Urbane Sprawl

Today is the 150th anniversary of Edith Wharton’s birth. I cannot recommend highly enough celebrating this milestone by dipping into one of her works.

The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence, The Custom of the Country, Ethan Frome: All are worth visiting or revisiting. If you want a quicker introduction to the grande dame’s corpus, read this electrifying story, “Roman Fever.”

Or, just appreciate this fantastic observation Wharton made in her 1936 Introduction to Mirth (first published in 1905), in which she laments the superficiality of so much fiction and so much of life:

I remember once saying to Henry James, in reference to a novel of the type that used euphemistically to be called “unpleasant”: “You know, I was rather disappointed; that book wasn’t nearly as bad as I expected”; to which he replied, with his incomparable twinkle: “Ah, my dear, the abysses are all so shallow.”

Well, so they are; but at least they are always there, and the novelist who has the patience to dip down into them will find that below a certain depth, whatever his subject, there is almost always “stuff o’ the conscience” to work in.

Wharton was one such novelist with the “patience to dip down” into the abysses, and her works are so much the stronger for it.

But indeed some readers have found her novels too abysmal — too lacking in redemption for her characters and readers. Lionel Trilling indicted her for a “limitation of heart.” We need only look to his own words, though, to see why Wharton’s novels have such singular, enduring power.

About Ethan Frome, Trilling says what can be said of much of life: “It is terrible to contemplate, it is unforgettable, but the mind can do nothing with it, can only endure it.” Thankfully, even now, 150 years after her birth and 75 after her death, we can contemplate and endure life’s disappointments along with Wharton — and we can be ever-newly dazzled by the brilliance of her observations and insight.

Happy birthday to an unforgettable authoress.

In my last post, I theorized — okay, conjectured — that there might be a link between states’ population densities and their organ donor registration rates.

My causal conjecture was that less dense states (whose populations live in small communities rather than big cities) are richer in “social capital,” the connection amongst members of a community driven by neighbors knowing each other and sharing values. Contrary to people in dense and accordingly anonymous states, people in scarcely populated states might feel closer ties to the hypothetical recipients of their donated organs.

Judd kindly sent me some actual data about state registration rates, which I then crudely compared to population density statistics. Data analysis is not my strong suit, but here are some basic observations:

1. The states I mentioned in the last post as having particularly extreme registration rates do indeed vary highly on the axis of population density, too.

In Texas, there is a 7% rate of “Actionable Donor Designation” in the adult population. And, according to Wikipedia, Texas has 98.07 inhabitants per square mile (ipsm). The Dakotas are different: North Dakota has a 65% ADD rate and 9.916 ipsm; South Dakota’s numbers are 54% and 10.86 ipsm. The Dakotas are 1/10 as populous as Texas while their adults are 10 times as likely to be registered organ donors.

2. The three least dense states in the union — Alaska (1.264 ipsm), Montana (6.858), and Wyoming (5.851 ipsm) — are in the top four states by “Donor Registration Rate”* with rates of 76%, 63.2%, and 59.6% respectively.

I haven’t correlated all the states’ densities with their levels of organ donation registration, but there does indeed seem to be a correlation — if not a causal relationship. I’m not controlling for what are no doubt hugely important factors: income, education level, demographic homogeneity (which itself may lead to a social capital effect), etc. Even with a direct correlation established, the causal mechanism would be opaque.

Still, based on this basic smell test, the theory/conjecture seems to hold water. Or, to not mix metaphors, it smells okay. My takeaway: If you want to live in a state where each adult you meet is more likely than not to be someone willing to give you an organ, move somewhere where everybody knows your name (cause there’s no one else around to know).

*DRR is a slightly more timely measure than ADD, but with less complete data. It’s defined as “the rate at which individuals join the state donor registry as a percentage of all driver’s licenses and ID cards issued within a specific period of time.”

Judd Kessler, who Forbes recently named one of the 30 most influential people under 30 in the field of Law and Policy, does a lot of interesting research on organ donation.

Though I understand this research only tenuously, I have picked up from him that there is a very high — and as-yet-unexplained — variance in organ donation registration rates in US states. For example (if I remember correctly), Texas has about a 9% rate of adults registered to donate organs, while states in the north-central US (ex. the Dakotas) have registration rates upwards of 60-70%.

Though I’m sure there are myriad factors contributing to this discrepancy — perhaps as localized as the specific language used in the registration forms at different states’ DMVs — a recent NY Times blog post on social networking made me think about the question in a new light.

In the big cities of India and China, it seems, people can’t help being social. Nearly everyone who uses the Internet there is also active on social networks, according to a vast global survey by Forrester Research, and most of them do much more than read and watch what’s posted online. Three out of four of them write blog posts or upload pictures and music.

Cultures reveal themselves online. Italians are twice as likely to visit a social networking site as Germans. The Japanese prefer anonymity and eschew Facebook, which demands real names, for the more flexible Japanese network called Mixi.

Norms of privacy and interpersonal interaction vary more highly between countries, I think, than they do between US States. But there’s an insight in that first paragraph that I think can be applied to how we think about US States and organ donation.

