The Reality Above Reality, Part One
How Surrealism is best embodied in reality television today, and what Bravo TV's Vanderpump Rules has to do with it.
To comemmorate the Surrealist centennial on October 15, 2024, “The Reality Above Reality” Parts One and Two will be available to read without the usual paywall for one week. Enjoy!
A certain subsect of people will remember where they were on March 3, 2023, when they saw the TMZ headline: “TOM SANDOVAL & ARIANA MADIX CALL IT QUITS… Allegations He Cheated With Co-star Raquel Leviss”. (I was at In-N-Out burger, on a pit stop as I drove from Los Angeles to the desert. That I was enjoying high-quality fast-food is on theme, in hindsight.)
The secondary stars of a secondary reality television show, Vanderpump Rules, whose relationship had been captured by cameras for almost a decade, split due to infidelity. For a program whose foundations were built on the practice, it didn’t seem like it should be news fit for outlets beyond such lowbrow tabloids as TMZ. But it was, and as #Scandoval, as it became known, grew, sources of news such as the Wall Street Journal, CNN, and the New York Times gave it coverage. Madix, the scorned woman, was invited the annual White House Correspondents Dinner; Leviss, the other woman, was vilified to such an extent that she entered in-patient rehab for over 90 days, before deciding not to return to the show; and Sandoval, the villain, became, according to The New York Times Magazine, “The Most Hated Man in America.”
As the current, post-#Scandoval season of Vanderpump Rules began to air at the end of January of this year, social media has become overwhelmed with commentary about how the show has become a let-down, worse than it’s ever been. I couldn’t disagree more.
If you watch Vanderpump Rules, you’re probably wondering how on earth I can be enjoying season 11. You’re probably wondering why you’re reading about it on this platform. It’s because of André Breton and his Surrealist Manifesto.
As I’ve written before, the Surrealists were an awfully aggressive bunch, with rival gangs, rules, purity tests, membership, and a manifesto to determine who could and couldn’t assume the moniker. As with many influential and important artists, they were a complicated group whose behavior – which was often violent, misogynistic, and homophobic – more than likely would warrant ‘cancellation’ today.
I don’t endorse their actions – these are the same people who vilified Jean Cocteau – but this is Sacred Monster, and it’s inherent in the title here that just because someone was terrible, doesn’t mean that their contributions should be discounted, too. And the Surrealists, particularly André Breton – who, make no mistake, was an asshole of epic proportions – made an undeniably important mark on art history.
Surrealism is the artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that emerged in Europe following the end of World War I and continued through, roughly, the 1950s, although there are many artists working in this style today. It comprises, and comprised, everything from writing to poetry; music to film; and, of course, the fine arts. While there was more than one faction of Surrealists, the generally accepted one is the one led by André Breton, a French writer, critic and poet who worked through the first half of the 20th century. Surrealism’s epicenter was Paris, and it spread quickly across the globe. Some of the most well-known and iconic artists of the 20th century, such as Frida Kahlo and Salvador Dalí, have been categorized as Surrealists (by gatekeeper extraordinaire Breton himself, bien sûr.)
Surrealism – the creative arts movement – is defined by certain parameters. Following the end of what was then called The Great War, the Surrealists were propelled by a desire to move against the rules of society. As a reaction to a generation-defining trauma, the tenets of the movement were all about rejecting rationality, the real, and the restraints of the conscious mind.
André Breton published his first Manifeste du Surréalisme in 1924 (two more would follow over the course of the decade.) In it, he outlines his vision of the “superior reality” that exists in our subconscious. With an emphasis on the importance of dreams and imagination, Breton rejected all that the mind at work produces, and concentrated on the Freudian machinations of what we think about when we’re not trying at all, with the belief that the subconscious points to what we really think and feel.
Breton called upon the importance of all of this as contributing to what he called “sur réalisme”: loosely translated, “superior reality”. While he and his rivals debated over the terminology and fine print of these characteristics, for our purposes here, his theory boils down to what I – and others – call “the reality on top of, or above, reality”.
