Then the grand event unspools, in all its gargantuan tasteless glory. Viewers are treated to much blurry party footage and disputes over would-be party crashers, replete with a drunken teen pronouncing it all “the best party ever” before toddling back to the dance floor for more semiconscious crotch-grinding. And then, like clockwork, the main celebrant drunkenly sums things up: all the kids in the house — and various, ill-defined “haters” — are mortally afflicted with envy. Invariably, all the garish soullessness culminates in the never-deserving child’s receipt of a yacht-sized luxury SUV, a moment that induces bulimia by proxy. At least that’s what I assume that whole throwing-up-in-the-mouth feeling is.
Arousing viewer contempt is the whole morbid point of something like My Super Sweet Sixteen. With reality producers already carelessly ransacking through so much of the human psyche — be it the conniving one-upmanship of Survivor or the thoughtlessly rapacious megalomania of The Apprentice — all that appears to remain are the smooth and lurid surfaces of the moneyed life. The logic of the genre has landed it in an utterly predictable spiritual cul-de-sac, where the complicit participants are at a loss to show viewers anything but the money.
And that impulse, in turn, seems to be short-circuiting the genre’s most basic formal premises. Indeed, in a little-noted development, the brutally scripted rounds of “reality” television and the “real” scandal fare of celebrity culture are merging indistinguishably into a new sub (or is it supra?) genre: the pseudo-reality show, a quasi-fictional TV series that pretends to be about the real lives of ordinary — or, you know, MTV-ordinary — people. And indeed, MTV itself is the pioneer, with the hit California teen melodramas The Hills (as in Beverly) and Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County. (For the record, The Hills is an alleged spin-off of Laguna Beach; but it’s perhaps best left to epistemologists to ponder how you can produce a derivative creative product of something that was never really trying to be real — or creative — to begin with.)
Both shows labor mightily to create the impression that their characters — an interchangeable battery of young and rich SoCal Jasons, Jordans, Laurens, and Sierras — are experiencing real-life angst in real time. But they also belie the whole conceit with brazenly contrived dramatic situations and character conflicts, carefully lighted shots of made-up cast members from multiple camera angles — and, one assumes, dialogue captured via multiple boom mikes. No one associated with either project has much bothered to defend its alleged reality.
But the reality quotient of these new hybrids isn’t the point. They serve as oddly pure distillations of the demand that most reality voyeurism tickles, without ever quite fulfilling: the paring down of human nature into inert and formulaic spectacle, of the sort that floats by indifferently before the eyes of aquarium visitors. What’s curious about The Hills and Laguna Beach is that, for all their elaborately tricked-out production values, they offer up the polar opposite of dramatic interest. Viewers know in advance that they will sit in passive judgment on character dilemmas about which it is impossible for any sane person to care: should Lauren bag her internship at Teen Vogue? Should that one chick dump that one guy for making out with that other chick at that one beach party? It almost makes one long for the gladiator-like combat of Survivor, where the pretend participants at least could be goaded into plausibly psychopathic conduct. The Hills kids, very much by contrast, will float in this same amniotic dream of privilege through all their remaining days. It’s more than a little chilling to picture them some 30 years on, propping up a poolside cocktail, mumbling about their vanished heyday when a nation of lurid-minded teens paid half-assed attention to their clothes and inamoratas. But mainly their clothes.
The booboisie and the yahoos, all over again
It’s tempting, of course, to dismiss MTV’s pseudo-reality fare as the last stop on the culture’s race to the bottom — and, as such, perhaps something of a relief, giving us a definitive answer to the question “how low can you go?” But that view overlooks the way the same aesthetic impulses have set up shop in the culture at large — including, most importantly, the year’s most overblown pop-cult phenomenon, Borat. Some measure of the media industry’s adulation for this weak effort at satire was the deliberately pseudo-reality tenor of its own coverage of the Borat craze. Nearly every writer on the Borat beat followed the weary convention of interviewing Sacha Baron Cohen only as he remained in the Borat character, with all the requisite “Niiice” and “sexytime” catchphrases, so that reporters and critics could feel they were in on the same grand joke.
On closer inspection, though, the joke seems barely worth repeating, let alone moving unmolested through news columns and year-end Best Lists. For all the grandiose claims made on behalf of the movie’s capacity to expose American boorishness and hypocrisy, it’s little more than a tour through some of the cheapest gawk-and-bray byways of the reality genre. And like Jackass, it’s very much a rigged game of social ridicule. Apart from an early interview with a troika of ultra-earnest Upper West Side feminists, Cohen spends most of the film working over the doughy, clueless booboisee and yahoos who inhabit the country’s scary southern and inland stretches.
