tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post6577619024935475161..comments2023-09-01T01:29:15.314-06:00Comments on zigzigger: The Hills Is Too Realmznhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/12336592183292185884noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-45123378738718992872008-05-13T17:13:00.000-06:002008-05-13T17:13:00.000-06:00Devastated by the end of the Hills mini-season-plu...Devastated by the end of the Hills mini-season-plus, so I thought I would add on to this thread. Great points, zig and femster. Some additional mist for the grill from two perspectives, one (labor history) in which I am actively training, and the other (art criticism) in which I am but a hacky pretender.<BR/><BR/>But first--what about the old film theory chestnut "suture"? Isn't this pertinent to the mental acrobatics that "the Hills" plus "the Hills as z-list celebutard grand guignol" forces our poor cognitive machinery to perform? Or do filmees think of this as part of diegesis talk?<BR/><BR/>Okay, on to the labor studies take. Reality television is, among other things--probably first and foremost-- an accumulation strategy. MTV is part of a large transnational corp; labor costs are among the most nettlesome barriers to increased profitability; using performers like LC, Lo, and Heidi, locations like Hyde and Don Antonio's (not to mention the fake job sites) who apparently style their own hair, do their own makeup, and wear their own clothes, and natural light means that a whole raft of unionized professionals are unnecessary. That is, in reality-speak, what it is. Why I love the Hills despite the dangers its success poses to one of the few remaining one-hundred-percent unionized modes of creative production is that it resists the urge to humiliate the performers it enlists. On The Hills, like on Survivor or Shot of Love with Tila Tequila, the people we watch are working--and unlike actors, their work is undisguised, in service only of its own realization (as such Spencer Pratt is absolutley right that he "works harder" than actors, although apparently he does understand why) and what we watch is their work. The difference between LC and your average reality show contestant or personality is that LC retains dignity. She is not forced to prance around in outfits she hates, smooch scorpions, or dance on bars. The existence of a separate LC 2 covered in the tabloids is, in fact, a testament to the dignity of her labor. She gets to retain privacy, interiority, intimacy, experience that we cannot purchase. This is why, as you sketch out elegantly, the sex tape has such a vital structural role within the Hills's organzing logic. <BR/><BR/>At the same time, the Hills format is also--intentionally, by design, brilliantly-- a vehicle for all manner of branding, including the continuing branding of what on Laguna Beach was the "OC" lifestyle (no laughing matter--Mike Davis points out that OCs have been popping up in Dubai and suburban India, gated communities with Jamba Juices and Starbucks that apparently make the miseries of neoliberalism outside the gates easier to stomach), and which on the Hills is something like "twentysomething coastal consumer citizenship." <BR/><BR/>I have a bit to say about this. "Twentysomething coastal consumer citizenship" is structed on deep paradoxes that should make us uneasy... and The Hills does make us uneasy-- we sense that this way of life is unstable (how long can a vain and entitled ruling class claim NYC and LA for itself?), parasitic (how much of this is funded by expensive educations, trust funds, connections), in some way deeply anhedonic (even the "fun" careers of music, fashion, and PR seem dull, monotonous, often marked by abusive managers and arbitrary demands). But this lifestyle also articulates a philosophy about public space and the legitimacy of different strategies of profiting off of the commons. <BR/><BR/>LA has long been the epicenter of "twentysomething coastal consumer citizenship" as neoliberal ideology. Lauren and Lo and the camera crews of the Hills have a social warrant to use the sidewalks and streets of LA to make money; the poor cannot even use these same public spaces in order to survive, with the virtual criminalization of homelessness. Even the act of inhabiting public space in LA as an identifiably Mexican-American or African-American youngster has been criminalized... the LAPD now considers merely being out of doors as criteria for entering youth into gang databases. And as recent NYPD shootings demonstrate, being outside and African American is grounds enough for murder by the police.<BR/><BR/>But I don't want to end there--merely critizing the brand that the Hills is ultimately selling. That would be too reductive. The Hills has a character--Spender Pratt--who embodies this lifestyle brand and its ethic in the manner of a character in a medieval mystery play. And not only because of his (disturbingly patchy and unattractive) mustache-twirling and scenery-chewing. I am convinced that he is there as a force of repulsion for LC-- not only does she hate him for what he has done, she hates him for what he is. She does not want to be him. In the end, she will fail. But that is in the nature of tragedy, and it is clear that the Hills is a quite classic tragedy, resonating especially with the Wharton and Dreiser tragedies of capitalism's excess from the last Gilded Age. <BR/><BR/>Finally, I want to say something about form. The Hills is utterly brilliant in its formal integrity. It is also clearly, in my view, a work of high minimalism-- right up there with "Groundhog Day" in the canon of pop minimalism. The materials used by the Hills's creators are ruthlessly kept to a minimum, and used in mathematical permutations: from the shots of street life, to the music cues, to the very conflicts staged by the principals. Like the Ibsen maxim that a gun introduced in Act I will go off in Act V, on the Hills, any element introduced anywhere will be re-used across the matrix of personal relationships. LC ditches a job opportunity for a lame boyfriend? So will Heidi. Not out of a lack of imagination on the part of the creators, but out of a rigid commitment to testing a hypothesis: repetition is interesting. It is also the symbol of the underside of capitalist pleasure-seeking-- the endless procession of logos and trademarks, the cloned spaces of commercial real estate, the looped grooves of pop music, the constricted language of empty phrases and ambiguous gestures. Here is where I emphatically celebrate the Hills. Has any work of art ever traversed the terrain of blankness, repetition, and redundancy to better effect? I don't think so. If historians of the future are judicious, they will watch the Hills to get a sense of the affective character of turn-of-the-century American capitalism.the sad billionairehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/12413202274741351825noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-37916241.post-4327957730285078522008-05-13T14:47:00.000-06:002008-05-13T14:47:00.000-06:00Very interesting post, MZN. It's cool to consider ...Very interesting post, MZN. It's cool to consider the Hills in the context of this film theory. The cross-platform narration is one of the things I find most pleasurable about watching The Hills. I enjoy the sense that the show keeps happening with or without the cameras, or rather, with or without the "official" hills cameras. I find that this contributes to my experience of the Hills as an "immersive" experience. There is a part of this process that, for me, reminds me of watching a mystery; every time I go online or open a tab I'm engaging with the potential to learn something that will contribute to the "narrative." It's fun to try and synthesize all these disparate threads and to speculate about what's real and what's not. At the same time, I'm fascinated by the form of the Hills. I tend to like forms that contain "disruptions," especially "disruptions" that call attention to the material and construction of the made/perceived thing(s). <BR/><BR/>The supposed "sex tape" is simultaneously like Desdemona's handkerchief (a planned/scripted narrative device that within the narrative is planned/scripted by one of the characters) _and_ like a bit in an improv piece _and_ like one of the actors breaking character. What surprises me about my own experience as a viewer/watcher/follower of the Hills as it is depicted across platforms is that I could *care less* about whether or not this sex tape exists. I only care about the real-or-not-real sex tape because of the way it mediates Lauren and Heidi's relationship (it is narratively what broke them apart and formally what holds them together). But I do not care if it is "real." <BR/><BR/>I don't know if this adds to the discussion (and I have not had coffee yet), but -- for me -- the binaries of the real/not real content and of the narrative/non-linear form don't really work with the Hills because there is not a common/authoritative script or text or platform. If there was, the spell would break. <BR/><BR/>Not ironically, the "creator" of the Hills, Adam Divello, is shrouded in mystery. How can I find out about this guy? What do you know?femme feralhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04487456561207417558noreply@blogger.com