In big cities, where population density is high, social networking is also high. Social scientist Robert Putnam, who pioneered the concept of social capital, might say that we network online when we live in communities where we have weaker ties to the people actually physically around us. Living in Manhattan, most of the people I see and interact with every day are strangers, and I interact often with my friends and acquaintances online. If I lived in North Dakota, I might know personally a lot more of the people in my daily path, leading to less necessity for networking online.

I wonder — Judd, look into this — whether these things are all correlated. Places with high population density (i.e. states where much of the population is clustered in high-density cities and towns) might have less social capital, more social networking, and, perhaps, lower rates of organ donation registration.

Perhaps US states with higher organ donation rates are those in which much of the population engages each day with people they personally know. If our DMVs were full of the people who’d been our lifelong classmates and neighbors and friends, perhaps we’d be more likely to check the organ donation box when asked.

The other day, I was chatting with one of my brother’s college roommates about how he ended up at Harvard. “I never would have considered applying,” he said, “if not for the score I got on the SAT.”

We commonly and rightly decry the bluntness of the SAT as a metric to assess all college-bound students. It’s certainly an imperfect yardstick for the skills it’s meant to assess — reading comprehension, critical thinking, math ability — and it very likely reflects a bias disfavoring racial minorities and the economically disadvantaged. (This article offers a nice roundup of the push to ditch standardized tests in the college admissions process.)

But what about the upshot of one test for everyone?

And I’m not talking about the obvious, designed benefit: that the SAT provides one unified assessment of students across schools with very different grading patterns and policies. The upshot I have in mind is not about the schools who see the scores on applications — it’s about the students who receive them.

When I talk to fellow Harvard alumni about what made them choose to apply, they almost always provide one of two answers. If they come from cities or schools with firm records of sending students to Harvard, they say that Harvard was always a possibility in their mind — one they worked hard to make a reality. But if they come from schools where going to an Ivy League institution was not an expected option, these alumni consistently point to their SAT score as the signal they gave themselves that they could get into a top college if they tried.

For bright, high-achieving high schoolers without trails already blazed from their schools to Cambridge or New Haven, it takes a signal like an SAT score to tell them (and their guidance counselors and family and friends) that they can blaze the trail themselves.

In conversations about revision or abandonment of the SAT in the college admissions process, I’d like to hear how this personal signal of possibility can be replicated without a standard test for everyone.

David Brooks and Gail Collins are always worth reading, especially when they’re in dialogue. They had an especially illuminating chat yesterday about Mitt Romney’s Iowa results and what they mean for the future of his campaign for the Republican presidential nomination.

One bit from Brooks particularly stood out, since it got at the two core roles primaries play in leading a party to the selection of a candidate: finding the person with the most desirable (1) policies and (2) personality.

David: [His eked out win] weakens Romney because it shows that no matter how much he spends per vote, he can’t break out of his educated suburban corporate Republican base. His motto should be, “We are the 25 percent!”

Gail: Fascinating how far the Republican base will go to avoid him. Rick Santorum. Wow.

David: The question is, Is Romney’s weakness good weakness or bad weakness? If it’s policy weakness, that’s good weakness. Then he’s just too moderate for the Republican Party and it is his very moderation that will help him in the general election.

If it’s bad weakness, it’s personality weakness. People just don’t warm to him. As Jonathan V. Last pointed out in The Weekly Standard a few weeks ago, the guy has run in 22 campaigns in his life. His record is 5-17. That’s not stellar.

Brooks is right on, I think, in talking about the “good weakness” of too-moderate policies, because it many ways a primary battle can be a winner’s curse. A refresher: a winner’s curse happens, for example, when people bid on an asset of indeterminate value (i.e. an untapped oil field). The asset’s real value is probably somewhere in the middle of the bid distribution, so the person who wins the auction has probably overpaid.

The candidate who wins the party base in a series of primaries is probably “overbidding” their policies to the extreme wing of their party. A very conservative candidate like Mike Huckabee or Rick Santorum can capture Republicans for whom conservative bona fides are the most important criterion for their candidate of choice, but to win the base they necessarily cast themselves as too fringe to be electable.

But if winning the base with extreme policies were the only route to getting a nomination, a moderate would never win it. Moderates do win nominations: like John Kerry in 2004, John McCain in 2008, and (likely) Mitt Romney this year. Of course this is because electability is a value that rivals fidelity to the base’s policy positions.

It’s also because the other essential aspect of the winnowing process — related to electability, of course — is finding a candidate who wins on the axis of personality. Romney’s bad weakness would be the inability to stir passion, as Barack Obama did in 2008 and Kerry, McCain, and (likely) Romney were and are unable to do.

Bottom line: Romney is not overbidding on policy, so he has to rely on electability and personality to win the nomination. He has electability in the bag — his lack of a stirring personality, though, might be a curse of another kind.

I knew long before the end-of-year accounting that 2011 had been a bad year for movies. In 2011, everyone I knew had been eager to catch the blockbuster Oscar bait: The King’s Speech, The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit, Inception, Toy Story 3.

