Captive Audience_On Love and Reality TV Read online

  Advance Praise for

  Captive Audience

  “If Mann doesn’t quite elevate reality TV to an art form—and that’s unlikely his intention—he makes a persuasive argument for readers to sit up and take notice. The cultural implications are perhaps more potent than we’d like to believe. An immensely captivating consideration of reality TV and a moving reflection on marriage.”

  —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

  “I’m an ardent admirer of Lucas Mann’s work. Captive Audience shows us how to do ‘media criticism’ the right way or rather the wrong way, the more electric and exciting way: the target is never out there; it’s in here. A galvanizing, illuminating, and nervy book.”

  —David Shields, author of Other People and Reality Hunger

  “I was initially drawn to Captive Audience’s smashing critical analysis and savvy pop-culture apologies, but what I ended up cherishing most of all is this book’s vivid portraiture. Mann has written a soulful recounting of not just a decade of watching reality TV as it has evolved past entertainment into something more complex, public, and even sinister, but a story of doing so alongside another person—a beloved life partner, nonetheless, with whom his shared reality also evolves and deepens. Who could have imagined that one of the most evocative love stories I’ve read in ages would be mixed into heady investigations of Joe Millionaire, Cops, and Vanderpump Rules?”

  —Elena Passarello, author of Animals Strike Curious Poses

  “There is no cultural critic in America like Lucas Mann. Perhaps that’s because he turns on the television and sees what you don’t—in the vulgar and striving world of reality television, he finds beauty and heart in the ambition that drove these overtanned and underfed people to perform for us—and that brought us in to watch. Mann’s voice is filled with empathy, irony, and a tenderness that will make you laugh and then ache, sometimes within the span of a single, perfectly constructed sentence. Captive Audience is the definitive book on the aging but perennially renewed genre of reality TV, and there isn’t an author alive who could have written it better.”

  —Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Only Wanting This

  “Epistolary writing is custom-made for immodesty and oversharing, the kinds of filterless self-display, as Lucas Mann shows us, that we happen to want from reality TV stars. But in this epistle to his wife, Mann explores their shared enthusiasm for reality television and proves there is insight and virtue to be found in examining the desire to be seen. He gets closer to that dimension of intimacy and love, in fact, than any spotlight-seeker yet who has beguiled us from our most private screens.”

  —Gregory Pardlo, author of Air Traffic

  “What other book goes so boldly into the insatiable need to be seen? Who else is as tough on his own perceptions? I already knew Lucas Mann was a wonder of a writer, but Captive Audience is his best book yet: a tender, humane, comic, brainy, unsettling achievement.”

  —Paul Lisicky, author of The Narrow Door: A Memoir of Friendship

  Lucas Mann

  Captive Audience

  Lucas Mann was born in New York City and received his MFA from the University of Iowa, where he was the Provost’s Visiting Writer in Nonfiction. He is also the author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, which was named one of the best books of 2015 by the Miami Herald, Kirkus Reviews, Paper magazine, Largehearted Boy, and Oprah.com, and Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere, which earned a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers selection and was named one of the best books of 2013 by the San Francisco Chronicle. His essays have appeared in Guernica, BuzzFeed, Slate, and The Kenyon Review, among others. He recently received a 2018 National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship. He teaches creative writing at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and lives in Providence, Rhode Island, with his wife.

  www.lucasmann.com

  ALSO BY LUCAS MANN

  Class A: Baseball in the Middle of Everywhere

  Lord Fear: A Memoir

  A VINTAGE BOOKS ORIGINAL, MAY 2018

  Copyright © 2018 by Lucas Mann

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and distributed in Canada by Random House of Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  Vintage and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  The Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress.

  Vintage Books Trade Paperback ISBN 9780525435549

  Ebook ISBN 9780525435556

  Cover design by Joan Wong

  Author photograph © Matthew Celeste

  www.vintagebooks.com

  v5.2

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Also by Lucas Mann

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Author’s Note

  For Ottavia

  1

  [REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:

  Hi (: I am ______, I am a 17 year old with a story.

  I want to quit feeling like I am not important. I want to be somebody in my life, I do not want to be remembered as some face in the yearbook, I want to be heard. Currently, I make youtube videos, and I have 317 subscribers. I know it is not a big number, but I am finally being heard by some people and I love it. I just want to make people happy, in any shape or form. Putting a smile on people’s faces is my dream! If I could be casted on this show, my life would be complete. I just want people to know me more than just some girl who likes makeup. I want people to know who I am. My family is not against this, but they do think I should focus on school, which I agree with but this is my dream.

