  ...................................... watching me watching t.v. ...................................... i watched the premiere last week of the Real World San Diego. I'm tired of the Real World. It feels pretty formulaic to me anymore. And mostly the plot lines only change in terms of more SHOCK value.
The movie Merchants of Cool (that we'll watch in class later this semester) talks about a concept called: the feedback loop -- and it seems like me that these characters have become almost too saavy about replaying old episodes from television back to themselves and us: oh! There's a hot tub! Well its the first night in our new house! Everybody knows what you do on the first night in the first episode! The whole cast gets in the hot tub! So we better get in. Good tv is predictable tv. That's our job this year as "six strangers picked to live in a house"... the obvious critique to offer is: could this "real" world *be* more about sex?
i have to admit i'm a little bored by that critique (much like i was bored with the sex storylines in the show last night), it seems to me that most of the time when people are freaking out about the amount of sex in the media -- they're kind of freaking out because they're so scared of it. like it (sex) has this amazing amount of importance and sway over them. which it does. over all of us, right?
we're deeply sexual beings. But that's not really the point I want to talk about in this blog. the thing which I DID find really interesting was this quote (which i'm only kind of getting right) by the character Frankie (STEREOTYPE: highschool geek, openminded piercer-tattoo-esque, porn-shop working, but i have a boyfriend back home + INTERESTING TWIST: has cystic fibrosis): "I've always had this dream of moving to a new city and getting to reinvent myself completely. " The world went into slow motion for me. It seemed SO right on. This is TOTALLY the mythos -- the BIG story -- of most emerging Reality Programming, isn't it? Personal reinvention. And its a story that seems particularly important because record numbers of people in MTVs audience ARE going away to college and / or moving away to new cities and places. The shape of the world and growing up is, increasingly, going away. So why wouldn't we want our HEROES -- or at least our CELEBRITIES (B-level celebrities in the case of reality television) -- to have that same journey -- that same quest... But then SOMETHING ELSE struck me. Not only is this the primary PLOTLINE for most reality television. It's also the primary VIEWING LINE. Isn't it? I know that when I watch the REAL WORLD -- I'm invested in the characters.
I think about how I'd act differently if I were in their place. I'm eager to SEE the places they get to see, to traverse the CITY and the RESTAURANTS and the SIGHTS and the TRAIN and .. I realized (ironically) that the REAL world is all about getting away FROM our real world. That dream of escaping from our world far enough to turn into something new and different.... more later... 
