Chuck Klosterman IV: A Decade of Curious People and Dangerous Ideas

by Chuck Klosterman

Bunim started her career making soap operas; she was the executive producer for daytime series like As The World Turns and Santa Barbara. The plan for The Real World was to craft soap opera storylines with actual people; though shot in a documentary style, the motivation was different than traditional documentary filmmaking. The twentysomethings cast on The Real World were not complex subjects meant to be uncovered and examined; they were supposed to be archetypes of youth culture, and they were supposed to make the melodramatic choices (and exhibit the melodramatic behavior) that would drive a serial TV program. They were supposed to be hyperreal versions of who they already were. What they did, ultimately, was unknowingly embody the same aesthetic Spalding Gray invented when he first became a monologist. “I became a kind of inverted Method Actor,” Gray wrote. “I was using myself to play myself. [It was] a kind of creative narcissism.” There is no better description of what it means to appear on reality TV than those two sentences.