The Hills Returns Tonight

The best show on television - The Hills - returns tonight for its fourth season. Some of us (me) were a little late to this show, and have yet to see season three. Needless to say, a crash course will need to take place over the next few days. The Hills is highly addictive in a "guilty pleasure," sort of way, but it is also utterly fascinating. Unlike any other reality show, it seeks to disguise itself as a narrative. There are never confessional interview sequences, nor is the camera ever acknowledged. This is in stark contrast to, say, VH1's Breaking Bonaduce where the camera crew plays an intricate roll in almost every episode, and the individuals frequently discuss the show's effect on their lives. The stars of The Hills, however, go to great lengths to appear unaware that they are, in fact, the stars of a show called The Hills. The camera never shakes and it becomes easy to get lost and forget that this is supposed to be a real show about real people.

But then that's the argument that this show is making. We live in a postmodern or possibly post-postmodern world, and the notion of trying to capture actually "reality" is a futile pursuit. As long as there have been documentaries, there has been this issue. The "realism" of documentary has been dissected and analyzed, criticized and broken down to the point where it just does not seem possible. The theory behind cinema verite was to capture a certain realism - letting the camera be a fly on the wall, with minimal edits because edits create distrust within the viewer.

Problem is, documentary is a manipulative medium, and there are few ways around it. Even when your subject is very much "real," you will still be shaping their story in a certain way that actually diverts from the truth. Furthermore, whether acknowledged or not, the camera turns the subject into a "performer." And thus, we have The Hills. The Hills takes on the appearance of cinema verite and then remixes it with the stylistic elements previously only found in narrative. It is a glossy, glamorous look at the world, with a hip soundtrack to aid the story. Whether this is "real" or not does not really matter, because cinematic realism just can't be achieved.