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Where respectability meets decadence.
The Hills mines basically the same territory as Jane Austen: interpersonal relations, alliance formation, all that. Now we have "Rash and Rationality" to prove it. posted by Jared at 1:32 PM 13 comments links to this post You have probably read that sentence as a criticism of the show, as meaning that the characters don't seem sufficiently life-like to capture my attention. And further, as an accusation of hypocrisy, since the show advertises itself as a reality show. But I don't mean either of those. I just mean that the characters on the show are constructed in pretty much the same way that characters are constructed in fictional shows. And they come into my living room the same way any sitcom character does. The knowledge that there are real people in Los Angeles whose lives are the raw material for the show enters my mind exactly as much as the knowledge that the steak on my dinner plate was once a cow. This may seem cold. It is. What's even colder is that, unlike that steak, I don't actually LIKE any of these characters. This is probably largely a function of demographics: the show is most popular with tweenage girls, whereas I'm male and in my early 30's. The minimalist characterization that the show uses--long pauses on the nearly expressionless faces of the characters as they interact with each other--serves a different purpose for me than for more aspirational viewers. For young girls it offers an abundance of time to empathize with the character; the inscrutability is also a chance to practice reading the subtle verbal and facial clues that are key to complex social interaction. These are not things I'm interested in. For me these pauses are more awkward and noticeable--the fact that the conversations don't look natural mostly serves to defamiliarize classical continuity editing. So for most young girls the pleasure is in placing themselves in the melodramatic (and therefore meaningful) life of Lauren Conrad, while for me the pleasure is in feeling myself aware of (and therefore superior to) the constructed nature of the show. I've been accused of intellectualism and elitism, and not for the last time. My writing is formal and exact. I know this turns some people off, even when I try to be accessible. But my point is that both of these ways of viewing the show involve complex cognitive processes. If you sat me and a tweenage girl in front of the The Hills and did brain scans on both of us, they would show equal amounts of mental activity. Her brain might show more empathic activity (brain scans can show that, right?) because of her identification with the characters, but that doesn't mean she's thinking about what she's seeing any less than I am. She's registering the social clues, and puzzling through the social strategy of the characters; I'm registering the framing choices and the cuts. But neither of us are more or less involved in the show. Whether she likes it more than me--well, I don't really see the point of that question. posted by Jared at 11:12 AM 54 comments links to this post A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers. For the MTV Real World audition chapter, and for the reality vs. fiction problem. Watching Dallas, Ien Ang. Exactly what kind of pleasure do people get out of TV melodrama? What sociological conclusions can we draw from these shows. Nothing on reality TV here, but a good introduction to media studies. Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia. An overblown and infuriating book, with absolutely no credibility, but it's fascinating in its depiction of the complex ways in which people use art and myth to create their personalities. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman. A game theoretical approach to the minutest types of everyday interactions. How we present ourselves, and how we examine other people's presentations of themselves for information. posted by Jared at 8:59 AM 4 comments links to this post
Cowboys? Samurai? And that's probably the best scream since "Frankie Teardrop" (that one's long). So it narrowly beats out the cosplay one, and the one with her playing electric guitar in a kimono. posted by Jared at 1:21 AM 5 comments links to this post posted by Jared at 12:09 AM 2 comments links to this post
T-shirts with things written on them are not cool, but it's okay because Audrina is Rock 'n Roll. But she's not really Rock 'n Roll, because the shirt says she's beautiful. But actually she is Rock 'n Roll, because it also says that's a lie. But really she's not Rock 'n Roll, because she actually is beautiful. posted by Jared at 9:15 PM 3 comments links to this post
No matter how disappointed many Hills fans might be at that New Yorker article (a pointless, lazy exercise in condescension that didn't even make a good faith effort to understand the show), it's not nearly as bad as this embarrassingly gushing review like this one of Gossip Girl. The conclusion to that article is that GG offers "profound social commentary." By which they mean: "The show mocks our superficial fantasies while satisfying them, allowing us to partake in the over-the-top pleasures of the irresponsible superrich without anxiety or guilt or moralizing." Um... let's just say that my definition of "profound" is very different from the one used by Ms. Pressler and Mr. Rovzar. "Social commentary," too. Or is that irony I smell? I can't quite tell, which in itself is a bad sign. Actually I'm not sure Hills fans care that much about the New Yorker thing. The official MTV blog puts a positive spin on it, claiming that any mention in the New Yorker is an accomplishment, given the prestige of the magazine. They don't really need to take it seriously because the group of people who 1) read the New Yorker and 2) might possibly watch more than one episode of the show is approximately... me.
