Even before Eric Neis came into my life, I was having a pretty good 1992.
I wasn’t doing anything of consequence that summer, but—at least retrospectively—nothingness always seems to facilitate the best periods of my life. I suppose I was ostensibly going to summer school, sort of; I had signed up for three summer classes at the University of North Dakota in order to qualify for the maximum amount of financial aid, but then I dropped two of the classes the same day I got my check. I suppose I was also employed, sort of; I had a work-study job in the campus “geography library,” which was really just a room with a high ceiling, filled with maps no one ever used. For some reason, it was my job to count these maps for three hours a day (I was, however, allowed to listen to classic-rock radio). But most importantly, I was living in an apartment with a guy who spent all night locked in his bedroom writing a novel he was unironically titling Bits of Reality, which I think was a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex. He slept during the afternoon and mostly subsisted on raw hot dogs. I think his girlfriend paid the rent for both of us.
Now, this dude who ate the hot dogs…he was an excellent roommate. He didn’t care about anything remotely practical. When two people live together, there’s typically an unconscious Odd Couple relationship: There’s always one fastidious guy who keeps life organized, and there’s always one chaotic guy who makes life wacky and interesting. Somehow, the hot dog eater and I both fit into the latter category. In our lives, there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. We would consciously choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available; we would write phone messages on the walls; we would vomit out the window. And this was a basement apartment.
Obviously, we rarely argued about the living conditions.
We did, however, argue about everything else. Constantly. We’d argue about H. Ross Perot’s chances in the upcoming presidential election, and we’d argue about whether there were fewer Jews in the NBA than logic should dictate. We argued about the merits of dog racing, dogfighting, cockfighting, affirmative action, legalized prostitution, the properties of ice, chaos theory, and whether or not water had a discernible flavor. We argued about how difficult it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled. We argued about partial-birth abortion, and we argued about the possibility of Trent Reznor committing suicide and/or being gay. We once got into a vicious argument over whether or not I had actually read all of an aggrandizing Guns N’ Roses biography within the scope of a single day, an achievement my hot dog–gorged roommate claimed was impossible (that particular debate extended for all of July). Mostly, we argued about which of us was better at arguing, and particularly about who had won the previous argument.
Perhaps this is why we were both enraptured by that summer’s debut of MTV’s The Real World, an artistic product that mostly seemed like a TV show about people arguing. And these people were terrible arguers; the seven cast members thrown into that New York loft always made ill-conceived points and got unjustifiably emotional, and they all seemed to take everything much too personally. But the raw hot dog eater and I watched these people argue all summer long, and then we watched them argue again in the summer of 1993, and then again in the summer of 1994. Technically, these people were completely different every year, but they were also exactly the same. And pretty soon it became clear that the producers of The Real World weren’t sampling the youth of America—they were unintentionally creating it. By now, everyone I know is one of seven defined strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Real World is the real world is The Real World is the real world. It’s the same true story, even when it isn’t.
I tend to consider myself an amateur Real World scholar. I say “amateur” because I’ve done no actual university study on this subject, but I still say “scholar” because I’ve stopped watching the show as entertainment. At this point, I only watch it in hopes of unlocking the questions that have haunted man since the dawn of civilization. I’ve seen every episode of every season, and I’ve seen them all a minimum of three times. This, of course, is the key to appreciating The Real World (and the rest of MTV’s programming): repetition. To really get it, you have to watch MTV so much that you know things you never tried to remember. You can’t try to deduce the day-to-day habits of Jon Brennan (he was the cowboy dude) from RW 2: Los Angeles. That would be ridiculous. You can’t consciously try to figure out what he likes and what he hates and how he lives; these are things you have to know without trying. You just have to “know” he constantly drinks cherry Kool-Aid. But you can’t try to learn that, because that would make you a weirdo. This kind of knowledge is like a vivid dream you suddenly pull out of the cosmic ether, eight hours after waking up. If someone asks you when Montana from RW 6: Boston exposed her breasts, you just sort of vaguely recall it was on a boat; if someone asks you who the effeminate black guy from Seattle slapped in the face, you inexplicably know it was the chick with Lyme disease. Yet these are not bits of information you actively acquired; these are things picked up the same way you sussed out how to get around on the subway, or the way you figured out how to properly mix Bloody Marys. One day, you just suddenly realize it’s something you know. And—somehow—there’s a cold logic to it. It’s an extension of your own life, even though you never tried to make it that way.
