The “_____” became almost anything: race, gender, geographic origin, sexual appetite, etc. There was suddenly an unspoken understanding that every person in the Real World house was supposed to fit some kind of highly specific—but completely one-dimensional—persona. In his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers writes about how he tried to get on Real World 3: San Francisco, but was beaten out by Judd. Coincidentally, both of those guys were cartoonists. But the larger issue is that they were both liberal and sensitive, and they were both likely to be the kind of guy who would fall in love with a female housemate who only perceived him as a good friend. This is exactly the person Judd became; there is now a famous[18] scene from that third season where Judd is rowing a boat and longingly stares at roommate Pam and her boyfriend, Christopher, as they paddle alongside in a similar watercraft. Months after the conclusion of RW 3, Pam broke up with Chris and fell in love with Judd, which is (a) kind of bizarre, but mostly (b) exactly what MTV dreams of having happen during any given season. Whenever I see repeat episodes of RW 3, I find myself deconstructing every casual conversation Judd and Pam have, because I know a secret they don’t—eighteen months later, they will have sex. It’s sort of like seeing old Judas Priest videos on VH1 Classic and looking for signs of Rob Halford’s homosexuality.
The Judd-Pam undercurrent is part of the reason I consider Real World 3: San Francisco the best-ever RW, but that’s not the only reason. Central to my affinity for RW 3 is a wholly personal issue: The summer it premiered was the summer following my college graduation. I had just moved to a town where I knew almost no one, and my cable was installed the afternoon of The Real World season premiere. The first new friends I made were Cory and Pedro, and I rode with them on a train to California. And I pretty much hated both of them (or at least Cory) immediately.
In truth, there wasn’t any member of RW 3 I particularly liked, and I couldn’t relate to any of them, except maybe Rachel (and only because she was a bad Catholic). But I became emotionally attached to these people in a very authentic way, and I think it was because I started noticing that the cast members on RW 3 were not like people from my past. Instead, they seemed like new people I was meeting in the present.
Because The Real World has now been going on for a decade—and because of Survivor and Big Brother and The Mole and Temptation Island and The Osbournes—the idea of “reality TV” is now something everyone understands. Without even trying, American TV watchers have developed an amazingly sophisticated view of postmodernism, even if they would never use the word postmodern in any conversation (or even be able to define it).[19] However, this was still a new idea in 1994. And what’s important about RW 3 is that it was the first time MTV quit trying to pretend it wasn’t on television.
Here’s what I mean by that: I once read a movie review by Roger Ebert for the film Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back. Early in the review, Ebert makes a tangential point about whether or not film characters are theoretically “aware” of other films and other movie characters. Ebert only touches on this issue casually, but it’s probably the most interesting philosophical question ever asked about film grammar. Could Harrison Ford’s character in What Lies Beneath rent Raiders of the Lost Ark? Could John Rambo draw personal inspiration from Rocky? In Desperately Seeking Susan, what is Madonna hearing when she goes to a club and dances to her own song? Within the reality of one specific fiction, how do other fictions exist?
The Real World deals with an identical problem, but in a completely opposite way: They have a nonfiction situation that is supposed to have no relationship to other nonfictions. They have to behave as if what they’re doing hasn’t been done before. Real World ers always get into arguments, but you never hear them say, “Oh, you’re only saying that because you know this is going to be on TV,” even though that would be the best comeback 90 percent of the time. No one would ever compare a housemate to a cast member from a different season, even when such comparisons seem obvious. The kids talk directly into the camera every single day, but they are ceaselessly instructed to pretend as if they are not being videotaped whenever they’re outside the confessional. Most of all, they never openly recognize that they’re part of a cultural phenomenon; they never mention how weird it is that people are watching them exist. Every Real World cast exists in a vacuum.
That illusion started to crack in RW 3. That’s also when the show’s mentality started to leak into the social bloodstream.
The reason this occurred in San Francisco is because two of the housemates, Puck and Pedro, never allowed themselves to slip into The Real World’s fabricated portrait of reality; they were always keenly cognizant of how they could use this program to forward their goals. Depending on your attitude, Pedro’s agenda was either altruistic (i.e., personalizing the HIV epidemic), self-aggrandizing (he was doggedly focused on achieving martyrdom status), or a little of both (which is probably closest to the mark). Meanwhile, Puck’s agenda was entirely negative, any way you slice it; he wanted to become the show’s first “breakout star” (a Real World Fonzie, if you will), and he succeeded at that goal by actively trying to wreck the entire project. In a show about living together, he tried to be impossible to live with. But in at least one way, Pedro and Puck were identicaclass="underline" Both of these guys immediately saw that they could design their own TV show by developing a script within their head. They fashioned themselves as caricatures.
Ironically, they both attacked each other for doing this. By the ninth episode, Puck was breaking the fourth wall by suggesting that Pedro was trying to force his message down the throats of viewers; no one had ever implied something like this before. Without being too obvious, The Real World producers relaxed the reins and gave up on the notion that this show was somehow organic; a decision was made to let Puck and Pedro fight over the future identity of The Real World. Puck represented the idea of a show where everyone was openly fake and we all knew it was a sham; Pedro represented the aesthetic of a show where what we saw was mostly fake, but we would agree to watch it as if it was totally real. It was almost a social contract. To feel Pedro’s pain (as Bill Clinton supposedly did), you had to suspend your disbelief—a paradoxical requirement for a reality program.
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14. This is partially because everyone who does use