This year, I trekked out to catch the final installment of Harry Potter at midnight, and I moderately enjoyed films along the artistic axis from kind-of-above-average summer flick Captain America to kind-of-below-average Oscar favorite The Artist. For pure enjoyment, Bridesmaids and Mission Impossible 4 topped the list. But little else has galvanized me and my friends to leave behind Downton Abbey and Friday Night Lights for the silver screen.

Popular conception is that movies are too expensive, more crowded and less comfortable than the couch, an overall poor option in a still-recovering economy. But I think a better explanation for the weakness of the 2011 box office — domestic box office was down 4.7% from 2010 — is that the movies last year just weren’t that good.

I’m not the first person to make this case. Richard Lawson wrote a compelling account for The Atlantic Wire, breezily touring the movies that had weaker-than-expected showings at the box office and finding them all wanting in quality. But is it really the case that the high-profile films of 2011 were worse than those of 2010? (I think restricting attention to “high profile” movies, i.e. the top grossers, makes sense, as the differences in earnings of small art house films probably doesn’t change the big financial picture.)

Looking at a chart of the top-25-grossing movies of 2011 and 2010, their domestic box office takes, and their Rotten Tomato scores*, there are two big patterns. (1) There were many more original movies in 2010 (i.e. not adaptations or sequels). (2) The top five adaptations and sequels were better-reviewed in 2010 than in 2011.

Top-25-Grossing Movies of 2010 and 2011

(1) Very unscientifically, I noted that there were thirteen original movies on the top-25 list in 2010 and only six in 2011. In 2010, original movies had an average RT score 15 points higher than “unoriginal” movies (77.6 v. 52.8). The difference in 2011 was 9 points (71 v. 62). Interestingly, the “unoriginals” were better on average in 2011 given 2010′s clunkers like Little Fockers and The Last Airbender. But we can imagine a state of the world in which 2011 had films like True Grit or The King’s Speech that pushed Paranormal Activity 3 and The Green Lantern off the list with big box office numbers driven by positive reviews and buzz rather than just brand names.

(2) The most important stats, though, seem to be located in the top fifth of the chart. Lawson and I are wrong, perhaps, to point to the lack of Black Swans and King’s Speeches in 2011 as the main driver of diminished box office numbers. It’s the quality of the highest-earning sequels that suffered most between 2010 and 2011. The average RT score of the top five films in 2010 was 75; in 2011, 58. This drop correlated with a drop of average earnings from $331M to $300M. Perhaps it will always be big name adaptations and sequels that lead earnings, but the quality of these movies matters — the better they are, the more marginal or repeat attendees they’ll get, bringing earnings back up to their better days.

I encourage actual social scientists to do a more nuanced data analysis, hopefully to convince Hollywood that just bloating budgets or just slapping a brand name on a new release won’t do the trick. Here’s hoping that 2013 is like 2011, producing both high-profile original movies that are high in quality and better brand name blockbusters — here’s hoping studios give us reasons to leave behind the DVDs and come battle the crowds every now and then.

*I chose Rotten Tomatoes rather than, say, Metacritic, because it is more inclusive of critical opinion and thus more reflective (I presume) of the broader public’s critical understanding of a movie. Even people who don’t read Manohla Dargis have a sense of when a movie is considered must-see or underwhelming.

And while I’m on the topic of rationalization and its discontents, I must mention another darling of the zeitgeist — another phenomenon notable for its sharp break from a rationalized narrative: ChatRoulette.

Like reality TV, online communication has become rationalized over the past decade. We used to sign on, unfettered, to loosely categoritzed AOL chatrooms, for no other purpose but to converse with strangers about whatever came to mind.

Within the world of public online discourse, new structures popped up to help us find more quickly and accurately what — or, I should say, whom — we were looking for. Special interest message board sites for new parents, golf enthusiasts, and arthritis sufferers appeared. Surfers created sites for posing questions in deeply nested categories (Yahoo! Answers), while other sites for listing goods to buy and sell staked claim to their own turf (Craigslist, eBay).

For those of us who just wanted to talk, we got new tools to weed out the weirdos and promote interaction with our friends (or friends of friends): from a/s/l, there were Friendster and Facebook; from chatrooms, there were Google docs and groups and waves.

We gave ourselves better tools to find the right people and talk to them about the right things, but in the process we walled our communities in — and walled in ourselves.

That all changed (for the moment, at least) with ChatRoulette, a website that provides each user a complettely unfiltered video chat connection to another, randomly-selected user. One can stay to chat or click through to the next stranger out in the world of the webcams — an unmediated, unrationalized communication landscape. Like an early, almost empty AOL chatroom — with cameras.

Millions of users’ curiosity has been piqued enough to sign onto the site and see what they might find (even though they often find a close-up and uncensored view of some other user’s genitalia), and it’s easy to see why: ChatRoulette breaks down the barriers we’ve spent a decade erecting, and it unmasks us from the usual anonimity of blog comments and user reviews. It takes us from a bureaucratized present to a wild west past.