The concept of “The reality above reality” was my first introduction to Surrealism, in a class I took on the subject taught by inimitable fashion historian and professor of French at Barnard, Caroline Weber. (Professor Weber, aside from being extremely cool, also had a particularly extraordinary wedding day.) She played for us a clip from the Will Ferrell film Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby wherein Ferrell’s character says grace. As the scene progresses, his prayers get increasingly absurd, with invocations of “8lb, 6oz Baby Jesus”; thank-yous to the fast-food companies that paid to sponsor his graces; and discussion of how each person prefers to imagine the Jesus they pray to (notably, one character says he likes to “picture Jesus in a tuxedo t-shirt.”) It’s hilarious.
Needless to say, the class was stunned by their introduction to the subject being made via a film clip that was so low-brow by comparison to the rest of the syllabus, which was otherwise full of cultural heavyweights such as Louis Aragon’s Le Paysan de Paris and Leonora Carrington’s The Hearing Trumpet.
In the time that has since passed, I have come the conclusion that ‘Horseshoe Theory’ – in which two opposing sides of a binary, instead of stretching further away from each other as they reach further into their own ends, instead circle in and come closer together at each extreme or end point, like a horse’s shoe – can apply to pop culture. The lower-brow the content can be, the more potential it has to achieve transcendence and warp into something more potent, and surreal, altogether. And Vanderpump Rules is a perfect example.
Vanderpump Rules premiered in 2013, as a spin-off of Bravo’s successful franchise The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. At the time, it followed the waitstaff at Housewife Lisa Vanderpump’s West Hollywood restaurant, SUR (Sexy Unique Restaurant.) The sexy, unique staff were followed by camera crews who documented their love triangles (in many cases, squares,) infidelities, and drunken nights as they aspired, like so many hospitality staff in Los Angeles do, to move beyond their crumbling apartments and jump-start their acting and singing careers. They drank (and, it’s implied, drugged) to excess, fought dirty, slept with each other, and were totally fascinating to watch. In the early seasons, I would tell friends to watch it because it was like watching a Bret Easton Ellis, Los Angeles-noir fever dream come alive.
Early seasons of Vanderpump Rules hewed close to the philosophy that Breton lays out in his Manifesto. The cast of the show is defined by their outlandish actions, which seem to always play out in restaurants across Los Angeles (the editors, who are storytellers in their own right, always include clips of shocked diners reacting to the madness going on in front of them.) From Kristen Doute screaming at the manager of SUR to “suck a dick” from the restaurant’s sidewalk patio, lit cigarette in hand, to SUR co-owner Ken Todd growling that he’ll knock DJ James Kennedy “spark out” on Robertson Boulevard for raising his voice at his wife, there are countless examples of the cast behaving in ways that defy both rational thought and societal norms.
As the success of the show grew, and seasons passed, the introduction of camera crews to document these people’s lives added a thicker overlay to the very lives that they were living. The effect was such that the ‘fly on the wall’ feel suffered diminishing returns; viewers began to watch a performance of reality for the reality show. Its surreality (SUR-reality?) curdled.
Whereas the initial success of Vanderpump Rules included a ‘Disneyland’ element to it – someone could watch the show on their television one night, and then presumably have a cast member serve as their wait staff at SUR the following day – the premise wore thin as the cast gained infamy and made money from the show. By seasons six and seven, it was farcical to watch them still have their quibbles set within the pantomime of working at the restaurant. They ceased to embody the archetype of struggling creative strivers and became flattened versions of themselves: reality stars. Viewership dropped; the machinations behind the storylines of the show began to be more obvious to the trained eye. A Covid-19 season was disastrous, and by all accounts, the show was on its last legs before being renewed for season 10, which production was planning to be its last.
And then, out of nowhere, an organically tawdry storyline landed: #Scandoval. Which is when the reality show returned, in a new way, to its truest depiction of “reality above reality”.
You can read the second part of “The Reality Above Reality” by clicking this link.
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À très bientôt,
Chloë Helen America Cassens