I Like to Watch

April 9, 2006 | American pop culture is a fickle temptress, indeed. From the time that we're young, she convinces us that we're destined for greatness -- or at least for massive grassy lawns and two-car garages and beautiful, giggling blond children -- and then when we get our average-size grassy lawns and our bitchy redheaded stepchildren, we feel cheated.

When I was a kid, I thought that when I got older I'd be married to a man who looked just like a Ken doll, I'd have a Dorothy Hamill haircut (which I thought would set me apart as the energetic, spunky type), and I'd live on an enormous farm somewhere in the middle of Kansas. Instead, I have scraggly hair, I live in a small blue and white house that my neighbor says looks just like a fish restaurant, and if I so much as hear someone else being described as "energetic," it makes me want to take a long nap.

Instead of a life packed with wonderful Fourth of July picnics and romantic strolls on the beach like we pictured when we were little, life is filled with annoying recorded telemarketing calls and muddy paw prints on the kitchen floor, all of which unfold against a backdrop of sugary teen pop and cheery radio ads about good family fun and sizzlin' summer sales and an oppressive mandate to be upbeat and polite, at all costs. Living in America is like going on an amazing date with a pretty girl, and after dinner you go back to her house and she puts on that Sarah McLachlan song "Your love is better than ice cream!" -- and instead of kissing her, you're forced to vomit all over your brand-new shoes.

Yes, American pop culture is a big-breasted siren whose sickly sweet tunes lead us onto rocky shores. So how do we deal with the countless disappointments of American life? Well, if our name is Mary Winkler, we handle the disappointment by pulling out a gun and blowing our kindly minister husband away, then packing the kids into the car and hitting the road. The rest of us take all of our anger and disappointment out on has-been celebrities.

Celebrity fear and loathing
Here's how the process works: We're standing in line at the grocery store and we glance over at Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston on the cover of People, a photo taken on their wedding day. "My, my, my, it must be nice to be so happy and so sexy and so fucking rich," we think in spite of ourselves. "It must be nice to have had sex with Brad Pitt and then order in from Spago and watch bad TV in bed with Brad Pitt, who would probably be naked at the time. It would be nice to eat a nice pasta and watch 'The Amazing Race' within a few feet of Brad Pitt's juicy meat Chiclets." Then we go home and eat something gray and limp with our stupid boyfriend/husband with his same old stories and his dumb hair.

A few years later, Brad leaves Jennifer for Angelina Jolie, and we feel oddly satisfied and enraged and thrilled by the whole thing. Ooo, that Angelina, she is bad news but ... guess they weren't so perfect and so happy after all, huh? Ha ha. Serves them right, for rubbing their perfection in our faces!

Since we can't watch Brad and Jen bicker or mud-wrestle yet, because they're still big stars, we have to get our kicks by watching other, less important celebrities struggle and fail.

As you'll recall, it all began with "I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!" in which a pack of mostly aging F-list celebrities sat around bitching at each other in the jungle, all the while horrifying us with how terrible their scientifically engineered plastic faces looked without makeup. These days, the networks have moved on to humiliating celebrities not by locking them up together or dumping them on some soggy island, but by forcing them to dance the tango or attempt double axles on the ice without breaking their necks.

For the most part, though, the networks are far less enamored with celebreality than they once were. But as the mainstream loses interest, VH1, like a greasy old pervert, still seems to savor the countless indignities of the celebreality genre. Like that fateful afternoon when Aqualung, fresh from a NAMBLA meeting, discovered a crumpled copy of the children's section of the Sears catalog in the trash outside of Kentucky Fried Chicken, VH1 soon discovered that it could create hits with limited resources. It seems audiences don't require a gaggle of celebrities, à la "The Surreal Life," to hold their interest. No, all those discriminating audiences wanted was one or two F-list celebrities, preferably with no recent accomplishments or credits to their names beyond occasional humiliating appearances in the tabloids.

Next page: VH1, the Chester the Molester of cable television