To Have Our Lives Taped

Over the past decade, MTV's The Real World has become a mainline for cultural propagation. The archetype of the "reality tv" genre, this weekly, pretend-documentary consolidates, edits, and cannibalizes culture.

This season, taped in Chicago, showcased what is arguably the most agitating and self-aware cast of characters in its 11-year history. Aneesa, Cara, Chris, Keri, Kyle, Theo, and Tonya, appear to be plagued with hypocrisy, superficiality, and narcissism in various combinations. Like other recent casts, they grew up watching The Real World. Since they were 10 years old and younger, it taught them how to act and look, which problems to have in order to seem complicated, what fights to pick and with whom to seem independent, and what inner obstacles to overcome to seem heroic.

Such an understanding of the expectations held for them was immediately obvious when the seven cast members sat down on their first day together, lolling in their hot tub in order to "get to know each other." All jumped at their chance to reduce themselves to hyphenated identities: Kyle described himself as an all-American-white-fratboy; Aneesa, a Jewish-black-lesbian-princess; Keri, a party-girl-who'd-been-drinking-since-age-13, etc. The catch-quirks continued all the way around the tub. When the camera reached the relatively reserved Chris, the other six appeared shocked that he didn't have a label for himself. But they knew better. In fact, they refused to accept that he could have been chosen for the show without some kind of prefab baggage to be exposed. And the season proved them right: Chris is a former-latent-homosexual-recovering-alcoholic-with-fear-of-commitment. He used to be fat, now he is compulsive about working out and ogling himself in the mirror.

Even more obvious was the moment when Keri called out Kyle's "political campaign" (meaning he sculpted his image for the camera, even more than the others). Every cast member, other than the first season, has been a viewer and so, knows he or she is chosen to play a role and provide dramatic controversy, ensuring massive ratings and swarms of advertisers for MTV and its parent company, Viacom.

These ratings are the point of MTV's "cool-hunting" -- the focus groups, surveys, polls, house visits, and years of relentless programming. Consumers can be turned into product and vice versa. In the event that some consumers create their own lifestyles, or even worse, subcultures, MTV swallows them up and sells them back to its audience by incorporating them somehow into its programming.

Chicago's Wicker Park neighborhood, where The Real World XI was taped, is undergoing gentrification. For MTV, this meant sanitized urbanity, an opportunity to reveal the cast in a hip area doing hip things with hip people. Almost immediately, the MTV crew met with resistance. Local shops posted signs that read "No filming inside" and "Go back to the suburbs." Hundreds of activists, artists, anarchists, and concerned residents protested on the street outside the loft after its location was discovered. The bright orange door was hit with a can of red paint, traces of which could be seen on the sidewalk and doorway in certain episodes. Chicago police officers soon began patrolling the area, cordoning off the block, and, eventually, arresting two protesters -- one for writing on the sidewalk in chalk, the other for playing a drum, and both to send a message: disturbances at the loft would not be tolerated. (Not surprisingly, MTV is prosecuting both men.) Despite the turmoil, MTV still got the expected trendy nightlife, city skylines, roommate tears and shit-talking. The protests were simply left out.

While it is surprising that MTV didn't contextually edit the protests into TRL-style mobs of fans, they really didn't need to. The Real World's hand-selected characters, unlikable as they are, and probably because of it, did provide the goods. Kyle led Keri on for (what was edited to seem like) months, before callously dumping her for his ex and making her "feel like shit." Tonya, who just wanted to go home, passed kidney stones to the beat of her internal "countdown to Justin" clock. Cara took us on an ugly quest for male companionship, ugly not because she is "man-izing," as she calls it, but because her behavior is so clearly rooted in low, or no, self-esteem.