But, as is natural with all human processes, we may soon find ChatRoulette fall victim to a self-undermining rationalization that we saw befall reality TV. We will be moved to carve it up into interest-based rooms, we will “like” some users and “friend” others, and soon we will be building a city on what is now an empty landscape.

Sam Anderson described this rationalizing impulse in a piece on ChatRoulette in New York Magazine, at once predicting ChatRoulette’s fragmented future and exalting its unbridled present:

I found myself fantasizing about a curated version of ChatRoulette—powered maybe by Google’s massive server farms—that would allow users to set all kinds of filters: age, interest, language, location. One afternoon I might choose to be thrown randomly into a pool of English-speaking thirtysomething non-masturbators who like to read poetry. Another night I might want to talk to Jets fans. Another night I might want to just strip away all the filters and see what happens. The site could even keep stats, like YouTube, so you could see the most popular chatters in any given demographic. I could get very happily addicted to a site like that.

But that site would also lose a lot of what makes ChatRoulette, for now, so weirdly magnetic. If I’d been able to curate my experience, I might never have had what ended up being my favorite interaction: a half-hour chat with a twentysomething, vaguely Kurt Cobain–ish guy in Pittsburgh. We started with the obligatory ganja jokes, but suddenly he turned serious. “Actually,” he typed, “I’m a mystic.” When he offered me a tarot-card reading, I considered clicking “next” in search of more dancing Koreans. I’ve never had a psychic reading—in fact I’ve actively refused them on many occasions—but something about the strangeness of the context made me accept. Although I only vaguely remember the content of the reading itself (I like nature, have been thinking about taking a big trip, etc.), the experience was surprisingly powerful. It felt generous and deep and oddly very human.

Contemplating the filtered, statistically-tracked, rationalized version of ChatRoulette that Anderson fantasizes about  — while considering the losses that would come with an inhibited version of this paragon of inhibition — we realize that, even when we discuss a website built 90 years after his death, Max Weber was right.

Continuing the trend of major publications echoing the ideas discussed here, Gawker’s Brian Moylan last Thursday traced the same narrative in reality TV that I described in my last post from artless, captivating beginnings to streamlined, artificial ends. His recapitulation (which doesn’t appeal to the concept of Weberian rationalization) was conducted, though, in support of a pointed overarching argument: MTV Must Cancel The Real World.

In his polemic against the documentary series, which just concluded its 23rd season, Moylan picked up on the adverse effects reality TV’s rationalization has had on its ability to say something authentic about human experience:

I remember the excitement, the magazine covers, and the buzz surrounding the original sociological experiment. This was the first time a bunch of strangers had been throw together and the results taped. They fought, they loved, the hooked up, they went on vacation. It was just like the program is now (minus the vacation, which D.C. skimped out on) except it seemed that the people had real lives.

Sure, we never heard much from Heather B’s rap career or Andre’s band Reigndance after the show, but these people seemed less like characters or types and more like actual people. There were ambitious twentysomethings already involved in finding their way in their chosen field. They also had some sort of life in the city where it was being filmed, so outside friends and interests filtered onto the show, much in the same way that sharing a house with a bunch of roommates really does. Over time, the characters calcified into “types”—the angry black man, the gay one, the slut, the conservative, the sheltered zealot—and people were cast less as individuals, but as stock characters who would create conflict.

The serious sociological aspect of the show quickly started to diminish after the San Francisco season, perhaps the shows most poignant and famous thanks to the death of AIDS activist Pedro Zamora and the ouster of his nemesis Puck, who was so nasty the roommates kicked him out of the house. Remember on that season that Pam was in med school while it was being filmed? That was some serious stuff. Now we’re lucky if one of the kids works one day a week at something other than exhibitionism and self-promotion. In later seasons, the show started giving the cast projects, like starting a business or working a job, to give the show some cohesion, but even those shortly fell by the wayside.

What do we get now? The people on the show don’t seem to be actually doing anything outside of the house. They have silly internships that don’t involve much work and seem more like pre-arranged camera dates than documented work experience. Either that or they have little hobbies that the producers try to blow up into a huge thing. Callie is a photographer! Andrew is an artist! Emily is a (really bad) poet! Erika the quitter and Josh are musicians! Ashley is…well, just whiny!

No, they are practically forbidden to do anything outside other than get drunk, go to the gym, party, and hook up with people. Otherwise, they are trapped within the confines of their messy, faux Ikea domicile to claw each others eyes out, sob on the phone, and have petty squabbles and heavy petting. Thanks to the rule-breaking Las Vegas season, which was the start of The Real World’s descent into trash for trash’s sake, there is only a thin patina of social relevance to the entire enterprise. Ironically, it is that earnestness that makes it seem stodgy and outdated.

From casts of participants whose interpersonal interactions were authentic and dramatic, we have “types” cast only for their predisposition to engage in explosive and pathetic behavior. From a show structured to document real life, we have contrivances designed to maximize conflict.

