the hills: no wonder our enemies hate us

This will sound disingenuous, but I don't normally watch the hills. Everyone says that, because even if you like watching the show it is impossible to not know that it is a horrible thing. Watching it is bad, that it exists is bad, that people produce something like this is bad. I've been unable to justify its existence at all, at least until last night. I may finally be able to make a (feeble) argument in its defense.

SOMEONE made me watch it last night, though I've been told I'm not allowed to tell anyone that he watches it because he is appropriately ashamed of this vile habit, but why would I sit through such torture if I can't make fun of it afterwards? Well, I'm nicer than I look, so I'll let this person remain nameless. Let's call him "Beth". Beth and I had gotten in a squabble and there was that moment where you feel like you've already had all the arguments a couple can manage and that you are doomed to repeat ridiculous gripes forever and ever. In that shortsighted moment, it is easy to blind yourself with all the ways that you and this other person are incompatible and also question whether or not you really are just a jackass. Maybe I'm retarded and don't know how to manage a relationship. Maybe I don't know how to communicate my feelings effectively or listen when someone else is trying to communicate them to me. Maybe we just don't work together...

None of this is true. I know that and even when feeling frustrated facing the picked scab of slow healing old fights, I still know that we've got a real good thing going on. I'm no fatalist and know better than to wallow too deeply or believe that moments of frustration are doomed to be eternal, but it is nice sometimes to have something external to your situation remind you how good you've got it.

When Beth wanted to quit talking and watch the hills, you can (if you have ever met me) imagine the look I shot in his direction. It was somewhere between over-my-dead-body and i-dare-you-to-try. Watching the hills isn't something you should wish on your worst enemy, much less someone you love. Had there been someone else to protect from this blight, I might have stood strong but he made an impassioned plea and I relented.

If you've never seen the hills, don't. It is a bunch of horrible vapid people who do horrible vapid things. Actually, that is being generous: the cast is entirely RealDolls and motorized mannikins. The purported main character, Lauren, almost comes across as human and occasionally says things that make sense. The worst people in the show are heidi and spencer. She is on the show because she is pretty. She looks like she has escaped from the Playboy Mansion and and flounces around with layered blonde extensions and a pouty, perpetually surprised/confused look. And why not? spencer doesn't make any sense. There is no reason he should be on television. She is at least pretty. He is not, and while she isn't particularly likable, her abject idiocy allows for occasional flashes of unintended humor. He isn't even funny. This is the second episode of the show I have ever seen, but just that small snippet leaves an indelible bad taste in the mouth towards this couple and him in particular. In this episode, the two are going through couples counseling. The counselor winces as she listens to their idiocy. heidi is flipping out over a bartender who he flirts with and who is sending him text messages and squares off against this jezebel when she and her brunette gang step to her blonde fembot gang at a club. All of them come across as stupid monkeys dancing in front of a camera, but the brunette wins the round by pointing out that at the end of the day, heidi is still dating a douche bag who hits on other girls and always will.

The other main drama of the show was some awful girl (named "Jayde") with bad collagen injections and a bottle of Jaegermeister acting like an idiot over a dumb boyfriend. But I'm not really here to give a play-by-play recap; I have no desire to recreate this horror. Watching all this absurdity though, suddenly my own relationship seemed incredibly healthy. We get in fights and sometimes silly fights and sometimes the same silly fights over and over, but there is no way either of us is ever going to be that disagreeable. The show's value seems to be in showing what is purported to be a fabulous life (glamor, parties, clothes, etc.) and making it look like the worst hell imaginable. And not even a fun sort of wretched hell. Lost occasionally looks like hell, being stuck on some time-travel island with an atomic bomb and people trying to kill you and your friends, but it is an interesting dynamic hell. The hell that is the hills just looks so painfully boring. They make leisure and money look awful.

And then there is what they do for relationships. If they make hanging out in bars look painful, they make dating look like pure torture (and not the waterboarding kind, but the ripping-off-fingernails-with-pliers kind). Sitting watching these... people(?) after having my own spat suddenly made me appreciate what I've got. We (like every couple) come up with some stupid things to fight about, but contrast against this alternate universe displayed in the hills we suddenly seem remarkably sane and stable. And there was a certain vicious catharsis to answering "Yes," when asked by Beth if he sounded like a particularly awful character as she picked a pointless fight. Having this televised nightmare to remind me how beautiful -even if occasionally frustrating- my reality is made the night a little easier, but I'd still rather it just didn't exist.

