I might be the only male, or maybe person, at Hampshire College who obsessively watches The Hills. It has been mocked mercilessly from all angles since it premiered, except by teenage girls, who regard it as seriously as males do the fucking NFL playoffs (the “after shows” consist of giddy bitties deconstructing each episode-evidently it inspires their Derridean side). But why do I love it so much? Obviously, it seems pretty shallow at first glance. The show basically deals with beautiful women, dressed mostly in bikinis or cocktail dresses, handsome and chiseled dudes, all with fucking impeccable teeth, who spend their nights eating at chic restaurants and then hit up the hottest club spots, after breezing through their dream jobs (fashion stylists, nightclub promoter, etc.) during the day. It has been criticized for being fake, an illusory fabrication of Lauren Conrad’s (LC) glamorous life in Los Angeles, with all the storylines scripted and any conflicts completely set-up and intentional.
But I don’t think one can brush it off as easily as that. As LC remembers from one of her appearances on Letterman, “one of the writers said that they believe The Hills is the most important show made in the last 10 years.” Routinely, it hits from 8.0-9.5 in Nielsen ratings, and Audrina, LC, and Speidi (an amalgam of Heidi Montag, Lauren’s former BFF turned arch-nemesis, and the root of the split, Heidi’s now-husband Spencer Pratt) have their smiling faces posted on tabloids in every grocery store checkout line in the nation. Fucking whole blogs have been posted devoting shot-by-fucking-shot analyses of multiple episodes. The New York Times have compared it to the works Antonioni for its deliberately distant dialogue, focus on reaction shots (protagonist as beauty!), and the prioritizing of personal tribulations (see: Zabriskie Point, Blow-Up,). Think of a soap opera on ‘ludes, and you kind of have an idea of it, as it has been categorized as a “docu-soap.” But with all of this academic and critical jargon, and to some extent, lauding, this shit has to have some merit, right?
A Matter of Visual Aesthetics
First, it has to be noted that this show is fucking gorgeous. There’s no getting around it: its eye-candy in both setting and characters. Yes, it is a spin-off of Laguna Beach, but that was child’s play compared to The Hills. It literally looks like a movie-maybe even better. This is what reality television was supposed to look like; I honestly want to move to L.A. after seeing it. In a recent article for Rolling Stone, Jason Gay noted the stunning visual look:
[I]t’s filmed with digital cameras on tripods, with elegant evening scenes shot in low light. When its aerial cameras swoop down for a dream view of Sunset Boulevard twinkling at dusk, L.A. has never appeared more desirable. Much of The Hills’ look is credited to Hisham Abed, a young director of production who worked on the show’s first season and was also responsible for the golden tint ofLaguna Beach. Abed says he based The Hills’ cool evening look on the films of Michael Mann. “I like Heat,” Abed says. “We were trying to emulate the look offilm on television.”
In the episode, “Girl’s Night Out,” there is a scene where Spencer and Heidi have a minor quarrel in a nightclub corridor. This would seem like a relatively unimportant event—it isn’t, in the broader context of the show—but it is honestly, one of the most beautiful pieces of visual art I have ever seen in my life. The club’s music is heard in the background as two cameras cut between reaction shots of Spencer and Heidi mid-argument, while they are doused in the morphing colors of the house lights. I may be romanticizing a bit, and it doesn’t hurt that Heidi (and possibly Spencer) is aesthetically pleasing in any environment, but I would highly recommend searching online for this episode (all episodes are on MTV.com), just for this scene. This scene along with the preceding shots of the L.A. evening, are perfect examples of this type of cinematography and production that Abed and his crew were looking to portray. Hell, just look at the title sequence: glittering shots of West Hollywood interlaced with enticing scenes of girlfriends partying, synced to Natasha Bedingfield’s incredibly optimistic anthem “Unwritten.”
Now, obviously most viewers of the show are not going to be obsessing over the mise-en scène. It is pure, escapist fantasy in most other respects. Its basic premise is basically like The Mary Tyler Moore Show set in age of materialism. LC moves to West L.A., going to school and working her way up in the fashion industry, all while she experiences new friends, boy troubles, and break-ups with old friends. No South Central barrio exists here: where to eat, shop, and party are the only social problems these people must confront. This is where much of the mockery comes from: who the hell cares about Lauren’s minute problems? Honestly, who gives a shit?
LC and Inherent (In)Authenticity
Therein lies on of my attractions to the show. Lauren is a complex character: call me an idiot, or a starry-eyed male if you want. But I think she does more to highlight the critique of superficiality rather than the glorification of it. In the same Rolling Stone article, show creator Adam DiVello notes the peculiar nature of her character. “She is the girl who has it all—but doesn’t have it exactly.” She is constantly looking (a “searcher” as Gay says) for a lover, trustworthy friends, and her dream job in fashion, but never finds it. She has become pessimistic in her outlook. In a recent episode, when Audrina doesn’t trust her denial about hooking up with Audrina’s “boyfriend,” the notorious and hilarious Justin Bobby, LC just says fuck it, in a sense. When Audrina apologizes, Lauren seems to be beyond it: it seems like she read No Exit as a manual to analyzing her friendships for now on. Furthermore, she talks in a particular vernacular, one that is recognizable to young girls, and young people, in general. In interviews, Lauren has constantly defended the show’s authenticity. If anything, she has learned to not take things at face value. She has ended up unhappy too many times (Lo is the only constant friend in the show, and they have known each other since 3rd grade) to do that.
