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

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 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 Being interesting has been replaced by being identifiable.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.

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.

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.

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