  Height: 5 feel 5 inches

  Age: 17

  Gender: Female

  Dream: This.

  Please help me reach for the stars, this is my dream and if it comes true, I can’t even imagine my life. Help me out (: Help me be heard.

  —from www.castingcallhub.com

  I have, for a long time, suggested that we get rid of cable. I have even suggested that we throw out our TV altogether so that we may eat at our actual kitchen table and play more Scrabble. I’d say these suggestions come biannually, on average—they used to be more frequent, then ebbed, and are now increasing again. They have been going on for the better part of a decade. They arise, as most of my impulses toward change do, out of feelings of shame. They arise when we open up our home and visitors see the way we live—by which I mean what we watch and the frequency with which we watch it—and make remarks that I take to be scornful:

  I cannot believe you guys have all the channels.

  Or: How can someone retain so much information about Bravo?

  Or: How do you do it? If I had cable, I think I would forget how to live. It’s just too easy t
o let your mind get lost in the slush and forget to look up.

  The relationship between television and life is loaded. The relationship between television and love is, perhaps, even more so. Life, the way I think the term is most commonly used, is about action. Go out and live is the kind of thing people say to those they deem flawed—ride something, climb something. Engage. Or it can be used as an insult to those who have nothing valuable to offer: get a life.

  Love, the way I think the term is most commonly used, necessitates the same action. Loving passively is as shameful as living that way. When we love fully, we are doing something to make that love valid. It’s a conscious process; it’s active. Two people see each other in a way that elevates the act of sight to a challenge that must be confronted. Two people refuse to take their eyes off one another; that’s the idea. When we love fully, we are meant to engage.

  * * *

  —

  For a long time, when you would refuse to give up television, I would pretend to be grudgingly acquiescent, as opposed to relieved. You would placate me and say that our watching was your fault, that I was merely implicated by association, the same way it is when I buy ice cream and offer you some—those aren’t your calories if you didn’t seek them out. We would, as a way to avoid any long-term legislation, briefly turn off the TV and spend the following hours in a sort of mutual meditation, leaning over the table at dinner, sometimes by candlelight, taking in the contours of the face in front of us, as though it had changed from the previous day, and the one before that, and the countless expanse of days that stretched out behind us (nearly every day of our adult lives), making us forget what it felt like to not know that face.

  The literature of love, both the bad kind and the good, hinges on this type of sustained gaze. And, though the word boredom rarely comes up, it seems crucial that lovers put themselves in scenarios that would otherwise be boring and then very pointedly not feel bored. I’m thinking of Keats here, in one of those gorgeous poems to Fanny that I once read aloud to you in college, the last time neither of us owned a TV. I read to you of Keats wishing only to be:

  …gazing on the new soft-fallen mask

  Of snow upon the mountains and the moors—

  No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,

  Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast….

  People used to live at such a slow, sensual pace. This is the kind of thing I still say on the nights when the TV is off. Nostalgia is all wrapped up in slowness. How long we used to linger. The capacity we used to have for sustained care, sustained concentration, sustained quiet.

  My favorite book about love is John Berger’s And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos. Berger wrote it in 1984—an early–MTV era book—but he wrote with a slowness that implies timelessness, that makes a piece of writing feel resonant, or maybe the word is authentic. He was an aging icon in the French Alps then, describing the way his life had moved, the way he’d seen the world change, but at its core the book is a missive to his lover.

  He writes of when he is without her, thinking of her, how she shifts in his imagination:

  In the country which is you, I know your gestures, the intonations of your voice, the shape of every part of your body. You are not physically less real there, but you are less free.

  How strong a gaze; how long lasting—until his love (who remains unnamed throughout) becomes the image of herself, a creation of his mind and memory as much as the person he knows. There is a bending of reality in this sentiment, and in turn a sort of dehumanizing, but in Berger’s hands it doesn’t feel gross. Instead, it is a way of seeing I aspire to. It’s the elevation of a person to art: to speak to the one I most care for and hopefully witness a grander sentiment (Love! Timeless love!) whisper out from the intimacy of that address. But Berger wrote these words long before anyone ever wrote the word mansplain, and I wonder now if he might ask for a do-over. And I wonder, too, if I should try to find a better way to capture and perform my own love. You don’t need me to tell you what’s there, what’s been there, like it’s a show that only I’ve been watching. And yet I do, uncertain, trapped in my own voice, hoping you see at least a sliver of yourself in the portrait, frozen in sustained care.