I would have still felt sour about the experience of being subjected to the show had we not followed it with the current episode of Family Guy, which spoofs the hills. Family Guy treated it with all the delicacy and tenderness that it treats any subject. If watching the hills made me feel better about my own small social sphere, it made me cringe for humanity in general. If this is a hit show, if people in droves are choosing to watch this eagerly, how can one have faith in our fellow man? Looking around the world today, it is easy to bump up against these terrifying dilemmas ("How can people do such horrible things?"), but then Family Guy dives in to save us. The brutal satire reminded the self-important jerk inside me that perhaps my negative reaction to the hills is the point. The show is done in arch seriousness, but everyone watching is in on the joke: no one watches it thinking these are likable people. Some are more likable than others, but all of them are kind of walking caricatures of our pop-generic obsessions and desires. Family Guy reminds that we all know this beast is absurd, that even Lauren Conrad is in on the joke, voicing herself as a character in the episode even as they present her as dating a (literal) dog (culminating with a scene of her dragging her ass around on a rug after Brian gives her worms) and lampooning the emptiness of the show.

In the end, rather than ruining my night and deepening our divide and prolonging our disagreement, the hills (I am still not going to capitalize it) actually salved the wound and gave us a common horror to be happy we weren't a part of. This isn't to say I plan on watching it again or that I don't think it should be cancelled, but you know me: always looking on the bright side.

Nightwood and Giovanni's Room: the dangers of the search for hidden messages in recommended fiction...

Language is meant to communicate, to get a point across. Perhaps also sometimes just to get something out, to express, to release some of that steam that builds up behind our eyes. We can be utilitarian in our language, try to say exactly what we mean in direct tones with simple meaning, but more often than not our feelings are more complicated than that. This is where we get into art and language and communication can get refined, yet also garbled. As we shape and express what we mean through whatever medium our art finds its expression in, it isn't usually just a simple single meaning that comes out. Had we meant a simple single meaning, why bother with art? Just make a sign and hang your message where the target will read it, or just say it straight out. As our intentions and feelings become more complex than just simple cause and effect, so too our forms of expression necessarily communicate complex feelings and messages. Of course, once it leaves our mind and enters the corporeal world, it isn't only up to the artist as to the meaning. We put what we can into something we create, but then the person who comes upon it takes from it according to what they see and what they've brought. It isn't only the creation of the art which completes it, it is also in the viewing. Finding a receptive audience is a talent in and of itself.

I'm prone to forget that everyone in an audience doesn't see the same work. Reading a book that hits on something I've felt but not known how to express always makes me want to share it with friends. I want to share what I've found, I want to discuss it with others, I want to dig in deeper. Some of this is just wanting to compare what we find and trying to see through different eyes. Some of it is just social and wanting to share things. Of course, sometimes there is the feeling that someone has communicated something that I couldn't or hadn't been able to before and sharing a reading feels like a way to let me make more sense to others: if they read this, they will understand what I mean, how I feel!

But we all read differently and each text has many messages. Coming from different directions, relating to different characters, we do not always find the same clarity in the same texts as our friends. Why am I reflecting on this now? Because I just read Nightwood.

There is something intriguing in the title, and I love the author's name. Djuna Barnes. I seem to have a certain predilection for names beginning with "Dj". I really wish I knew some Djunas and Djangos. I'm getting off track, just saying that there has been something compelling about the book that would have eventually pulled me to it, but I read it on recommendation. Ben had told me about it before and I had meant to pick it up and hadn't, so I finally decided to grab it off the shelf to be part of the traveling library that helps make this floating incarceration feel productive and less like a prison sentence. It was finally the right time to read it.

That it was the right time to read it was made all the more clear by Ben looking for it on the shelf and growling when he realized that I had taken it when he wanted to double check his remembrance of a passage for some of his commentary in his Facebook "25 things". Not that the right time to read it was when someone else wanted it (I'm not that spiteful, really) but rather that having read his comments on it and realizing how big an impact it had made on him brought it to the front of my mind and made it something that I wanted to read now. It was already in my mind and he had asked me to read it before; now the time was right to read it.

