The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 04
“Let’s put on some reggae jams and just chill out.” - McKenzie
I’ve got to hand it to MTV. While they are getting worse and worse at capturing the nuances of the human condition, this is the second week in a row that version of New Orleans that appeared on screen was pretty darn close to the way things really are down here. The prelude to and aftermath of the Saints’ Super Bowl victory was nothing short of life-affirmingly awesome. The type of douchebag date-rapist you meet at a shitbox like The Beach on Bourbon would feel right at home at the hell-hole that is Monkey Hill. And a trip to The Boot isn’t complete until you meet at least one girl with a visible sore on her lip. Yep, they’ve got this place pretty well pegged. But as their portrait of a city that can conceivably be painted in any number of ways continues to impress, their chronicle of people interacting with even a baseline level of dignity continues to disappoint.
Even back when the first group of strangers moved into the SoHo loft that hosted The Real World’s inaugural season, truly combative discussions about race were already obsolete among young adults of a certain age. In 1992 - just as is the case today - if someone in their early 20s had ass-backward views on race-relations, he or she would rightfully be dismissed as a simple-minded bigot. Sure, every now and then a cast member gets busted perpetrating an offensive stereotype, but treatises on race have rarely gone beyond “Not all black people with pagers are drug dealers” and have rarely needed to. MTV knows enough to know that putting an unabashed racist in close quarters with anything other than a bunch of unabashed racists would be disastrous (and not at all engaging).
And because any modern conversations about religion and gender roles should be doubly innocuous lest they come off as comically heavy-handed, the only issue consistently ripe for meaningful discussion - both “meaningful” and “discussion” being used extremely liberally for the lack of more accurate terms - has been the cast members’ differing attitudes towards various sexual orientations. Over the years, the subject has been handled with a wildly inconsistent level of sensitivity - on the part of the cast and the producers alike - and this season it appears as though the Wheel of Tact has landed squarely on “Race to the Bottom.”
The Real World: Back to New Orleans, Episode 03
“I don’t give a fudge what anybody thinks.” - Knight
Despite what many people think, Mardi Gras isn’t some devil weed that transforms ordinary people into stark-raving-mad lunatics who drunkenly lurch around New Orleans fueled by an insatiable thirst for cheap, plastic beads and their own depraved desperation. While the level and frequency of one’s intoxication may be slightly above average for the two or so weeks that parades run down St. Charles Avenue, the scale of Mardi Gras debauchery seldom reaches wide-scale and wanton corruption of moral decency.
The true phenomenon was very accurately documented in the episode of Treme that was set on Fat Tuesday proper. Even though alcohol and drug use was prevalent, few - if any - of the characters behaved in a way that was totally unexpected. Sure, the drinkers started drinking earlier, the smokers smoked more often and the cokeheads did coke under less sanitary conditions, but even the expanded revelry for which the season is notorious was shown to have limits. Mardi Gras is crazy and people do cut loose, but the mere fact that Easter is nigh does not turn virgins into sluts, sluts into boozehounds or boozehounds into crackheads.
Given the fact that no one had to be rushed to the hospital or took part in a PCP fueled street orgy, I’d say MTV has given the holiday a pretty fair shake so far. There was, however, something about this week’s episode that I did manage to find extremely troubling.
