Just as Miley Cyrus could potentially be seen as 'bad' for covering a Cocteau Twins song, that is, to me, not even interesting to consider.

First, it's obvious that Miley loves the track. Second, I love her talk before and during the song; reverence is overrated. Third, the result is a gateway into the universe that is Cocteau Twins, and that, friends, is never bad.

This morning I read a well-conceived and -written book excerpt about the villain as concept. The book is Dream Facades: The Cruel Architecture of Reality TV by Jack Balderrama Morley. The book excerpt is found in this LitHub post.

The excerpt starts by focusing on Heidi Montag, The Villain of fantastic TV series The Hills.

A villain is just Heidi Montag wanting to make money for being famous. She just wants to follow her own path. Her “flaws” are on the outside, and she’ll enumerate the ways in which she’s tried to fix them, not squirrel them away so they can do damage in the dark. Villains may not be perfect, but at least you know who they are.

Reality TV, despite all the moral hand-wringing and critical disdain surrounding it, has never really been so different from other kinds of American media. It fits neatly into the broader cultural landscape of torn social ties, disconnection and alienation, and the hunger for a life that feels more real and the belief that video somehow offers a cure.

The genre may actually be most similar to the televisual medium that sits on the opposite end of the respectability spectrum, vaunted as so critical to maintaining the American republic: the news.

Another excerpt:

Heidi is a storyteller. She conceives her lines and delivers them in the moment, reacting to the scripts of the people around her, such as the newscaster interviewing her.

Many have followed in Heidi’s steps—Christine Quinn, Donald Trump, the Kardashians—and they’ve been so successful because America had been heading in Heidi’s direction since its founding. She is the self- made soul, speaking the story of herself into existence, redefining the wilderness as she sees it, finding love and a home in the process.

This is the strange trajectory that hybrid homes get pushed along by the digital forces running through them. Video’s paranoia about the story of reality now runs through the places we live.

The Real World, Selling Sunset, the Kardashians shows, and The Bachelor show how homes are freighted with feelings, but they don’t explain why homes are just so foundational to the American psyche. Our homes, our selves. It might be a universal association, but Americans and their twisted economic system take it a step further. When it comes to your home, you have to own it, as any Real Housewife will tell you. It’s on their show that we start to see how deep the paranoia about reality runs.

The book seems to be extraordinarily well written. I will buy it.

#books #reality #TV #music