3 What Happens When People Stop Being Polite 0:26
Even before Eric Neis came into my life, I was having a pretty good 1992.
I wasn’t doing anything of consequence that summer, but—at least retrospectively—nothingness always seems to facilitate the best periods of my life. I suppose I was ostensibly going to summer school, sort of; I had signed up for three summer classes at the University of North Dakota in order to qualify for the maximum amount of financial aid, but then I dropped two of the classes the same day I got my check. I suppose I was also employed, sort of; I had a work-study job in the campus “geography library,” which was really just a room with a high ceiling, filled with maps no one ever used. For some reason, it was my job to count these maps for three hours a day (I was, however, allowed to listen to classic-rock radio). But most importantly, I was living in an apartment with a guy who spent all night locked in his bedroom writing a novel he was unironically titling Bits of Reality, which I think was a modern retelling of Oedipus Rex. He slept during the afternoon and mostly subsisted on raw hot dogs. I think his girlfriend paid the rent for both of us.
Now, this dude who ate the hot dogs…he was an excellent roommate. He didn’t care about anything remotely practical. When two people live together, there’s typically an unconscious Odd Couple relationship: There’s always one fastidious guy who keeps life organized, and there’s always one chaotic guy who makes life wacky and interesting. Somehow, the hot dog eater and I both fit into the latter category. In our lives, there was no Tony Randall. We would sit in the living room, drink a case of Busch beer, and throw the empty cans into the kitchen for no reason whatsoever, beyond the fact that it was the most overtly irresponsible way for any two people to live. We would consciously choose to put out cigarettes on the carpet when ashtrays were readily available; we would write phone messages on the walls; we would vomit out the window. And this was a basement apartment.
Obviously, we rarely argued about the living conditions.
We did, however, argue about everything else. Constantly. We’d argue about H. Ross Perot’s chances in the upcoming presidential election, and we’d argue about whether there were fewer Jews in the NBA than logic should dictate. We argued about the merits of dog racing, dogfighting, cockfighting, affirmative action, legalized prostitution, the properties of ice, chaos theory, and whether or not water had a discernible flavor. We argued about how difficult it would be to ride a bear, assuming said bear was muzzled. We argued about partial-birth abortion, and we argued about the possibility of Trent Reznor committing suicide and/or being gay. We once got into a vicious argument over whether or not I had actually read all of an aggrandizing Guns N’ Roses biography within the scope of a single day, an achievement my hot dog–gorged roommate claimed was impossible (that particular debate extended for all of July). Mostly, we argued about which of us was better at arguing, and particularly about who had won the previous argument.
Perhaps this is why we were both enraptured by that summer’s debut of MTV’s The Real World, an artistic product that mostly seemed like a TV show about people arguing. And these people were terrible arguers; the seven cast members thrown into that New York loft always made ill-conceived points and got unjustifiably emotional, and they all seemed to take everything much too personally. But the raw hot dog eater and I watched these people argue all summer long, and then we watched them argue again in the summer of 1993, and then again in the summer of 1994. Technically, these people were completely different every year, but they were also exactly the same. And pretty soon it became clear that the producers of The Real World weren’t sampling the youth of America—they were unintentionally creating it. By now, everyone I know is one of seven defined strangers, inevitably hoping to represent a predefined demographic and always failing horribly. The Real World is the real world is The Real World is the real world. It’s the same true story, even when it isn’t.
I tend to consider myself an amateur Real World scholar. I say “amateur” because I’ve done no actual university study on this subject, but I still say “scholar” because I’ve stopped watching the show as entertainment. At this point, I only watch it in hopes of unlocking the questions that have haunted man since the dawn of civilization. I’ve seen every episode of every season, and I’ve seen them all a minimum of three times. This, of course, is the key to appreciating The Real World (and the rest of MTV’s programming): repetition. To really get it, you have to watch MTV so much that you know things you never tried to remember. You can’t try to deduce the day-to-day habits of Jon Brennan (he was the cowboy dude) from RW 2: Los Angeles. That would be ridiculous. You can’t consciously try to figure out what he likes and what he hates and how he lives; these are things you have to know without trying. You just have to “know” he constantly drinks cherry Kool-Aid. But you can’t try to learn that, because that would make you a weirdo. This kind of knowledge is like a vivid dream you suddenly pull out of the cosmic ether, eight hours after waking up. If someone asks you when Montana from RW 6: Boston exposed her breasts, you just sort of vaguely recall it was on a boat; if someone asks you who the effeminate black guy from Seattle slapped in the face, you inexplicably know it was the chick with Lyme disease. Yet these are not bits of information you actively acquired; these are things picked up the same way you sussed out how to get around on the subway, or the way you figured out how to properly mix Bloody Marys. One day, you just suddenly realize it’s something you know. And—somehow—there’s a cold logic to it. It’s an extension of your own life, even though you never tried to make it that way.
In 1992, The Real World was supposed to be that kind of calculated accident; it was theoretically created as a seamless extension of reality. But somewhere that relationship became reversed; theory was replaced by practice. During that first RW summer, I saw kids on MTV who reminded me of people I knew in real life. By 1997, the opposite was starting to happen; I kept meeting new people who were like old Real World characters. I’ve met at least six Pucks in the past five years. This doesn’t mean they necessarily talk about snot or eat peanut butter with their hands; what it means is they play The Puck Role. In any given situation, they will provide The Puck Perspective, and they will force those around them to Confront The Puck Paradigm. If nothing else, The Real World has provided avenues for world views that are both specialized and universal, and it has particularly validated world views that are patently unreasonable.
Part of me is hesitant to write about cast members from The Real World in any specific sense, because I realize few Americans have studied (or even seen) all twelve seasons of the show. You hear a lot of people say things like they watched most of the first two seasons, or that they watched every season up until Miami, or that they never started watching until the San Francisco season, or that they’ve only seen bits and pieces of the last three years and tend to get the casts mixed up. For most normal TV watchers, The Real World is an obsession that fades at roughly the same rate as denim. I’ve noticed that much of the program’s original 1992 audience gets especially bored whenever a modern cast starts to talk like teenage aliens.[6] Last year, an old friend told me she’s grown to hate the Real World because, “MTV used to pick people for that show who I could relate to. Now they just have these stupid little kids who act like selfish twits.” This was said by a woman—now a responsible twenty-nine-year-old software specialist—who once threw a drink into the face of her college roommate for reasons that could never be explained. It’s hard for most people to hang with a show that so deeply bathes in a fountain of youth.
However, another part of me realizes there’s no risk whatsoever in pointing out specific RW cast members, even to people who’ve never seen the show once: You don’t need to know the people I’m talking about, because you know the people I’m talking about. And I don’t mean you know them in the ham-fisted way MTV casts them (i.e., “The Angry Black Militant”[7] or “The Gay One”[8] or “The Naive Virginal Southerner Who’s Vaguely Foxy”[9] When I say “you know these people,” it’s because the personalities on The Real World have become the only available personalities for everyone who’s (a) alive and (b) under the age of twenty-nine.
Our cultural preparation for a Real World universe actually started in movie
