Real People

Last night I watched a man reach the lowest point of his already miserable existence and I loved every moment of it. Wracked with sobs behind the wheel of his leased car, he awkwardly punched the dashboard in a burst of existential frustration; this act made the GoPro on his windshield vibrate so violently his presence became pixelated. The scene was as beautiful as it was miserable; I felt bad watching it, but he had brought this pain on himself, having fallen in love with yet another prisoner who was not to be trusted, a bottle blonde who was only using him for his ability to afford Michael Kors watches on credit.

The man was not unique. The man was one of half a dozen featured on this season of WE TV (short for Women’s Entertainment Television)’s “Love After Lockup,” a show I watch religiously even though I loathe television so thoroughly I recently told a friend soliciting scripts I no longer had a desire to write for the medium. “I appreciate the offer,” I said, “but I think I just wanna write prose, not for the teevee [sic]. Too many middle men.”

Scripted television is corrupt — so corrupt I would rather sell expired athletes foot spray on eBay to make a living than attempt to claw my way up its ranks — but unscripted television, when done correctly, can be pure, beautiful. When done correctly, the sheer desperation it exhibits can be so intimate, so palpable, you have to turn your eyes away from its heartbreaking veracity. This level of debased humanity is impossible to replicate in scripted form; really, the only person I’ve ever seen competently do it is Lisa Kudrow in “The Comeback.”

Side Note: Why Kudrow’s performance in “The Comeback” is not unilaterally respected amongst all comedians as one of the best of all time is beyond me. She exhibits pure id; she is harrowingly, painfully, human. The only explanation I can fathom for why “The Comeback” isn’t considered essential viewing amongst the entirety of my peers is because it is a show about a vain, desperate actress clinging to the last remnants of her relevancy, co-created by a former writer and producer of “Sex and the City” — this fact, sadly, relegates it to the “only respected by queers” ghetto. 

I religiously watch, I am addicted to, true reality television because it is the realm of the uncoached, the feral, the honest. People who are not only not in on the joke, but entirely unaware of it. 

One of my favorite reality shows of all time is “MTV True Life,” a program in which there are no in camera confessionals, only stark, observed, existence. “MTV True Life: I’m an Alcoholic” is an episode of television I have undoubtedly seen more times than I have told my mother I love her; the visual of a bloated bottle blonde screaming, in horror, “That was, like, three sips!” when her friend accidentally knocks a bottle of electric blue Mad Dog 20/20 on berber carpet has been forever imprinted on my psyche. 

“MTV True Life” and “Love After Lockup” hit because they satisfy my curiosity about the living environment of the person who buys the bootleg Playboy Bunny blanket I see hanging from the chain link fence surrounding the parking lot of the gas station. Said blanket is placed upon a mattress devoid of a fitted sheet and surrounded by sub-IKEA furniture which was created for function sans form, owned by people who persist for reasons they cannot ascertain. The only dreams they have are unattainable; their reason for being is the hope that one day someone can love them in a way in which they have not yet been loved.

While “MTV True Life” still exists, it is in a different, tainted form; the closest I have come to its heyday in the modern world, a world in which social media has made everyone aware of the camera, is “Love After Lockup.” Recently I watched a woman on it yell swears at one of her myriad siblings while observing the tattoo on her right breast undulate. In blurred script, the tattoo read, simply, “Gary,” a name that has inspired zero sonnets but multiple tit tats. “Pass a drug test, bitch,” her brother retorted, a line no one could write. He said it, and he meant it, ‘cause his sister is a bitch, simple as that — she’s always been one and she’ll always be one, expressing zero remorse upon making her 12 year old nephew sob bitter tears in the back of an American made SUV. 

In scripted entertainment, families quibble but ultimately love one another — even the most loathsome character must somehow possess a semblance of redeemability, even irrationality must be justified. This is not how the world actually works. This is not how people actually are. Every corporately disseminated piece of scripted entertainment you have ever watched, unless created by a (9.99 times out of ten male) auteur, has been micromanaged to the hilt by a gaggle of people who couldn’t tell a story to save their lives, executives who give notes solely to justify their own existences.

Side Note: I have always been befuddled by suits’ desire to know a character’s motivation, background, and impetus for every action, as it implies an empathetic necessity to understand human nuance. The truest way to make it in their field, after all, is to unplug your empathy chip and snap your moral compass in half — why, then, do they pretend to care about the root of the characters their employees create? It’s the same reason why I find it funny how all of Hollywood shuts down during the month of December, a bizarre and insincere deference to religion in a town that, generally speaking, not only ignores but actively defies the existence of god (or, depending how you swing, God). 

Also, TV writers are rarely able to generate dialogue that rings true because they are incapable of parroting reality because they lack experience with those who are different than them — people who microwave singular bowls of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese for sustenance and chug off-brand energy drinks to infuse themselves with the life force required to work non-union service industry jobs (I implore you, if you have not, to watch “MTV True Life: I'm Addicted to Caffeine"; while I will not relegate this imploration to its own side note, know that I feel passionately about it). TV writers go straight from their mothers’ wombs to an Ivy to the keyboard of a Macbook Air and the content they create demonstrates that. Why would you expect someone who has no idea how to make their own coffee to know how to put truthful words in the mouth of someone who was born without a trust fund?

Side Note: A lack of functional knowledge of the poor, of the ill, of the other, rings throughout modern fiction. Sometimes I’ll read pieces in the New Yorker, which I have a subscription to only because, when you finally pull triggie on one of their agonized emails, they give you a free tote bag, which can be sold on eBay for $30, and I will shake my damn head. It’s as if these writers have only read the Wikipedia entry for the word “freak” and colored their characters’ existences accordingly. The works of Ottessa Moshfegh, presented as fresh and challenging, I find, while competently written, hollow and insincere. The distance between the writer and her subject is enormous, insurmountable; I look into this disconnect and see that she went to Barnard AND Brown. It’s the same reason why I dislike the social criticism of Jia Tolentino, another child of privilege whose words, while suffused with alleged awareness, ring empty. Her work both asks and answers the question, why not make the whole collection of essays out of the photo of the woman in a bikini lounging alongside a Palm Springs pool with a copy of “The White Album” lying across her toned stomach?

Side Note to the Side Note: I understand that Joan Didion was born of privilege, too — I once, while in town lobbying for a pro choice organization, walked from my shared room at the Econo Lodge to her enormous childhood home in Sacramento, and judged her accordingly. 

Watching true, undistilled, American misery makes me feel like a landlocked, zenohopophic Margaret Mead; it is what I want to see if I choose to watch something that is not myself in the mirror of the fetid bathroom of my rented apartment. I want to see something that is not my life but is at least familiar, sans the manipulation of a story editor. I can’t party with “The Bachelor,” I can’t party with “Love Island;” it is too contrived, too manipulated, too art directed. 

I realize that it is naïve to think this is true honesty, as anyone observed who is aware of said observation adjusts their behavior to fit what they want the viewer to witness, but it is simply the closest I can come. I am delighted by it, entranced by it. And so I observe.