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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Nostalgia TV: Culture stalls and we choke on its fumes. At least we can all be warmed by the return of "Greg the Bunny."
Aug 14, 2005 | Nostalgia, Inc.
Our culture is driven by nostalgia, chickens. Even the brand-spanking-new stuff, the newest of the new, the stuff that parades around showing off its supreme novelty is, nine times out of 10, just some crusty 20-year-old idea with a pretty new hat and scarf on it so you won't recognize it at first. Most of our movements, our trends, our cultural blunders, even our foreign policies, are created or at least endorsed and funded by crusty old hosebags who are so nostalgic for their glory days that they can't get it up for anything but recycled ideas, remakes, adaptations of old books and movies, styles that were crappy the first three times around, and antiquated notions of our rightful place at the top of the globo-cultural trash heap.
Nostalgia informs us and drives us and keeps us dating the same variety of jerk over and over again. Nostalgia ensures that we fly home to visit our families for a regular dose of emotional abuse and debilitating family dynamics. Nostalgia tricks us into procreating, because we imagine that having a Mini-Me around will restore our youth or at least restore our childlike innocence and wonder -- you know, so that we can be more like Tom Cruise.
The trouble with all this nostalgia is that not only does it make us look like losers because we either can't create anything new or can't appreciate anything that is new, but it also dooms us to repeat our old mistakes over and over again. In other words, those who learn history are doomed to repeat it -- or replicate it -- badly.
Half-empty glass only
Some would rather think of this process as cultural recycling. These are the people who treat their stinky concepts as shiny and special and brand-new in every way. "TV producers," I think they're called. But they are learning a very painful lesson lately: Reality stars aren't remotely interesting outside their native environments.
In other words, when you take all of the notable sociopaths from various shows -- Jonathan of "The Amazing Race," Richard Hatch and Jonny Fairplay of "Survivor," Stacy J of "The Apprentice 2," Toni of "Paradise Hotel" -- and put them all together in a new scenario, say, competing against each other on an obstacle course or filming a really terrible horror movie together -- somehow they're only about one-third as interesting as they were on their original shows. Which is not to say that Jonathan of "The Amazing Race" isn't just as aggressive and blind to himself on "Battle of the Network Reality Stars" (Wednesday, Aug. 17, at 9 p.m. EDT on Bravo) as he ever was; it just doesn't seem very interesting to find out that he knows how to give an inspired repeat performance before the cameras. After all, the appeal of "reality" -- and here we understand "reality" as a brand, one that denotes lots of arguing and tears and some of the unguarded dismay you might expect to see in someone who's not surrounded by cameras -- is that you meet these "characters" and then watch as they "lose their shit."
Watching the same characters lose their shit in exactly the same way as they did the first time you met them is kind of like riding "It's a Small World After All" at Disney World for the sixth time, 30 years after you rode it for the first time. No matter how much you loved the little girl in the sari way back when, now you know that only Brangelina has any real love for those cute little foreign peoples these days. The rest of us just want our Thai delivery to show up on time.
This is a service economy, after all, so not only do we want our friggin' green curry chicken to arrive piping hot, we want that bonehead Jonny Fairplay to do his dumb Jonny Fairplay thing: Lie, use people, manipulate, charm (if you can call it that), snicker to the camera over what suckers they all are, etc. But when he does it on "Kill Reality" -- the show where a bunch of reality stars make what appears to be an unspeakably awful horror movie together -- it's just not the same, kind of like hearing "Axle F" again for the first time in 20 years, but this time it sounds really lame and tinny and you don't feel like doing the Snake at all, not even just a little bit.
Not surprisingly, "Kill Reality" (Mondays at 10 p.m. EDT on E!) features some of the most outrageous idiocy ever seen on any reality show, much of it brought to you by Toni, notorious bug-eyed mutant of "Paradise Hotel" fame. These kids know how to earn their keep, after all -- they want off the Z-list so bad, they'll do any old thing that viewers might consider "outrageous" just to be back in the public's consciousness. But when it comes to recycled reality has-beens, nothing's shocking.
