The Hills
I recently watched the first season of The Hills, an MTV reality drama series about a girl called Lauren who used to be on another reality TV programme I’ve never watched, called Laguna Beach. For me, the show was interesting in two ways: firstly, it offers a voyeuristic look into American life, and secondly, more interestingly, it creates a strange interplay between the real and the fake. For example, the show is structured as a television drama serial, with each episode centring around a particular subject and leading to a climax within the episode, in the same way each season builds towards a climax, and all the ‘stars’ of the show are presented as characters, with certain traits enhanced through the editing. It’s certainly not a documentary, the way it presents this skewed view of its subjects, and instead, with the title referring to Beverly Hills, the city neighbouring Hollywood, becomes a reality TV show in a town where everything is fake.
I particularly liked the bit in the Christmas episode where the cast go for a walk in a ‘winter wonderland’ and as they stand looking over a lake, a snow machine starts up and sprays them with movie-snow, as if they have their own personal snow cloud amidst the bright lights, clear sky and cool air of a Los Angeles night. And the stars themselves seem something like this, almost like charicatures of themselves, all trying to fill a role either of protagonist or supporting character, friend, girlfriend or boyfriend. They’re not actors, and yet they are, all working to an unconcious script dictated by the place and time in which they have grown up, by what they see on TV and read in magazines, and what they think other people want to hear. It’s like a lot of the time, I feel, especially when they’re emotional, such as while in love or during a breakup or consoling someone who is upset, people say these certain clichéd phrases, as if they feel they’re expected to. Like in one episode of The Hills I think Lauren says “love is not a maybe thing” which sounds like a rehearsed line, but presumably isn’t. People in real life say these things too, narrating their own lives and feelings as if in fictional terms.
The way people talk is influenced by the fictions they consume, and vice versa. There’s a humorous example of this in the Coen Brothers’ film The Big Lebowski where the main character keeps repeating things he’s heard other characters say before, just slipping them into conversation every now and then. A better example though is a quote I once read about Ernest Hemingway, I can’t remember who by, that was something along the lines of: it is said that Hemingway had a good ear for speech, and yet no one spoke like Hemingway’s characters and until after they had read Hemingway.
In my fiction, often, and especially with speech, I try to aim for absolute realism as much as possible. But speech is difficult. Good dialogue and believable speech don’t always intersect. When speaking people pause in awkward places, searching for the right word, or they make mistakes and start again, or they pepper their speech with hesitancies such as ‘um’. Depending on the kind of piece I’m writing, I often include these, even, to an extent, if they could be detrimental to the literary quality of the piece. Perhaps I’m going off at a tangent here, but I occasionally feel, for some works, the presentation of what is real can be more important than what makes a good book (not that they’re necessarily mutually exclusive). For example, I was thinking yesterday how the extended piece I’m working on at the moment, doesn’t really have a climax or, if it does, it’s about two thirds of the way through, and at the end it starts to kind of dwindle out, like a burned-down candle. Then I realised that I was fine with this, that that’s more realistic: Life rarely has climaxes, and I don’t think a lot of Modernist novels do either (Mrs. Dalloway has a character kill himself fairly near the end, but this seems a sort of minor occurence that little effects the title character except in a passing thought). In my piece, the lack of a climactic ending, which is actually different from what I originally planned, mirrors the feelings of my protagonists, who wanted something more dramatic.
Anyway, I’ll talk about all that, and how I’m blatantly obsessed with aspiring towards the ideals and proficiency of James Joyce, in another post. Right now, I shall just add that I think Raymond Carver also is good at realistic speech, and you can see my attempts to emulate his style in stories like I Couldn’t Really Say and Dragonflies, but his speech is a certain type of speech, specifically 1980s American, which is quite different to modern English speech, primarily because of the differences in attitudes between the two nations; most broadly: Americans tend to be frank and direct, while the English are more reserved and indirect.
So it’s interesting that in The Hills there’s this interplay between real dialogue and these kind of stock phrases that sound scripted, which I suppose is the real reason I like The Hills. Yes, it seems strange, certainly impressive, that the film crew managed such intimate access to every part of the stars’ lives, and that the stars should all be so comfortable saying things in front of them, not seeming to play up overtly to the camera any more than they would to anyone else. And though this might call into question the validity of the show’s ‘reality’, other comparable shows, such as Channel 4′s Big Brother, on the few instances I’ve been unfortunate enough to have been exposed to, seem to contain similar types of speech, though more shamefully British and less naturalistic since the people are forced together.
Certainly, that’s one of the things The Hills does well: it does feel very natural, and this returns to my first point about the show providing a voyeuristic look into American life, or at least a very specific type of American life; that of the young priveleged elite. For a lot of people, to live somewhere where the sun shines constantly and the beach is just down the road, to be rich enough to always be comfortable and never have to worry about money, is an ideal existence, and yet still, Lauren and her friends constantly find problems to rock the boat of their idyllic lives, whether stemming from their jobs, their schoolwork or their relationships, all of which are petty compared to the stresses and strife the vast majority of the world’s people face. It’s a reminder that drama and conflict are a part of human existence, one of the few constants through all the stories we’ve told through the years. Even in a perfect utopia people would find something to complain or fight about.
So, in conclusion, or, as they say on the internet, tl;dr: The Hills, despite the questionable merit of watching spoiled California girls obsessed with shopping, fashion and boys, who inflect the end of every sentence, is an interesting programme if only for it’s unusual blurring of reality and fiction and the way it develops concise characters from real people.
Tags: American, Beverly Hills, Big Brother, British, California, Ernest Hemingway, Fake, Fiction, Hollywood, James Joyce, Laguna Beach, Lauren Conrad, Modernism, Mrs. Dalloway, Raymond Carver, Real, Realism, Reality, The Big Lebowski, The Hills, Virginia Woolf