I think this also set me up for a certain confusion. Going into a book looking for someone you already know is a mission fraught with danger. We end up putting too much of our friends into the characters or too much of the characters into our friends and sometimes if we aren't careful we can distort and damage our reading.

This is particularly difficult for me. I'm an avid reader, but a brutal one. Even as I hated book reports in school, I've grown up doing one after another as a hobby. As anyone who has read much at all of what I write here knows, I've got strong opinions and a tendency to share them. I tend towards gushing or demolishing as my whims take me and often enough both about different aspects of the same thing. This is all good and well when it is just me talking about my experience with a piece of art, but what about when this is a thing you approached because it is emblematic for someone you love?

At the moment, I feel as if I am sort of through the looking glass, looking at the reverse of a scene I've been in before. On the other side of the mirror, I'm the one presenting the book which meant so much to me, so colored my world outlook that I felt compelled to share it and then eagerly awaited for it to be read and find myself understood and closer than ever. Of course, this is not how it worked out. I handed Ben Giovanni's Room, as I had handed it to friends before and as it had been handed to me. I devoured it in one night when I got it, reading as the remnants of a hurricane blew past where I waited it out in a safe inland retreat, crying tears openly (which is no great feat now, as I've become a little looser with my emotions and like a good cry anytime a book or movie warrants it, but then I was an uptight control freak who refused such silly human indulgences) and feeling destroyed and devastated by the book, but also hopeful. The book could be so tragic because there was this beautiful love story, that even if this love was doomed, the fact that it could exist, that it could be written down, that this story could make people cry was breathtaking to me. I felt like it was giving me permission to fall in love if I found it. Mason and Liz had made me read it, and I had made Michael read it (don't tell Liz, he still has her copy. I had to find an identical edition to replace it for her.) and made John read it and I don't know how many other people I forced it on. But we were all friends, in various states of tortured love (or not love). When I handed it to Ben, I handed it to someone I was in love with, who I was dating.

You may not know this, but significant others don't always take away the same thing from a tortured love story that you did when you read it years ago and lonely and single. The story told my younger self of the possibility for love and passion; to someone already in love it warns of tragedy and hopelessness. So when he finally read it, Ben seemed somewhat horrified. Why did I want him to read that story? What was I trying to say? I was so flabbergasted that I didn't really know how to respond. Wasn't it beautiful? He said it was sad. Of course it was sad, and beautiful too, but because it wasn't just a book he was reading, rather a message from me, he couldn't just breathe in the beautiful. He went into it looking for me and probably also himself in relation to me and then he finds two people destroyed by each other and the society around them. They fall profoundly in love, and one becomes more jealous and desperate and falls to pieces before being executed and the other retreats in fear and grasps for traditional roles before falling haunted into exile. Was this what I saw as an ideal relationship? Was this how I saw us?

No and no, of course, but it is impossible to take in something brought to us by someone singing its praises and saying how much it has influenced who they are without looking for them in it, and also perhaps a little of what this says about how we fit into their life. So now it is my turn, and I try to look back through and remember his bafflement and then mine too.

At the beginning, I really liked Nightwood. The descriptions are incredibly rich and there is this strangely detailed breakneck pace racing your through a bizarre, but detailed background. You fly straight through one generation in no time. In an odd way, the laying of the groundwork reminded me of Amelie.

I shouldn't have said "At the beginning." I liked the book, when I backed away from my personal quest of finding Ben and I in it. It is a beautiful book and the characters are vivid and compelling. But I've a vicious critic of books and characters. I always have been and not in a particularly generous or forgiving way. When my mother would watch soap operas when I was a kid, I remember thinking how stupid everyone it is was. If they would just explain themselves instead of weaving these complicated lies their lives would be so much easier. I've gotten a little more understanding as I've aged, but only a little bit. And as much as I relish giggling at drama in real life, I've got a low tolerance for feeling like it has been cultivated, in real life or written worlds. I suppose this was my great intolerance with soap operas: there wasn't actually any drama except what was actively cultivated by all these vapid people. They had no real problems, just made some and carefully coached them along.