But Moylan blames audiences as much as producers and participants for wanting to be fed only the fat of the reality animal, arguing that it is our hunger for disembodied discord that spurred the rationalization of reality. We have forced the devolution of documentary, from representational of real experience to manipulated, empty interactions between easy-to-cast types. And, he claims, it was the early seasons of The Real World that served to whet our appetites:

Thanks to The Real World itself, we have catapulted ourselves headfirst into the reality television black hole. Now seven eight strangers followed by cameras is no longer a novelty now that every two-bit celebrity will mug for the camera and countless shows pit strangers against each other in much more extreme and exotic locations. The audience no longer demands low brow entertainment disguised as high brow documentary. We want to wallow in the muck. Give us the Kardashians. Give us Tinsley Mortimer and her fake racist socialites. Give us the Bad Girl’s Club. Shockingly, MTV mastered this art form quickly with Jersey Shore, the crown jewel of the reality treasure chest. If you’re going to lock a bunch of people in a house and make them drink, fight, and fuck their way to fame and salvation, that this is the way to do it. No Real World cast ever will be able to top Snooki, The Situation, and crew in unabashed trashiness. With its continued innovation, MTV made their old innovation obsolete.

He and I agree that shows like Keeping Up with the Kardashians and Bad Girl’s Club are the product of rationalized reality — the food of early reality processed to extract the basest bits — but I can’t get on board with the assertion that Jersey Shore is this trend’s apotheosis (or nadir, depending on how you look at it).

No Real World season to come can top Snooki and The Situation, but not because the latter are more trashy. Unlike the current seasons of The Real World, The Jersey Shore and its participants are compelling because they are untrained and artless. As fake as they are, we watch them because they are real.

The End of Reality: Part II.

This is what happens in the blogosphere: I vow to post more persistently, then go five months without an update. No more vows — just a futile hope that I can muster the energy and wherewithal to actually record my thoughts for you, my faithful(?) audience.

So where was I?

***

Yes, even reality shows can jump the shark, because even reality shows can have artistic integrity and grounding assertions. In the case of Project Runway, it had continually cast itself as the high-brow reality show (embracing the implied contradiction), insisting it is meritocratic even within its convoluted constraints.

During its last season, Heidi went so far as to verbalize its internal logic: “three strikes, and you’re out.” But in Christopher’s survival past three egregiously heinous strikes, the foundational arguments of the show were thrown over and the series — or, at least, the season (for each new batch of contestants provides its own potentially-redemptive slate-wiping) — jumped the shark.

Where does this leave us? With the realization that we are nearing, at, or just past a critical inflection point in the genre.

***

It’s taken for granted these days that “reality shows” no longer represent anything “real.” Shows that, at their launch, trained their cameras on non-camera-trained individuals in unfamiliar settings and constructs (The Real World, The Bachelor, Survivor, American Idol) have become repetitive and clichéd. New reality shows have eschewed the goals of their antecedents entirely, uninterested in gleaning insight about real people in microcosm (The Hills, the entire VH1 reality line-up).

When Court TV distanced itself from trial coverage, moving towards documentary shows about true crime and dangerous jobs, it renamed itself “TruTV” and worked our disenchantment with reality TV right into its motto: “Not Reality. Actuality.” “Reality” as a TV genre has become meaningless, a codeword for nothing more than non-fiction (not necessarily unscripted) starring individuals playing themselves, or versions of themselves (not necessarily non-actors).

But the meaninglessness of “Reality” and the inescapable cliché of contemporary reality shows are merely symptoms of culture — they are not the ding an sich (the thing in itself).

Of what are they symptoms? The Rationalization of Reality.

***

Father of sociology Max Weber described “rationalization” as the unavoidable progression of systems (both physical systems and systems of thought) from inefficient abstraction to cold logic that occurs as we gain better understanding of means and ends, cause and effect, and adapt accordingly. It’s a bit of a difficult concept to understand, and I’m doing it no favors with my abstruse attempts at definition. Examples are the best way to get at it — metonymically.

Bureaucratization is a great example: From early governments and companies that deal with issues ad hoc, with messy delegating and overlapping domains, we develop bureaucracies, with clearly delineated institutions and internal hierarchies for each carefully differentiated issue. So we get the Deputy Assistant Secretary for Canada, Mexico and NAFTA Issues in the State Department’s Bureau of Western Hemisphere Affairs.

Health has also been extremely rationalized over the last few centuries: from a vague understanding of illness tied into conceptions of sin and virtue, we’ve developed keen observations of patterns of sickness and of the world on a microscopic level — we now understand how germs are disseminated, and we’ve developed highly organized systems of treatments for every conceivable array of symptoms.

Even something as simple as our usage of a park can become rationalized. From an open field, we develop well-trod paths where the most people have found the most amenable routes. From free and spontaneous play all around, we designate an area for picnics and an area for baseball. From inconsistent self-policing, we develop rules and guidelines and post them on big green signs forbidding cell phone usage from 11am to 4pm.

While rationalization makes these systems and our lives more efficient, we become constrained by the rigidity of the structures we’ve made for ourselves. We become, as Weber wrote a bit melodramatically, trapped in an “iron cage” and our world devolves into a “polar night of icy darkness.”