In 1992, The Real World was supposed to be that kind of calculated accident; it was theoretically created as a seamless extension of reality. But somewhere that relationship became reversed; theory was replaced by practice. During that first RW summer, I saw kids on MTV who reminded me of people I knew in real life. By 1997, the opposite was starting to happen; I kept meeting new people who were like old Real World characters. I’ve met at least six Pucks in the past five years. This doesn’t mean they necessarily talk about snot or eat peanut butter with their hands; what it means is they play The Puck Role. In any given situation, they will provide The Puck Perspective, and they will force those around them to Confront The Puck Paradigm. If nothing else, The Real World has provided avenues for world views that are both specialized and universal, and it has particularly validated world views that are patently unreasonable.
Part of me is hesitant to write about cast members from The Real World in any specific sense, because I realize few Americans have studied (or even seen) all twelve seasons of the show. You hear a lot of people say things like they watched most of the first two seasons, or that they watched every season up until Miami, or that they never started watching until the San Francisco season, or that they’ve only seen bits and pieces of the last three years and tend to get the casts mixed up. For most normal TV watchers, The Real World is an obsession that fades at roughly the same rate as denim. I’ve noticed that much of the program’s original 1992 audience gets especially bored whenever a modern cast starts to talk like teenage aliens.[6] Last year, an old friend told me she’s grown to hate the Real World because, “MTV used to pick people for that show who I could relate to. Now they just have these stupid little kids who act like selfish twits.” This was said by a woman—now a responsible twenty-nine-year-old software specialist—who once threw a drink into the face of her college roommate for reasons that could never be explained. It’s hard for most people to hang with a show that so deeply bathes in a fountain of youth.
However, another part of me realizes there’s no risk whatsoever in pointing out specific RW cast members, even to people who’ve never seen the show once: You don’t need to know the people I’m talking about, because you know the people I’m talking about. And I don’t mean you know them in the ham-fisted way MTV casts them (i.e., “The Angry Black Militant”[7] or “The Gay One”[8] or “The Naive Virginal Southerner Who’s Vaguely Foxy”[9] When I say “you know these people,” it’s because the personalities on The Real World have become the only available personalities for everyone who’s (a) alive and (b) under the age of twenty-nine.
Our cultural preparation for a Real World universe actually started in movie theaters during the eighties, particularly with two films that both came out in 1985: The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. These seminal portraits were what The Real World was supposed to be like, assuming MTV could find nonfictional people who would have interesting conversations on a semiregular basis. Like most RW casts, The Breakfast Club broke teen culture into five segments that were laughably stereotypical (and—just in case you somehow missed what they were—Anthony Michael Hall pedantically explains it all in the closing scene). St. Elmo’s Fire used many of the same actors, but it evolved their personalities by five years and made them more (ahem) “philosophically complex.” Here is where we see the true genesis of future Real World ians. With Judd Nelson, we have the respected social climber doomed to fail ethically;[10] with Andrew McCarthy, the sensitive, self-absorbed guy who works hard at being bitter.[11] Rob Lowe is the self-destructive guy we’re somehow supposed to envy;[12] Emilio Estevez is the romantic that all chumps are supposed to identify with, mostly because he’s obsessed with his own obviousness.[13] Demi Moore is fucked up and pathetic,[14] but Mare Winningham is even more pathetic because she aspires to be fucked up.[15] Ally Sheedy is too normal to have these friends[16] (or, I suppose, to be in this particular movie).
If we were to combine these two films—in other words, if we were to throw the St. Elmo’s kids into all-day Saturday detention—we’d have a pretty good Real World. It’s been noted that one of the keys to Alfred Hitchcock’s success as a filmmaker was that he didn’t draw characters as much as he drew character types; this is how he normalized the cinematic experience. It’s the same way with The Real World. The show succeeds because it edits malleable personalities into flat, twenty-something archetypes. What interests me is the way those archetypes so quickly became the normal way for people of my generation to behave.
