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 Worlder 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, 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 Worlders 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 Justin16—they’ve never made it through an entire season. If t
hey 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 Worlders 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.
15. This was that chick with Lyme disease.
16. This was the gay law student with the spiky hair.
Being Zack Morris
Sometimes I’m a bad guy, but I still do good things. Ironically, those good things are often a direct extension of my badness. And this makes me even worse, because it means my sinister nature is making people unknowingly smile.
Here’s one example: I was once dating a girl in a major American city, and I was also kind of pursuing another girl in another major American city. I had just received one of those nifty “CD burners” for my computer, so I started making compilation albums for friends and particularly for lady friends. Like most uncreative intellectual men, almost all of my previous relationships had been based on my ability to make incredibly moving mix cassettes; though I cannot prove it, I would estimate that magnetic audiotape directly influenced 66 percent of my career sexual encounters. However, the explosion of CD burning technology has forced people like me to create CDs instead of cassettes, which is somewhat disheartening. The great thing about mix tapes
was that you could anticipate the listener would have to listen to the entire thing at least once (and you could guarantee this by not giving them a track listing). Sequencing was very important. The strategy was to place specific “message” songs inbetween semimeaningless “rocking” songs; this would transfix, compliment, and confuse the listener, which was always sort of the goal. However, once people starting making their own CDs, the mix tape suddenly seemed cheap and archaic. I had no choice but to start making CDs, even though they’re not as effective: People tend to be more impressed by the packaging of the jewel case than the songs themselves, and they end up experiencing the music no differently than if they had thoughtlessly purchased the disc at Best Buy (i.e., they skip from track to track without really studying the larger concept behind the artistic whole).
ANYWAY, I was making a mix disc for one of these women (I will never admit which), and it was my intention to find eighteen songs that reflected key elements of our relationship, which I thought I did. But as I looked at the track selection, it suddenly dawned on me that these songs were just as applicable to my other relationship. My feelings for “Woman A” were completely different than my feelings for “Woman B,” but the musical messages would make emotional sense to both, despite the fact that these two women were wildly dissimilar. So I ended up making two copies of this album and sending one to each woman, using all the same songs and identical cover art (computers make this entirely too easy). I expressed identical romantic overtures to two different people with one singular movement. And they both received their discs on the same day, and they both loved them.1