Our cultural preparation for a Real World universe actually started in movie theaters during the eighties, particularly with two films that both came out in 1985: The Breakfast Club and St. Elmo’s Fire. These seminal portraits were what The Real World was supposed to be like, assuming MTV could find nonfictional people who would have interesting conversations on a semiregular basis. Like most RW casts, The Breakfast Club broke teen culture into five segments that were laughably stereotypical (and—just in case you somehow missed what they were—Anthony Michael Hall pedantically explains it all in the closing scene). St. Elmo’s Fire used many of the same actors, but it evolved their personalities by five years and made them more (ahem) “philosophically complex.” Here is where we see the true genesis of future Real World ians. With Judd Nelson, we have the respected social climber doomed to fail ethically;[10] with Andrew McCarthy, the sensitive, self-absorbed guy who works hard at being bitter.[11] Rob Lowe is the self-destructive guy we’re somehow supposed to envy;[12] Emilio Estevez is the romantic that all chumps are supposed to identify with, mostly because he’s obsessed with his own obviousness.[13] Demi Moore is fucked up and pathetic,[14] but Mare Winningham is even more pathetic because she aspires to be fucked up.[15] Ally Sheedy is too normal to have these friends[16] (or, I suppose, to be in this particular movie).
If we were to combine these two films—in other words, if we were to throw the St. Elmo’s kids into all-day Saturday detention—we’d have a pretty good Real World. It’s been noted that one of the keys to Alfred Hitchcock’s success as a filmmaker was that he didn’t draw characters as much as he drew character types; this is how he normalized the cinematic experience. It’s the same way with The Real World. The show succeeds because it edits malleable personalities into flat, twenty-something archetypes. What interests me is the way those archetypes so quickly became the normal way for people of my generation to behave.
It’s become popular for Real World revisionists to claim that the first season was the only truly transcendent RW, the argument being that this was the singular year its cast members actually acted “real.” In a broad sense, that’s accurate: Since that first Real World was entirely new, no one knew what it was going to look like (or how it would be received). Nobody in the original New York loft was able to formulate an agenda on purpose. Logically, this should make for great television. In practice, it doesn’t translate: In truth, RW 1 is mostly dull. It was fascinating in 1992 because of the novelty, but it doesn’t stand up over time.
I’ll concede that the cast on the first Real World were the only ones who didn’t constantly play to the camera; only hunky model Eric Neis did so on an episode-to-episode basis, but one gets the impression this was just his normal behavior. While the actual filming was taking place, I have no doubt the seven loft-dwellers were clueless about what the final product would look like on television; that certainly fostered the possibility for spontaneous “reality,” and there are glimpses of that throughout RW 1. The problem is that hard reality tends to be static: On paper, the conversations from that virgin Real World would make for a terrible script. In fact, the greatest moments from the first Real World are when nothing is going on at all—the awkwardness becomes transfixing, not unlike the sensation of sitting in an airport and watching someone read a newspaper. Yet if every cast of The Real World has been as “real” as that first New York ensemble, the show would have only lasted two seasons.
Ironically, the reason RW flourished is because its telegenic humanoids became less complex with every passing season. Multifaceted people do not translate within The Real World format. Future cast members figured this out when that initial season finally aired and it was immediately obvious that only two personalities mattered: Alabama belle Julie and angry African-American Kevin. The only truly compelling episode from the first season came in week eleven, when Julie and Kevin had an outdoor screaming match over a seemingly random race issue.[17] But the fight itself wasn’t the key. What was important was the way it galvanized two archetypes that would become cornerstones for late-twentieth-century youth: the educated automaton and the likable anti-intellectual. Those two personality sects are suddenly everywhere, and they’re both children of The Real World.
Obviously, Kevin embodies the former attitude and Julie embodies the latter. And—almost as obviously—neither designation is particularly accurate. Kevin became a solid hip-hop writer for Vibe and Rolling Stone, and he’s far less robotic than he appears on The Real World. Meanwhile, Julie was never a backwater hick (I interviewed her in 1995, and I honestly suspect she might be the savviest person in the show’s history). But within the truncated course of those thirteen original episodes, we are led to believe that (a) Kevin is obsessed with racial identity and attempts to inject his blackness into every conversation, while (b) Julie adores anything remotely new and abhors everything remotely pretentious.
Kevin’s Huey Newton–like image can’t be blamed entirely on him: The Real World is unnaturally obsessed with race. And what’s disheartening is that The Real World is so consumed with creating racial tension that it often makes black people look terrible: If your only exposure to diversity was Coral and Nicole from the 2001 “Back to New York” RW cast, you’d be forced to assume all black women are blithering idiots. This is partially because the only black characters who get valuable RW airtime are the ones who refuse to talk about anything else. It’s the same situation for homosexual cast members—their Q factor is completely dependent on how aggressively gay they’re willing to act. In that first NYC season, Norman is immediately identified as bisexual, but he’s not bisexual enough; he only gets major face time when he’s dating future TV talk-show host Charles Perez. Future queer cast members would not make this mistake; for people like AIDS victim Pedro Zamora and Dan from RW 5: Miami, being gay was pretty much their only personality trait. Perhaps more than anything else, this is the ultimate accomplishment of The Real World: It has validated the merits of having a one-dimensional personality. In fact, it has made that kind of persona desirable, because other one-dimensional personalities can more easily understand you.
If you believe Real World producers Mary-Ellis Bunim and Jon Murray, they don’t look for troublemakers when they make casting decisions. They insist they simply cast for “diversity.” But this is only true in a macro sense—they want obvious diversity. They want physical diversity, or sexual diversity, or economic diversity. What they have no use for is intellectual diversity. A Renaissance man (or woman) need not apply to this program. You need to be able to deduce who a given Real World er represents socially before the second commercial break of the very first episode, which gives you about eighteen minutes of personality. It was very easy to make RW 1 Kevin appear one-dimensional, even if that portrayal wasn’t accurate; he gave them enough “race card” material to ignore everything else. Thus, Kevin became the inadvertent model for thousands and thousands of future Real World applicants—these are the people who looked at themselves in the mirror and thought, “I could get on that show. I could be the _____ guy.”
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8. Kind of like that dork from Hawaii who fell in love with the alcoholic lesbian and then dated her sister.
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9. Theoretically Ruthie, the drunk chick from Hawaii—although (in truth) she was actually more reasonable than everyone else in that house.
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10. Cory in San Fran, all the other girls from Hawaii, Tonya from Chicago, and every other female who spends at least two episodes of any season staring at a large body of water.
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11. Julie from the first NYC cast, the blonde from New Orleans, Kevin in the second set of New Yorkers, and Frank from Vegas.
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12. I say “seemingly” because this argument appears totally superficial—until you find out the context: It happened during the Rodney King riots in Los Angeles, a fact that MTV never mentioned. As a rule,