undeniable voice, one where her personality spills off the pages. She is, quite simply, a really good hang, and I wish we had more time with her.
Cue The Sun!: The Invention of Reality TV, by Emily Nussbaum (2024) — hardcover
I’m… well, you could say somewhat familiar with the reality TV world, so I wondered how much of this, Pulitzer Prize-winner Emily Nussbaum’s history of the invention of reality TV, would be new to me, and I was pleasantly surprised. (I particularly enjoyed the way she described reality TV at the start of the book: “cinema vérité filmmaking that has been cut with commercial contaminants, like a street drug, in order to slash the price and intensify the effect.”) For one, she grounds us in the history of reality-esque programming on radio 100 years ago, which seems like a bit of a stretch, until you see how all the dusty old radio dudes were pulling out the “This is the end of civilization” and “Culture is trashy” takes even back then. We’ve really never changed!
If you’re less familiar with the staples of the genre, you’ll definitely get more than I did out of the book — she dedicates each chapter to a different show or types of shows, but Survivor gets two well-deserved chapters to itself, in which, unfortunately for my pathetic ass, I already knew every single fact she reported. But the issue I have is less with the actual book and more with the concept of trying to summarize the apparently 100-year history of reality TV: it’s just so messy, and other than the mega-boom that came after Survivor, there aren’t many easy-to-explain “moments,” just a lot of flailing by various individuals and corporate entities. Nussbaum does a great job organizing it all, but you can feel a much, much larger book peeking around the edges the entire time, one that I’m sure publishers would have hated, but I would have welcomed. (Like, you can’t just drop a reference to a reality show called World's Biggest Bitches and not give us at least a paragraph or two on what the deal was with that whole thing.)
The weighting of what is important to the story is also slightly off: we get a lot of (incredibly fascinating, let’s be fair) details on the attempts at “reality TV” in the 60s, 70s, and 80s, but by the end we’re zipping through entire mega-eras in a page or two. The Housewives get brief, jokey mentions, as do the Kardashians, when there is obviously so much more to say about all of their effects on culture and the genre — the shift from one-off reality personalities to reality-star-as-full-time-job, which of course begat our everyone-is-an-influencer culture, for example.
Obviously, that could all be its own book in itself (and probably has been, many times over), so I get why we breezed past it all, but we then spent the final chapter fixating on the rise of The Apprentice and Trump, which, ugh. I get the appeal (especially since you need a pat little end to a book about a genre that’s only continuing to grow, and nothing says “it’s time to end this book” than “ok sorry but we have to talk about Trump again”), but it’s an extremely unpleasant ending note, and well-trodden territory at this point. He used the N-word on set and sexually harassed all the women, Mark Burnett buried it, and none of that will change his supporters’ minds, sorry. It mostly felt like she tried to avoid ending on Trump and then, as he tends to do, he sucked up all the oxygen and left her no choice. And now here I am, also writing about him, when I don't want to be. I'm sick of this guy!
It's hard to escape the conclusion by the end of the book that reality TV has, in aggregate, been bad for society. For all the examples where the genre pushes society forward — like Pedro Zamora on The Real World making the country finally fall in love with a gay man dying of AIDS — there are thousands of examples in which reality TV has genuinely destroyed lives. Is the tradeoff worth it? Hard to say. Is any of this new information? Not really! And yet, hearing so many individual stories throughout the book of cast and crew members who have gone through hell for our entertainment, you do have to sit with your complicity in their suffering. I have always felt — and feel more strongly after reading this — that the cast and crew of reality shows should somehow be unionized, for their protection. What that looks like, though, I don't know (I do know it does not involve Bethenny Frankel as a leader). But the small changes we're starting to see are a good start, like my beloved Survivor agreeing to have 50% POC casts and 40% POC crew members (only after public pushback from almost every single Black former contestant, but still).
Who knows, maybe I'm just rationalizing away my continued enjoyment of the genre. Unfortunately for everyone, even in written form the suffering of a random crew member is less interesting than reading about the stupid shit Steve-O did on Jackass. Reality TV is and will forever be undeniably interesting and complicated, because humans are undeniably interesting and complicated, especially when put under pressure. But if nothing else, trying to unionize reality TV would make for an interesting reality TV show.