Chuck Klosterman On Film And Television Read Online Free PDF Page A

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