The two shows are actually pretty similar. Both are about the romantic lives of the hyperrich, centered on a Betty/Veronica rivalry; both include lots of references to text messaging and general new media connectivity as a nod to their interconnected audience. The difference between New York and LA is not that great. The real difference between the shows is that Gossip Girl allows for distanced, ironic viewing while The Hills does not. Kristen Bell's kitsch narration has a lot to do with this--because she doesn't appear in the show, the effect is to distance the viewer from the action and allow viewers to not feel guilty about indulging in their "superficial fantasies." Lauren Conrad's narration is limited to the "previouslies," and takes itself very seriously. So we have people feeling superior to Gossip Girl but liking it anyway, and people feeling superior to The Hills and mocking it incessantly. None of this is surprising. But there's a way to feel superior to the show without mocking it or calling it a guilty pleasure--analyze it! Compare it to Antonioni, analyze narrative distance, name-drop Derrida and Barthes to show you've got more cultural capital than Heidi Montag. There's an obscurantist tendency in cultural studies to analyze the most disrespected aspects of popular culture; this may in the end be as condescending as simply dismissing them. To be honest, my appreciation of the show has very little to do with my feelings for its stars--Nancy Franklin is not far off when she says "I have yet to hear any character on the show say something interesting or funny." But the pleasures, for me anyway, lie elsewhere: I'm enough of a theory geek to actually enjoy all that cultural studies stuff. Labels: Cultural Capital, Gossip Girl, The Hills posted by Jared at 2:41 PM 4 comments links to this post
Look in the mirror--that's Whitney. She always knows where the camera is. Labels: The Hills, Whitney Port posted by Jared at 10:18 AM 3 comments links to this post
She's on the edge between light and dark. Black leather jacket and dark eye-shadow, but bleached blonde hair and white fingernails. Labels: Heidi Montag, The Hills posted by Jared at 4:53 PM 3 comments links to this post So here's an example of a tendency on The Hills that I mentioned last week, when a character enters a scene with their face obscured even though the entrance is staged. This is Audrina closing the door behind her as she comes home:
There's no logistical reason why the camera can't be moved a few feet in order to catch her face. This is a location that appears in every episode, and I guarantee that the producers know how to shoot here. So the question is, why obscure her face? What purpose does this serve? I suggested last week that it has something to do with the "reality effect," a concept developed by literary theorist Roland Barthes. If there's a descriptive detail in a novel that serves no narrative or symbolic purpose, then its very meaninglessness is used to signify that the novel takes place in "reality." This is one way of pointing out that the "realism" of any artwork is not a result of how faithfully it reproduces the outside world, but how much it signals to the reader or viewer "this is real." But since TV and movies (leaving aside animation and special effects) are already constructed out of accurate pictures of the outside world, adding more details doesn't actually reinforce the realistic effect. The principle that "lack of meaning = reality" still holds, though, except that the lack of meaning comes not from extraneous details in content, but from unmotivated camera choices, in this case framing. So one reason this shot is included could be to signal to the audience that this is reality. "If this shot were planned, don't you think we would have planned it better? Therefore, it's obviously real." But in the stylistic history of film, this has not been the usual way of signaling reality. Usually, you use long takes to better show a natural dialogue between characters, including things like awkward pauses and people talking over each other. You show scenes where very little happens in terms of plot. The Bicycle Thief is a classic example the realist school, or for something more recent try Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days. This is precisely the opposite of what The Hills does, following Hollywood convention. Dialogue is chopped up into alternating shot/reverse-shot angles in order to 1) encourage spectators to identify with one of the characters and 2) streamline the conversation and make it flow. (1) And the weird thing is that The Hills is actually less streamlined than most Hollywood entertainment: after a conversation is broken down into its constituent parts, The Hills puts it back together with the awkward pauses either still there or possibly even deliberately edited in. My point is that camera placement and editing in The Hills turn out to work against interpreting the show as "real"--instead, they highlight the show's constructedness. The show is purposely trying to look as much as possible like a Hollywood film, to the point of taking the Hollywood editing style to such extremes that the way it's constructed is blatantly obvious. And that includes the obscured faces, which are part of the currently popular "run-and-gun" style of filmmaking, where the best example is the Bourne films. This is also the reason the show is shot in widescreen. 1. By the way, this is basically the film-editing version of Taylorism, where actions taken by factory workers are broken down into the smallest possible pieces and then analyzed for efficiency--actually one word for this editing style is analytic. I'll say more about work on The Hills in a future post, to expand on my comments last time about industrial vs. information economies. Dissertation progress yesterday: Finished Staging Fascism, which was excellent. Did about 40 pages of indexing/notetaking. Wrote about half a page, still on Nanook/primitivism. Labels: Barthes, Film Theory, The Hills posted by Jared at 10:31 AM 14 comments links to this post I'm writing a dissertation about French fascist movie reception in the 1930's. Wish me luck. View my complete profile
Smarter than me
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