The Hills vs Jean Baudrillard

Readers in thrall to hangover TV featuring pretty girls may be familiar with the US MTV phenomenon that is The Hills. Those who buy Playboy for the articles might too, as one of the show’s stars, Heidi Montag, appears on the cover of the latest issue, and gives a typically salacious interview within. For the uninitiated, The Hills is a reality show that follows the lives of a group of squeaky-clean, glossily attractive young people in Los Angeles, to a soundtrack of polite nu-metal and execrable singer-songwriting. The main player has hitherto been Lauren Conrad, the former star of another reality vehicle Laguna Beach, although she won’t appear in Season Six, having left to become what Martin Amis might call an ‘artisan in the scrivener’s trade,’ (her first novel, L.A. Candy, is out in the UK soon). So far, so ephemeral. But with even Brett Easton Ellis name-checking it on Twitter, the show is fast becoming highbrow hot property, and is arguably one of the most significant cultural indicators around right now.

Interning at Teen Vogue, Lauren’s travails with boys, colleagues, and outfits are duly detailed, as are those of her friends and colleagues Montag, Audrina Partridge, and the prettily vacant Whitney Port (who has since left to star in her own spin-off franchise set in Manhattan, The City.) The girls enjoy the L.A. life with seemingly unlimited access to Teen Vogue’s West Coast editor Lisa Love; glamorous jobs at nightclub promotion companies and record labels, which appear to involve little more than talking about guys while sitting in front of sleek Apple Macs; apartments overlooking the Hollywood hills; and nights out in LA’s hottest clubs and restaurants.
Their love lives are of course central to the show’s narrative momentum, and we are invited to watch while they obsess over a bunch of truly epic douchebags, from the monosyllabic and offensively-bearded Jason of Season One; to the hunky-but-brooding (read monosyllabic) Brody; to Montag’s husband, chipmunk-in-a-Camaro SS, Spencer Pratt.

Doubtless Ellis, author of Glamorama, is drawn to the diamond-hard vacuity of a production which celebrates its own shallowness, its surface-without-centre. But what makes the show really significant is the daring way in which it blends ‘reality’ with fiction. T.S. Eliot famously noted that ‘humankind cannot stand very much reality’: he would probably have loved The Hills, as it contains very little at all. A disclaimer appears at the start of every episode states that “The following program may contain scenes that have been created purely for entertainment purposes.” But which are dramatised? And which are real? It’s hard to tell, as the dialogue throughout is of the standard of a very poor improv session in sixth-form drama class. The Beckettian pauses and non-sequiteurs in scenes between Lauren and Brody, while the latter manfully strokes his goatee, and clasps his beanie hat-clad head, are of great comedy value, real or not.

Just maybe, though, we should take The Hills seriously. Perhaps it is revealing to us something of the slippery nature of reality in the modern world. Jean Baudrillard, the French philosopher whose book The Transparency of Evil has just been re-issued by Verso, is famous for arguing that the Gulf War never actually took place; that the two sides didn’t fight, and that the ‘action’ was a media construct. In his most significant work, Simulacra and Simulation, he argues that the ‘simulation’ of reality now outstrips reality itself; that is, ‘reality’ doesn’t exist anymore, only copies of it. He writes that ‘simulation is insuperable, unsurpassable, dull and flat, without exteriority,’ which is as good a review of The Hills as any.

In a culture in which wall-to-wall ‘reality’ TV is the norm, surveillance cameras are everywhere, and in which our social lives are increasingly enacted through photos and videos on online networking sites, the old notion of ‘real life’ seems increasingly at risk. So next time you’re hungover on a Saturday morning ,watch The Hills, and recoil in terror, if not at Jason’s facial hair, then at what the show implies about modern life.