I don't mean to be so dismissive; Nightwood was certainly not Days of Our Lives. The writing is lush, the characters compelling and vivid and believable. Still, there is a certain flavor of tortured love that I don't really love that you can find in here. Doomed love, I can handle, but just plain old tortured love doesn't really do it for me. There is this feeling that to a certain extent the tortured want their love to tortured, that by traumatizing it that it becomes more real or something. This doesn't inspire sympathy in me, it makes me want to pull my hair out and scowl.

If you've read this book, you are probably scowling at me now, wondering why I'm so dismissive and hostile. As I said earlier, Nightwood is not a soap opera, it is a beautiful book. The characters tug and tear at one another and talk over each other trying to make themselves heard, and there is a terrible lucidity in it all. Just reading the book, unburdened by personal association, I'd see that. I'd be more forgiving and gentle to each of the characters, because I wouldn't assume at the start that I was any of them. If Ben found himself in this book, then wouldn't I also be there too, because surely I'm in any story he is in, right? I rail against silly romanticism muddling the thinking and blurring meanings, but damn if I'm not guilty of the crimes I accuse.

It is still difficult not to ask who in the book am I when Ben reads it. If-we-were-who-would-we-be is my favorite game anyway. It just gets loaded when you think someone else has played it already and sees you hiding somewhere in a text. Who am I when I read it and do we think the other person sees us the same person? Who are they? And do we see them as that person because we like that character or is this an indictment?

I assume that there are two choices for who we are, since in the book there are two main lovers: Nora and Robin. There is also the interloper, Jenny, but we'll assume as a given that neither of us could be this character; the implications would just be too ugly to contemplate. I'd assume that Ben sees himself as Nora, but I have a hard time imagining that he sees me as Robin, even if I do like going out drinking and wandering through the night. Of course, comparing yourself to characters is an imperfect game. And only a game. I, nor you, are the the characters in the stories we read.

I assume this is the same mistake he made when he read us in Giovanni's Room. I didn't love the book because I thought I was either David or Giovanni. I love the whole book, the whole story, and listening in on their conversations and the indictments cast against them by other characters, I found things explained that helped me understand better what I was feeling and how to navigate in the world. I didn't look to it as a plan for success or what my ideal love life would look like. It informed my world view; it didn't replace it. I wonder that that was the miscommunication when I shared this with Ben: he went in looking for us or a message from me to him.

Now I find myself fighting this same instinct with Nightwood. Even knowing this is a mistake and not why Ben told me about the book and wanted me to read it, I still couldn't help looking for us in it and being irrationally critical of the characters, thinking "I would never do that!" So I back up a little, relax, try again.

The writing is so beautiful it leaves me jealous. Even not imagining myself as the characters, they still irritate me somewhat, though flashes of brilliance shine through in their speeches. The character of the doctor is of particular interest (had this book not been recommended by a lover, he is the character I would have picked as myself: meddlesome, know-it-all, talkative). Interestingly enough, both of our emblematic books are set in Paris amongst gay expatriates and in roughly the same time period.

Perhaps I've written in enough circles about all this. I've just had to coach myself out of this trap and back into (somewhat) objective readership.

"You complete me.": a few thoughts on Lego Love (the treatment of individuals as building material rather than autonomous beings)

I wouldn't never choose to watch a sports movie. I just don't. Same as I normally would never choose to sit down and watch sports on tv. This isn't to say that I don't sometimes enjoy both. I remember loving The Natural and Rudy (though I couldn't now tell you anything about either except which sport each involved) and the Boise State/Oklahoma game at last year's Fiesta Bowl was one of the most exciting things I've ever seen. But still, most of the time I just don't get into them, so I stuck in my headphones and started playing spider solitaire when my bunkmate put in Jerry McGuire. If anything sounds more boring to me than a sports movie, it is a movie about a sports agent.

I remember when it came out and everyone was talking about it and how great it was and all these irritating lines from the movie were being quoted. It annoyed the hell out of me and while I never doubted that it was actually probably a good movie, I never really wanted to see it. Oddly enough, the one cheesy line which was quoted over and over again which didn't get on my nerves was, "You had me from 'hello'." Ok, I know that is one of the the sappiest lines in all movie history and easily the most obnoxious from a movie full of obnoxious sound bites. How do I like that one and still grump at all the rest? Well, I'm just like that. Kenny Chesney irritates the holy hell out of me, but I still like the song titled after and based on that line. (Honestly, I do like that song, and reflecting on that I kind of feel bad about some of the rougher opinions I've expressed about K-Che.)