But we can see where Weber’s coming from. In a hyper-rationalized landscape of, for instance, mental health, every possible deviation from “normalcy” becomes its own syndrome. As Louis Menand recently wrote in the New Yorker (paraphrasing David Healy in “The Antidepressant Era”), “if a drug (in this case, Paxil) proves to change something in patients (shyness), then that something becomes a disorder to be treated (social anxiety). The discovery of the remedy creates the disease.” As we are constantly hone in on more taut relationships between causes and effects, we can become blinded to the bigger picture.

***

From a brief survey of reality programming over the last decade, we can clearly see the bigger picture of authenticity being lost as shows become rationalized to milk drama from ultimately inauthentic characters and conventions. But before we can perform that survey, we have to understand the shows and the goals of their subjects and producers.

To generalize, there are two main sub-genres of reality TV: the documentary series (The Real World, The Hills, Jersey Shore) and the game show (Survivor, Project Runway, The Bachelor). Though the lines are blurry — there’s not much fundamental difference between I Love New York and New York Goes to Work — there is an essential distinction. While contestants on game shows are competing for a prize (be it a million dollars or the love of an over-the-hill 80s hip hop artist), with individuals often voted off each week, the subjects of documentary series need only exist within the contrived situations mapped out for them (New York works at a farm! Eight strangers stop being polite and start getting real!).

The goals of the early contestants on game shows was to win. Now, contestants want to win, but they also hope to gain some moderate level of fame and future opportunity through participation. Tabatha Coffey parlayed her appearance on the reality game show Shear Genius into her own reality documentary series, Tabatha’s Salon Takeover; Big Brother’s Jeff and Jordan won $500,000 and $25,000, respectively, and won enough of America’s affection to land them on The Amazing Race; myriad former contestants on American Idol, America’s Next Top Model, and Project Runway have leveraged their fifteen minutes of fame into much longer periods of moderate success in their chosen fields.

The goal of the subjects of reality’s documentary series was, at one point, simply to participate (think the early Real Worlders). Now, it seems their goals are primarily focused toward the attention they can earn by being interesting “characters” on their shows.

In both cases, the goals of the shows’ producers is viewership, achieved by making their programs interesting. Interesting can take many forms — cloyingly romantic (The Bachelor), cringingly pathetic (Celebrity Rehab), explosively charged (The Bad Girls Club) — but, in all cases, producers hope that their programs’ drama will translate into throngs of dedicated viewers.

Understanding the goals of the constituent individuals, we can see how reality TV can become rationalized: participants and producers better understand the means and ends of achieving success however defined (a million dollars, future opportunities, high ratings) and acting accordingly.

***

Let’s consider game shows first. Like people walking in a well-trod park looking for the best routes, early participants in reality contests found themselves more or less successful depending on different strategies of behavior, leading to the carving out of conventional types. From the complete blank slate of the first season of Survivor — in which Sue Hawk and Rudy Boesch had no touchstone against which to judge Richard Hatch, no model for suggesting they should suspect his scheming and double-dealing — there is now the season of “Heros” and “Villains,” with contestants from past seasons so neatly fitting into the types pioneered by their reality forbears that the subtextual “types” have become the text itself.

Every kind of game show — from talent to matchmaking to social experiment — has gone through enough iterations to develop these same conventions, these same paths through the park, and now contestants cannot help but retread the same steps. Reality game shows now have such clearly articulated narratives of success and failure that contemporary seasons cannot feel like anything more than variations on a theme.

And what about documentary shows? At the beginning, producers plumbed drama from the conflict between individuals from disparate backgrounds in contrived social situations. Untrained and unfamiliar with what patterns of behavior would lead to post-participitory fame — and unfamiliar with the notion that participation could lead to fame at all — the individuals on whom the cameras were focused acted authentically, and to the fascination of viewing audiences. But once producers noticed what moments were most likely to lead to the camera’s and audience’s attention — fights, sex, sloppy drunkenness leading to fights and sex — they began casting participants most likely to slap each other, sleep with each other, and drink to excess. The first season of the Real World becomes every subsequent season, with the frat-boy jock, the Mormon, the gay guy, the alcoholic — characters who were at one time simply compelling real people — cast to foster the contrived drama the producers think will attract audiences and that now-savvy participants think will attract future job opportunities.

In some cases, like The Hills, the producers have gone so far as to hire writers to ensure that each episode has the drama that unscripted reality shows cannot guarantee will arise on a regular schedule. Whole shows like Celebrity Rehab are built around premises designed for maximum pathos with little regard for documenting relatable human experience. Reality documentary shows are so manipulated to foster the drama that authenticity once provided that they have become scripted echoes of their true-to-life ancestors.

The problem with this rationalization is that any value reality TV once had as a genre inhered in its represnetation of authentic human experience. Settings like Survivor’s deserted island or American Idol’s big stage or the Real World apartment were contrived, but there was no behavioral model to follow for the early participants — no conventions of “successful” participation. Their behaviors and conflicts were thus authentic and engaging: Pedro on The Real World, Richard Hatch on Survivor, Jay McCarroll on Project Runway, and Omarosa on The Apprentice were compelling because they had not yet learned they were performing.

