I Like to Watch

What's more depressing than relentlessly critical parents, aging one-hit wonders and starving children? How about those poor people on "The Real Gilligan's Island"?

By Heather Havrilesky

Jun 20, 2005 | Portrait of a drone as a young man
You can't please everyone, chicken livers. I know you've known this for years, ever since your finger painting took a turn toward the avant-garde in the second grade, and instead of proclaiming you a young prodigy or an artiste or, at the very least, a mildly precocious little bugger, your parents sent you to see that child therapist whose office was always freezing cold and smelled like mothballs. There, the therapist would ask you to play with toys, hoping you'd reenact some violent or perverse exchange that would shed light on your home life, but instead all you'd do is stare at the weird pattern in the carpet, making your eyes focus and unfocus, and kick your feet against the leather couch in a way that seemed to make the therapist uncomfortable.

You were an artist, damn it! But the powers that be taught you to be a sociopath instead, to sublimate all your good, pure talents and creative urges into repressed, disturbing, vaguely antisocial behaviors, behaviors more appropriate to your future life in a corporate setting. Not only were you forced to take your raw intelligence and originality and force it into the confines of social expectations, reducing your passions to passive-aggressive manipulations and deeply irritating tics, but some small, beautiful part of you died a fast, painful death. Eventually, your brilliant finger painting lost all originality and freedom and boundary-pushing explosiveness, and began to resemble closely the mediocre scribblings of your dim-witted peers.

Aww! Just think of how you bottled up all your unbridled, violently authentic, primitive, archetypal urges, just to please your parents! I mean, sure, you'd probably be pissing in your pants and eating custard-filled doughnuts for dinner and shooting heroin under a bush somewhere if your parents let all those primeval urges run free ... But still! It's so no fair!

This is what I like about reality TV: We're all invited to watch the no-fair process unfold. From the unguarded optimism of "Mary Ann Mandy" on "The Real Gilligan's Island" to the nervous tics of Bryce on "Sports Kids Moms and Dads," we witness these free spirits being dismembered and packed into corrugated cardboard and sold to the highest bidder, until the wildest gaggle of free-range chickens becomes just another flat of frozen, breaded chicken tenders on its way to some food court in Ohio.

Now, sure, most people don't enjoy watching the free will and curiosity and romantic notions and ideals of talented, sweet innocents crushed under the wheels of a repressive, conformist society, only to spend the balance of their lives as soulless, commodified roadkill. But to me, it's soothing, somehow. I break out the chocolate and murmur to myself, "Ahhh, yes. Here comes another brick in the wall!"

I think we're old and alone now
OK, you're not there yet. It's cool. You're just not seeing where the fun is in any of this. You're feeling a little sad about it, and thinking about all those finger-painted masterpieces that your mom oohed and ahhed over, then clandestinely shoved into the trash. Meanwhile, Donny, that redheaded moron across the street, had his vastly inferior finger-painted blobs posted all over the goddamn refrigerator! Some of his aesthetically dissonant disasters were even framed, for Chrissakes!

But you can't please everyone, chickens, and life just isn't fair. Take a look at a Flock of Seagulls. Remember the guy with the terrible hairdo? Remember how, way back when, you thought of him as the kind of guy whose parents proclaimed him a prodigy or an artiste the second he wandered over to the piano and banged his fist into the keys a couple of times? I mean, who has hair like that, but a guy whose parents blew smoke up his ass about how original and special he was for years and years? The kid was obviously raised by nonconformist sycophants (see also: the Best Parents in the Universe).

But that guy, the bad-hair Flock of Seagulls guy -- how did his story end? Didn't you always imagine that he retired to some palatial modern home in Sweden or somewhere very hip and austere? Wasn't it easy to picture him with a new, more sensible but still stylish haircut, sipping port and listening to classical music in his hip urban abode?

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