  We went to the Alps once, with your sister and a bunch of other leather-clad Europeans. All that money blown to spend New Year’s partying at high altitudes. Everybody else went skiing, but you knew I couldn’t, so you let me avoid the embarrassment by staying behind. I spent a week binge-watching over bad Wi-Fi, and that experience of waiting for the screen to unfreeze while cold rain pecked at the windows of a moldy chalet only ratcheted up the claustrophobia. I watched. Sometimes I walked until I got bored, then returned to the screen again. I waited to hear you come in the door, and we’d put our cheeks together so I could absorb some of the cold from you.

  On New Year’s Eve, everyone did coke and got into predictable arguments when the coke ran out, and later we lay in bed unable to sleep. The shadows of the mountains were maybe visible through our window, framed in moonlight, but we weren’t looking. We watched each other’s faces and waited for the laptop to buffer. Finally, we were able to watch The Real L Word, a show about actual lesbians in LA, developed to capitalize on the success of a show about fictional lesbians in LA that I never had any interest in watching. It’s a program we’ve only ever sought out in transit—in a motel in Pennsylvania, mid-move, U-Haul packed in the parking lot, dog whimpering at the sound of trucks passing outside, or in a semisecluded corner of O’Hare Airport on a night when all connections were grounded for tornadoes.

  Sometimes it’s nice to match moods, to decide on that mood matching together. There’s a restlessness to The Real L Word that appeals only in restless moments. There’s a pulsing crassness to the way the most intimately personal is made to feel branded. The women fuck desperately in some scenes, and with the lights on, no pretense that they’re unaware of the cameras. They look up, let us see their faces, and then plunge their heads back between legs. In nonfucking scenes, every word is loaded with as much pressure as sex; anything said about anyone can be taken as a slight. It’s easy to get a sense that they don’t know one another at all, or maybe they really do and this is how shallow knowing someone looks when there’s a camera around—another loaded thought.

  We were on the futon in the dark, in the Alps, listening to the coke fights die down, and there was Whitney on-screen, fucking white-dreadlock Whitney, movie makeup artist-cum-minor celebrity, confessing in the confessional room after a pretty graphic tryst with her on-again-off-again.

  Lust is easy for me, she said in front of a bright-red curtain, for some reason. Love is hard. Lust is exciting. Love is scary.

  We looked at each other, like always. We didn’t say anything, but let Whitney’s cutaway line hang between us as a question or an invitation. I saw your face, pale, and my face reflected in your dark eyes. It doesn’t take much to approximate profundity. At least not to me.

  * * *

  —

  I’ve written about a lot of things, or it seems that way to me, but ultimately they’re all kind of the same thing. I write about loneliness, or dissatisfaction, or incompleteness. I have tried, in different (though not very different) ways, to make sense of the things that hurt. What is harder, and what I have avoided, is trying to honor the truth of everything that doesn’t hurt: that I am not alone; that (although I’m reluctant to say the exact phrase because of Jerry Maguire) I am closer to feeling complete because we are together; that often, in our little house in front of our big TV for hours until my eyes begin to sting, I am satisfied.

  This is tough to reread after writing it. It seems an impossibly small statement to make, one meant to be offered only semisincerely, and a bit drunkenly, at special-occasion dinners.

  Barthes says that love, as a subject, has been driven to the backwater of the “unreal.” Then, he strives to di
stinguish between unreal and disreal. The unreal is the fantastical—Tristan and Isolde, It’s a Wonderful Life, that kind of thing. In its grandness and sincerity and removal, the unreal is easier to explain, always familiar. And so it’s the love story that is easiest to find in any book or movie or TV show, allowing the audience to linger in swelling impossibility.

  The disreal, though, is that instant ghost of lived experience, the flickering, perceived moment, unsayable—if I utter it (if I lunge at it, even with a clumsy or overliterary sentence), I emerge from it.

  My problem is that I am immersed in it, and because I’m immersed in it, I can’t think of anything else to utter. We are in one place: our home; we see one person: the other. What else is there to say? I want to believe that I’m not interested in fantasy. I am interested in the disreal, not the unreal, both in the art that I seek and the love that I live. But if you look at any life long enough, with enough vested interest, how do you not begin to push toward the fantastical?

  Whenever you catch me looking at you, you say, What are you looking at? Which is a really loaded question. You know what I’m looking at—you, the person in front of me; what else could I be looking at? But what you’re asking for is the difference between image and interpretation—is what I see more interesting than what is really there, or what you think is really there? And all I can ever say is nothing. And then you roll your eyes and we become exactly what the world would expect us to be. And now I’ve gone from Roland Barthes to a sitcom punch line. I turn back to the TV.