***

But there is hope for the genre; or, there was at least a glimmer of hope during the fall of 2009, when MTV assembled a group of youngsters who wanted no more than to participate in the opportunity provided: a summer at the Jersey Shore.

What made Jersey Shore so compelling to viewers was that it was authentic in a way reality TV hasn’t been in years. Snooki, Sammi, JWow, The Situation, Ronnie, Pauly D, and Vinny were not there to perform — and, indeed, they seemed unaware of the promise of recognition and fame (unaware even of the cameras) until after the show had begun airing. They were there only for a swank house on the Shore and like-minded guidos and guidettes with whom to party. Indeed, Angelina’s early departure is evidence of the fact that her goal was not to be the focus of a reality camera; when she dragged her trash-bag of belongings into the house, one sensed she was there for no more than a good time. When she failed to have that good time, she left.

Though some of the conflicts on the show may have been prompted by the producers (one can’t believe that Vinny really seduced the girlfriend of his boss and landlord unwittingly), the interactions between the characters — and between them and the other people at the shore — was strikingly, unsettlingly realistic.

The phenomenon was fostered by the guido/guidette-framed nature of the grouping. Unlike The Real World, whose social experiment was once premised on people from diverse backgrounds coming into conflict, Jersey Shore had no such pretensions of diversity — a shallowness that in fact bolstered its representational success. When one goes from a community of like-minded people to a setting in which one is a minority (think The Mormon on The Real World), one must be as much a representative of one’s group as a normal version of oneself. Snooki and her kin did not need to be “the guido” in an unsympathetic group — they needed only be themselves.

But the magical moment of Jersey Shore season 1 is not replicable. Copycat shows (the as-yet-unnamed-Brighton-Beach-based spinoff, Jerseylicious) now have an implicit script to follow, characters to cast. Even the cast of Jersey Shore season 1 will be camera-trained and ratings-minded when they shoot season 2 this summer.

Still, there is a lesson here: Rather than manipulating reality shows to wring compelling television out of known-to-be-dramatic characters and conventions, we must find the last batch of people who are not yet characters and the last batch of contrivances that are not yet conventions. Any show with an existing script for success and drama, a script written by the last decade of the genre, will be fated to staleness. Only by a renewed commitment to authenticity can we break out of the “iron cage” of rationalization — only with a jettisoning of characters and conventions can reality TV be real again.

The End of Reality: Part I.

On Thursday, October 25, 2009, at 9:57 PM, Project Runway jumped the shark.

I know ‘jumping the shark’ is a loaded concept that’s now bordering on the cliché. And it’s easy to indict a show that’s having a lackluster season — especially a reality competition that’s suffering from inconsistent and frustrating judging — of having debased itself in some core way. But I think ‘jumping the shark’ is a very particular kind of invalidation, one perpetrated by PR in its last episode.

First, the facts. Spoiler alert.

In the bottom two on Thursday night: feather prince Nicolas Putvinski, with his malproportioned Grecian fantasy; and fragile autodidact Christopher Straub, with his indescribably bad “Sante Fe”-”inspired” “outfit” to match his unfortunate, hairline-thin, jawline-hugging facial hair.

Christopher, an earnest if overconfident soul from Shakopee, Minnesota, was making his fourth appearance in the bottom in just as many weeks. After a strong showing early in the competition, Christopher continued to display an utter lack of taste; it was his third time in bottom two, a perch from which he outlasted better competitors Louise and Shirin.

Somehow, Christopher had continued to squeak by on something — remembered potential? Simple favoritism?

This week, though, the there was simply no way he could get another reprieve after running so long on fabric fumes. Michael Kors described his Sante Fe garment as “costume.” Heidi was more frank: “unwearable,” she said; and, later, “just ugly.”

It was thus with the collective gasp of a million viewers that Heidi announced, “Christopher… you’re in.”

***

This season of Project Runway was problematic far before last week. After relocating to Lifetime and Los Angeles, the show has been unmoored by innumerable absences from New York-based judges Nina Garcia and Michael Kors.

Consistent judging is essential for a show like Project Runway, where contestants prove their mettle and articulate their point-of-view over a season’s worth of wacky challenges. If I had missed school as many times as either judge has abandoned their post (or, more accurately, their runway-side stool) this season, I would’ve never made it past the seventh grade.

There have been other problems, too.

None of the contestants has impressed audiences with innovative design. Each week, the winning designs seem to be the ones conceived and executed with the most competence, not originality.

And none of the personalities has proven exceptionally engaging, leaving an absence of interesting interpersonal dynamics. Yes, Irina is a bitch and Carol Hannah thinks Logan is attractive. But it’s hard to summon hatred for Irina, as she is the most consistently successful of the designers; it’s harder to empathize with Carol Hannah, as Logan is criminally devoid of personality.

So why was Christopher’s third bottom-two survival the moment that marked the jumping of the shark?

***

Let’s take a step back. What does it mean to jump the shark?

Wikipedia defines the term as “a colloquialism coined by Jon Hein and used by TV critics and fans to denote the point in a television program’s history where the plot veers off into absurd story lines or out-of-the-ordinary characterizations. This usually corresponds to the point where a show with falling ratings apparently becomes more desperate to draw in viewers.”

