People Will See Me and Cry

In case you’ve been reading Remembrance of Things Past lately, let me bring you up to speed on Jon and Kate Gosselin: either the husband in America’s Most Overexposed Family has a girlfriend, or he does not. Or maybe Kate Gosselin, patron saint for caponizing harpies everywhere, has been dating her bodyguard. Or maybe this is all just a ploy to make sure everyone is watching their show when it comes back on the air next week. The timing of the scandal lends credence to it being a marketing maneuver but if Kate has been faking her general air of shrill misery for the last season I'd pay to see her interpretation of Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House.” In sum, they are probably wildly unhappy and are seeing this play out in the same format in which they have lived their lives for the past four years -- the public eye.

Kate even got the cover of People magazine for this sordid business which must have just driven the Kardashian family insane. In the event you haven’t read the article, here’s what Kate needs you to know: It’s Jon’s fault; he hates to participate in the speaking engagements; he’s never made as much money as she has; he’s constantly whining about how unhappy he is and she knows he’s choosing to feel this way. Also, she’s pretty certain he’s cheated. She, on the other hand, has been a blameless rock, soldiering on, creating the show which she’s only doing to provide for her children.

And how is this affecting the children? According to Kate, they’re fine because she’s doing major emotional support of them, talking to them on the phone in her spare time.

[God, I wish I had just made that up. I can only imagine the expression on her PR handler’s face when she came up with that.]

Again, according to Kate, the kids are fine because they go to a school where no one cares about the tabloids. We can assume her neighbors spend all the time in a check-out line reading the folic-acid content on their cereal boxes. We can also assume they don’t read People magazine either and that no one in the school is going to tell these children their mother thinks their father is an unfaithful, depressed ne’er-do-well. They live in Pennsylvania. Perhaps the school is mostly Amish.

What you don’t hear in the story, in any way, shape or form, is Kate saying “I wish I had never started on this stupid reality-show train.” Maybe she said it, and the reporter didn’t use the quote but I don't think so; it would have made a nifty tag line. Maybe she feels some great responsibility to not bite the hand that’s feeding her somewhere between $25,000 to $50,000 a week. Or maybe she has regrets in life but making her family a media commodity isn’t one of them.

Look at the following character traits:

Believing that you're better than others
Fantasizing about power, success and attractiveness
Exaggerating your achievements or talents
Expecting constant praise and admiration
Believing that you're special
Failing to recognize other people's emotions and feelings
Expecting others to go along with your ideas and plans
Taking advantage of others
Expressing disdain for those you feel are inferior
Being jealous of others
Believing that others are jealous of you
Trouble keeping healthy relationships
Setting unrealistic goals
Being easily hurt and rejected
Having a fragile self-esteem
Appearing as tough-minded or unemotional

No, this isn’t a casting call-sheet for the next season of “Real Housewives”. These are the clinical symptoms for Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Of course, I’m not a doctor, not even on TV, and I know those shows are constructed for conflict and then edited to maximize the drama so I’m not saying all of those people are untreated narcissists. I tend to believe most of them were just garden-variety aggravating before getting picked for a show. But once they got on television some hellish mix of the producer’s encouragement and their own weaknesses led them to behave like five year-olds after back-to-back birthday parties. Because the narcissists are the most entertaining to watch and anyone longing for some kind of stardom has twenty years of reality shows from which to cherry-pick the best bad behavior, the results continue to draw a crowd.

“The Real World” was dumb, but like many dumb things it was remarkably potent. It began on May 21st, 1992 and was based on the simple premise that if you jam attractive young people with different views together in a confined space they will either have sex or kill each other; and either will be fun to watch.

[I find it interesting that one of the seminal reality shows was created because the producers realized they couldn’t afford to do a soap opera for teens.]

"The Real World" was wildly successful and ran all the time. Soon enough, there was “Real World: Los Angeles” and “Real World: San Francisco” and so on. It's still running. The show is a marvel of stock characters; Virgin, Christian, Trollop, Gay, Instigator. It’s Commedia Dell’Arte for the Clearasil set. And the kids watched and they learned. This reality-show format was creating its own language and, as with any language, it’s easier for the young to learn a new one.

I was twenty-four when the show went on the air -- the last generation who didn’t grow up with “Reality-television star” as a career choice. I have a friend who teaches high-school in a lower middle-class neighborhood and he told me fifteen to twenty percent of his students, when asked what they want to be after school, say “Famous.” Why shouldn’t they? If you’re attractive and loud enough there is no reason to think someone won’t hand you a show. In some ways, this is even more democratically American than voting. If you are convicted of a felony you can’t vote; I think a felony conviction slightly increases your odds of a reality show.

A friend of mine once asked her eleven year-old what she liked about the sitcoms geared towards her age group. Her daughter answered, “They show me how to be a teenager.” My friend rewarded this cogent and mature answer with a long mother-daughter walk and a very boring lecture. But the girl was right. Television is one of the places our children visit on a regular basis to figure out how to be adults, and reality television is telling them that throwing tantrums in public is a path to success.

Even as I’m writing this, I’m sneering at myself, “Quinn, you flagrant hypocrite. You of the self-centered blog, self-centered Tweeter, self-centered entire stinking book, how are you different than these people who long for shows dedicated to themselves?” Here’s my justification for separating me from them: my art, such as it is, is the writing. I write about myself because I’m too timid to go to a war zone and write about that. And I keep doing stupid things I think might be entertaining to read about. If you are on a reality show, it’s understood that you need do nothing more than exist. You might be a would-be rapper, or clothing designer or best friend to Paris Hilton, but in the end your finest creation is you, behaving badly in front of a camera. That is more than enough.

Americans have always thought themselves to be special. In 1630, John Winthrop told the Puritans who were about to disembark from the Arbella and form what became the Massachusetts Bay Colony, “For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us.” We still expect eyes to be upon us. It’s just that almost four hundred years later, the city on the hill is now an underdressed woman with bleached teeth and a camera crew demanding of a nightclub bouncer, “ You have to let me in. Don’t you know who I am?”

I do. She’s a cardboard city on a hill, a Potemkin village in the suburbs of the American dream.