It’s become popular for Real World revisionists to claim that the first season was the only truly transcendent RW, the argument being that this was the singular year its cast members actually acted “real.” In a broad sense, that’s accurate: Since that first Real World was entirely new, no one knew what it was going to look like (or how it would be received). Nobody in the original New York loft was able to formulate an agenda on purpose. Logically, this should make for great television. In practice, it doesn’t translate: In truth, RW 1 is mostly dull. It was fascinating in 1992 because of the novelty, but it doesn’t stand up over time.
I’ll concede that the cast on the first Real World were the only ones who didn’t constantly play to the camera; only hunky model Eric Neis did so on an episode-to-episode basis, but one gets the impression this was just his normal behavior. While the actual filming was taking place, I have no doubt the seven loft-dwellers were clueless about what the final product would look like on television; that certainly fostered the possibility for spontaneous “reality,” and there are glimpses of that throughout RW 1. The problem is that hard reality tends to be static: On paper, the conversations from that virgin Real World would make for a terrible script. In fact, the greatest moments from the first Real World are when nothing is going on at all—the awkwardness becomes transfixing, not unlike the sensation of sitting in an airport and watching someone read a newspaper. Yet if every cast of The Real World has been as “real” as that first New York ensemble, the show would have only lasted two seasons.
Ironically, the reason RW flourished is because its telegenic humanoids became less complex with every passing season. Multifaceted people do not translate within The Real World format. Future cast members figured this out when that initial season finally aired and it was immediately obvious that only two personalities mattered: Alabama belle Julie and angry African-American Kevin. The only truly compelling episode from the first season came in week eleven, when Julie and Kevin had an outdoor screaming match over a seemingly random race issue.[17] But the fight itself wasn’t the key. What was important was the way it galvanized two archetypes that would become cornerstones for late-twentieth-century youth: the educated automaton and the likable anti-intellectual. Those two personality sects are suddenly everywhere, and they’re both children of The Real World.
Obviously, Kevin embodies the former attitude and Julie embodies the latter. And—almost as obviously—neither designation is particularly accurate. Kevin became a solid hip-hop writer for Vibe and Rolling Stone, and he’s far less robotic than he appears on The Real World. Meanwhile, Julie was never a backwater hick (I interviewed her in 1995, and I honestly suspect she might be the savviest person in the show’s history). But within the truncated course of those thirteen original episodes, we are led to believe that (a) Kevin is obsessed with racial identity and attempts to inject his blackness into every conversation, while (b) Julie adores anything remotely new and abhors everything remotely pretentious.
Kevin’s Huey Newton–like image can’t be blamed entirely on him: The Real World is unnaturally obsessed with race. And what’s disheartening is that The Real World is so consumed with creating racial tension that it often makes black people look terrible: If your only exposure to diversity was Coral and Nicole from the 2001 “Back to New York” RW cast, you’d be forced to assume all black women are blithering idiots. This is partially because the only black characters who get valuable RW airtime are the ones who refuse to talk about anything else. It’s the same situation for homosexual cast members—their Q factor is completely dependent on how aggressively gay they’re willing to act. In that first NYC season, Norman is immediately identified as bisexual, but he’s not bisexual enough; he only gets major face time when he’s dating future TV talk-show host Charles Perez. Future queer cast members would not make this mistake; for people like AIDS victim Pedro Zamora and Dan from RW 5: Miami, being gay was pretty much their only personality trait. Perhaps more than anything else, this is the ultimate accomplishment of The Real World: It has validated the merits of having a one-dimensional personality. In fact, it has made that kind of persona desirable, because other one-dimensional personalities can more easily understand you.
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 World er 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 famous[18] 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).[19] 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 World ers 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 same day 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,[20] Hawaii’s Justin[21]—they’ve never made it through an entire season. If they 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 self-awareness. 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 World ers 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 Neis 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.
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.