That’s not to say The Hills isn’t scripted in some ways: total mimesis is not possible in this day in the age of mechanical reproduction, especially on television. Shooting locations have to be planned and mapped out, as the crew has to know where the cast members will be and prepare the area (since filming scenes with bystanders can’t really happen). Their semi-real jobs always must contain some sort of real work to push storylines along at times (Heidi’s job as a nightclub promoter, Lauren and Whitney’s fashion jobs), so that DiVello and the editing team can “pick and choose” what they are going to keep. Audio overdubs have to be done in a studio at times if there are technical problems.
With the lack of the traditional “confessional” mainstay of reality television (think Real World, Survivor) the editing room becomes the place where the story lines are conceived and brought to fruition. As Lo describes, the producers “really little nothings and turn them into story lines.” Additionally, some of the cast members will act differently onscreen than off. Spencer, Brody, and Audrina all have commented publicly on this, usually with the response they would rather be entertaining than boring, for the sake of good television (that comment can speak volumes by itself, but on a different tip). What then, becomes of any merit of the show? It is in this lack of a confessional where a major part of the majesty of The Hills lies.
The Minutiae Aspect
Justin Wolfe, the aforementioned blogger who during the 3rd season (which is the series’ zenith, in my opinion) contributed extremely layered and detailed analyses of many episodes, has referenced Antonioni, Rohmer, and Godard in his criticisms of the show. He is quoted in an article by Kate Taylor’s article “There’s a Revolution Brewing in The Hills” with perhaps the perfect summary of the strength of the docu-soap approach:
“What I enjoy most about The Hills is seeing things that I have never before seen represented on television,” writes Justin Wolfe, a recent English graduate from Florida State University, who keeps a blog about the show. “[…]I mean in the micro sense: the small gestures and body movements, the casual poses, the verbal tics, word repetitions and vocal inflections; all the things that colour [sic] the fabric of everyday existence. The Hills’, by foregrounding what is unnoticed, defamiliarizes it. It make what’s completely normal feel strange.”
I recently had a conversation with a friend while watching the show. He was a completely objective viewer, having never really watched it consistently. But he noted this phenomenon. Can we really say exactly what we would do when in a similar situation as Lauren, for instance while arguing with a friend? You can pick up on certain phrases or inflections each cast member loves to use: Lauren loves the word “shady”, Heidi talks with an over exaggerated Valley-Girl drawl, Justin Bobby speaks in ridiculously generalized, pseudo-philosophical statements, and Whitney adds an extra syllable to any word ending with a –g. I have the feeling I could watch these people discuss absolutely mundane things for hours. When you see people react to certain situations on screen it seems written because perhaps it isn’t, but rather it is your perception of what is scripted and real. Neo-Kantian sentiments are surely the idea.
Conclusion
Regardless of opinion, The Hills’ popularity, and the larger movement of the docu-soap that it has been at the forefront of, is groundbreaking in television. As MTV program-development director Tony DiSanto points out, their goal was to “do a reality show in the visual language of narrative film, to see if we could throw out the language of documentary film.” But it is a quest whose source has been seen from Ibsen to Zola, to the Italian directors in the school of Neo-Realism, but now with a voyeuristic tinge, viewing wealthy American white women.
Susan Sontag, the renowned American cultural critic, wrote in her famous essay “Against Interpretation,” that, “[t]ransparence is the highest, most liberating value in art—and in criticism—today. Transparence means experiencing the luminousness of the thing in itself, of things being what they are." This is the greatness of, for example, the films of Bresson or Ozu and Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.
The Hills doesn’t completely achieve transparence, and I know that. One has to tease out its merits at times, deconstruct it—to use that overused word in the faintly Derridean sense—to come to any real conclusions. Otherwise, it may come off for what it is, which is a docu-soap marketed to teenage girls or young women about a privileged life in the big city. But I still love it, and I will still actively consume it (Whitney now has her own spin-off, The City) and so will millions of others. It is part of a new breed of television, one that has its aforementioned drawbacks and its strengths. But this may be the closest we can get to reality on television, following the lives of the beautiful and the rich. Or perhaps, that is all that the American public is ready for.
Works Cited
Gray, Jason. “Are They for Real?” Rolling Stone, May 2008.
Sontag, Susan. Against Interpretation. 1966.
Taylor, Kate. “There’s a Revolution Brewing in The Hills.” Globe and Mail,
September 2007.
Patrick King is a writer and student at Hampshire College in Amherst Massachusets, when not watching The Hills he spends time reading Hemingway and being awesome.
