My Life as Liz

Channel surfing yesterday I came upon the MTV show My Life as Liz, now in its second season. The show presents life and times of ”Liz” (the quotes are appropriate here as you will see) a small town Texas native who is now in her first year of art school in New York.

The story:  She is in a long distance relationship with a boyfriend who is going to school in Austin and otherwise stays in touch with her other high school friends and though it looks like she has been in NY for quite sometime (the weather looks “spring-ish and she talks about going back to Texas for the summer, so I assume we are to think it is Spring but really I am not sure) she apparently has not made any friends or visited any place outside of going to school (the show has a subplot of her Austin boyfriend surprising her in NY and her not knowing anywhere t take him).

The show is, in almost every conceivable way, horrible. But it is expressively horrible.

Though it is in the same genre as a reality show (and even here you have to break it down further: it is not part of the game show reality (Survivor) but more a part of scripted reality (The Hills, The Real Housewives of….) it wears the genre superficially because the plot construction is so naked and the acting is bad (and not just a little bad, really bad)- but this is where it becomes so expressive.

Sidebar: Is there a more expressive term to describe the last decade that we have been living in than scripted reality?

What happens when you present something as reality but then overlay fictional constructs on top of it, just not so well? On shows where they do this seamlessly, the audience does not think about it because it fulfills an audience desire to live in that type of fiction themselves.

Most of these shows do this by presenting not just conspicuous, but almost orgiastic indulgence (I am looking at you Real Housewives). But here there is no such wish fulfillment. Instead the audience desire is not aspiration but identification: The show wants us to identify with the main character and see the world through her eyes. This brings on the double entendre of the title- the show does want to show “my” life as Liz.

But that doesn’t work out so well. The fiction is not seamless.

We want to identify but are continually pulled out of it by being able to see the wiring and stage lights break though the curtain. The camera is always in places it would never be if it was a documentary and the acting is so wooden it does not remind a viewer so much of people but watching pre-schoolers play act as people. It is a new genre: “accidental Brecht.”

And it makes you wonder, “what are they really like?” and “why are they doing this?”

The answer is, I am assuming, wanting to be on TV and that they are being controlled by “Liz.” Does she write these scenarios for them all to play act? The reason I think so brings up the second meaning of the title: It is Liz playing at being “Liz.” In this respect, what the show resembles most is pornography: This bizarro version of the real world where there is only one motivation but “Liz” replaces “sex”.
Everyone, even people thousands of miles away (though apparently not her parents, who are not alluded to) are obsessed with Liz and think about her constantly even though she presents herself as a type of socially awkward art school naïf.

It really does show the world through the distorted lens of a relatively entitled 19-20 year old who can only think about the world narcissistically.

And this is why the show is so expressive: It wants us to identify but really shows someone aspiring: The wish fulfillment is being able to control everyone around you, which is happening because we know it is her show, her fiction, even though the narrative of the show doesn’t present this- only the art school naïf part.

But the manipulation is so mechanical and naked (in the same way that it is with a 19-20 year old) that it becomes sort of endearing because it is s honest about not realizing it is lying to you.