This definition approaches the phenomenon by metonymy: yes, jumping the shark is often found in conjunction with declining ratings, and it often occurs vis-a-vis absurdity or inconsistency. But these are not the ding an sich.

What these associations hint at is the core of shark-jumping: a cultural object’s forfeiture of artistic integrity. A TV show jumps the shark when it ceases playing by its internally-established rules or abandons its foundational premises.

Happy Days jumped the shark when Fonzie literally jumped a shark on water skies (still in his trademark leather jacket), but it jumped the shark because in that moment it gave up the pretense that it was a naturalistic representation of the lives of Richie Cunningham and his 50s teenage friends.

Cousin Oliver came to stay with the Brady Bunch because of their declining ratings, but the show jumped the shark because his arrival fundamentally altered its premise as a sitcom built on the foibles of what happened after a lovely lady bringing up three very lovely girls married a man named Brady who was busy with three boys of his own — this was a show with its premises built right into the theme song!

When Christopher lived to sew another day after first taking up residence in the bottom and then living their comfortably for a month, it wasn’t just an opportunity to scream at the screen — it marked Project Runway’s loss of artistic integrity.

***

Much of the best cultural criticism being written today can be found on a blog called FourFour, where Rick Juzwiak meditates on music, web culture, and, most prominently, reality TV. (His recaps of America’s Next Top Model offer enough motivation in themselves to continue watching.)

On the occasion of Project Runway’s sixth season premiere, he wrote about the show he once recapped but never fell in love with:

Project Runway has a reputation for being a high-brow reality show, probably because of its supposed investment in talent, its tempered contestants and its consistent pacing. I think assigning high- and low-culture status within the genre of reality TV is like assigning a hierarchy of pork products, from, say, belly to scrapple. In the end, it’s all fucking pig…

I don’t mean to hold its hype against it, and it’s not like Project Runway ultimately does that great of a job in avoiding being what it is, anyway. People are not there to make friends, they throw each other under the bus, this isn’t the last you’ve heard of them when they’re bounced. As though sniffing out truffles, the casting agents fill the show with types…

There is an androgynous, aggressively coiffed pseudo-intellect who described his design as “ineffable,” but was unfortunately incorrect as he didn’t then shut up.

In response to the task of designing for the red carpet, this one also said “I don’t differentiate between different colored carpets,” which, uh, yeah you do because you just called them “different.” It was here that I was reminded of maybe the main reason I stopped watching this show: I find humorless snobs too excruciating to even laugh at, and as a fashion-design competition, pretension runs thick on Project Runway. It’s not the show’s fault, per se, it’s just how it works out.

Juzwiak has never been able to sign onto Project Runway’s premises — that it is a cut above the typical reality competition, a true search for the best that rewards the excellent and dismisses the dilettantes — but these are its premises indeed. These are the reasons discerning viewers, who would never deign to watch Top Model, have fawned over Daniel Vosovic and Jeffrey Sebelia and Christian Siriano and Korto Momolu for years.

But Juzwiak is right: Project Runway was never perfect, and it has always had more base reality conventions sewn into the muslin core beneath its silk exterior. Yes, contestants who make for good TV might outlast their less interesting competitors. Yes, the challenges with their money- and time-limits are contrived.

Still, the internal logic of the competition demands that continued ineptitude be punished. The show is built on its premise of pretension, of being the highbrow reality competition that may give a second and third chance, but never a fourth.

***

At the beginning of this season, there was a contestant named Mitchell, whose last name I forget. Technically talentless, he seemed constitutionally incapable of assembling a wearable garment by the time of the runway show.

He was in the bottom two in week one, but was kept over the otherworldly Ari Fish. He was in the bottom two in week two, but was kept over the ineffable Malvin Vein. Viewers were frustrated, seeing admittedly eccentric designers leave before the bungling Mitchell.

But, then, justice.

In week three, Mitchell found himself in the bottom two for the third time — and this was after a challenge in which his team had won!

It was unprecedented, but clearly required by the logic of the show — his continued failure could not be countenanced.

Heidi made the awaited pronouncement: “Never in Project Runway history has a team member for a winning design been eliminated. Three strikes and you’re out.”

Flash forward to October 22. Christopher sews together fabric that leaves fellow designer Althea dumbstruck: “If Christopher can put that garment down the runway and not get eliminated, then I don’t know what’s going on.” We all agree.

He lands in the bottom two for the third time. The logic of the competition, the internal rules of the show articulated by Heidi herself, demand his expulsion.

But he survives. And he’s not even good TV.

The rules are broken. The premises are thrown over. The foundation collapses.

Project Runway jumps the shark.

***

In my next post, I’ll explore what Project Runway’s shark-jumping says about the state of reality TV — a genre built on the premise of representing “reality” that may be increasingly incapable of fulfilling its foundational requirement.

Note that this series is also being posted on Tears and Jeers, a pop culture blog written with Sachi Ezura. It was relevant to both blogs’ interests, and I couldn’t choose just one place to post. And some cross-blog promotion never hurts.