Why am I writing about this now, since I've just declared that I chose headphones and spider solitaire to spare me from this movie? Because spider solitaire only lasts so long and I ended up watching bits of the movie, most importantly the last chunk. The movie is engaging enough and I probably would have just stored that in the back of my head and not really thought about it again except there is the moment which is supposed to be touching when Jerry McGuire comes running back to find his wife and win her back. He comes in to the house to find her in what appears to be a divorce support group and... I started to type 'declares his love for her' but that isn't what he does. He tells her how incomplete the victory was without her to share it with, how much he missed what he shared with her, and all this built up to his big line: "You complete me."

Which made me throw up just a little bit in my mouth. "You complete me," may be the most repellent line I have ever heard. Why? Because he didn't come back and declare his love for her at all, he came back and told her he wasn't letting her get rid of him and declared how much he had missed the role she performed in his life. He didn't say a damn thing about loving her or missing her; he listed out what was missing when someone, who seemingly just happened to be her, wasn't there to perform that role. He didn't miss her, he missed his Wife.

It really fucking got under my skin. I was actually kind of letting myself get into the emotion of the movie and was looking forward to their reconciliation and hearing her say, "You had me from hello." I still like that line, perhaps all the more for how it stands in such stark contrast to this "You complete me," bullshit. One speaks to a spark between two people, being instantly taken by this new person and completely swept away by them; the other speaks to ownership and the sublimation of one individual by another.

The scene was all the creepier given Tom Cruise's recent interactions with the media. He's seemed more and more calculated as time goes on, with his marriage coming across as calculated to look perfect. It may in fact be truly perfect and they may be happy as clams, but it sure as hell looked like he was getting married and having a child for the sake of achieving these appropriate milestones and filling out a fairytale life. Which is exactly what Jerry was doing in the movie and the reason that his wife initially intends on them separating: he is using her to fill a family shaped void in his life but doesn't truly love her. When he comes back, it isn't because he has had an epiphany and found that he did truly love her, he just doesn't want this formulaic facsimile to break up and leave his perfect world with unfulfilled roles. Maybe I'm just being cynical, but there wasn't really anything in his speech to her to suggest otherwise. He said it more emphatically, but emphasis does not change the meaning here and to my mind at least made it even more offensive.

(Bunkmate is now watching some whitewater rafting movie with Alan Alda, Peter Gallagher, and the dad from Alf.)

I'm certainly showing personal prejudice here (isn't that what a blog is for?); I don't like the idea of people looking to other people as solutions to problems or to fill the empty spaces. I'm not a fixer-upper and don't care to date one either. I want a partnership not a supporting role in someone else's life (or someone else taking a supporting role in mine). There is nothing more depressing that realizing that someone isn't actually in love with you so much as in love with the function you fulfill in their life. I've always had a sharp aversion to titles like 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend', not so much because being one or having someone who I consider as such bothers me, but much of the time I feel like the title is meant to stake a claim of ownership rather than to confer affection. I'll happily claim a boyfriend as an indication of how I feel about him, but in situations where it could be taken as my staking a claim of ownership, I cringe, not at the thought of claiming him, but at the idea of introducing this person not as their own person but as their role in my life. This is coming across poorly (granted, these days I feel that coming across poorly just might be my superhero power), and there is a fine line in it all and more than a few times I have certainly raised the ire of a significant other for not wanting to 'claim' them the way they expected me to claim them.

But this moment in Jerry McGuire perfectly illustrated the worst of this kind of instinct to eclipse the individual with the role: when he returns, he addresses the room of women with a demand for his Wife and as he lists off what he missed and who he missed, it was his Wife and the role she fulfilled for him which he cites, not the woman who is his wife.

I can understand missing the role a loved one plays in your life; that is only human and practically, we do play roles in each other's lives. But missing the fulfillment of that roll and missing how that particular individual makes you feel when they are there to fulfill that role are two very different things. He didn't want to share it with (name I can't remember), he wanted to share it with his Wife. A Wife was an integral part of a perfect life and he didn't want to lose that formulaic perfection he was so close to completing. She was just one more shiny plastic piece that he had to have to to complete his perfect Lego marriage as the crowning component for his perfect, shiny Lego life. He didn't love her, he loved how she fit in the appropriate space.