Sweet Little Lies

To further aggrieve the would-be author, I report that as of this month, Lauren Conrad of The Hills is a not-once-but-twice published novelist, having released the follow-up to her bestseller L.A. Candy, entitled Sweet Little Lies. As a suddenly prolific cipher, Conrad speaks from her own experience acting on a fully scripted “reality” TV show, the guilelessness of which brings to mind Patrick Stewart's pitch on Extras: that in his screenplay, his character has the powers of Professor Xavier from the X-Men, only “for real.” To take up the role of author after reciting years of script under the auspices of improvisation constitutes a fascinating turn.

Here I demonstrate a discussion that could occur were one actually to read these books. By way of summary, the nineteen-year-old protaganist of L.A. Candy can't believe her luck when she and her best friend are recruited to star in what is described as a “reality version of Sex and the City.” In this enthralling “fictionalized” (read: written) account of art imitating life imitating art imitating life, Jane and Scarlett find themselves inhabiting a high-gloss world where everything is not as it seems, or whatever. One couldn't be blamed for thinking that this is as much as should be said on the subject. But only one chapter into the book, the reader encounters the following lines:

"Scarlett poured a cup of coffee, black, into her favorite mug, which said: COGITO, ERGO SUM, her favorite saying by her favorite philosopher, Rene Descartes. It was Latin for 'I think, therefore I am,' but she liked to tell anyone who bothered to ask that it was Swahili for 'I'm shallow, but you're ugly ...'"

We can tell that she means business by the mention that this saying is her “favorite.” If this quotation is horribly miscast here, as a citation of Scarlett's rich inner life in contrast to the vapidity of her surroundings, we can still examine it seriously. In a novel of mirrored surfaces, this assertion of interiority, which has been cited as a solipsism elsewhere, may even provide an interesting foil to the text, which is itself a foil to the author's onscreen persona, the opacity of which allows us to start in on Scarlett's favorite (sic) philosopher.

Satire aside, the reality of reality TV is so shaky that it's conceit can only be dismissed entirely, or elicit doubts that shouldn't stop at the program. After all, one has grown accustomed not only to the conventions of narrative television, such as foreshadowing or the MacGuffin, but also to the disperse innocence of most of the encounters comprising one's day; hence it is already understandable how the cast of a reality show could be distrusted as sinister automata even by a participant, willingly thrust into this arrangement. Unlike our neighbours, whose motivations we can mentalize, one's fellow cast members are instated as part of an invisible plot. And addled with the attendant anxieties of frantic, improvised performance, the individual could not be blamed for feeling that empathy is not so helpful an instinct in this place. “I'm shallow,” one can imagine saying to a thwarted automaton agent, “but you're ugly.”

The inscrutable or machinic Other smacks of Cartesian fallacy. But the same paradigm affords us the intellection to understand the body and ascribe motivation to it. Lauren Conrad is in no position to explore this dichotomy, but in her latest offering, she may come close enough to justify a look. Sweet Little Lies picks up where L.A. Candy left off, following the disappointingly unsordid escapades of Jane and Scarlett in Hollywood. Only this time, Jane must contend with the menace of the parapazzi, who, having obtained racy photos of her, are eagerly brewing a tabloid scandal. There is a tantalizing contradiction here.

In the world of L.A. Candy, as well as in our own, the long-standing dichotomy of the Public versus the Private has broken down, and the distinction has ceased to be of any practical use to one who would assert their right to the latter. In Jane's meta-reality, she is a publicly traded property – for that matter, so is Ms. Conrad. It seems contradictory for Jane to insist that at the moment of capture, she was being photographed as a private person. In an illiterate world, one wonders if the trust we place in such images wasn't best described by Guy Debord in the second volume of his Panegyric: “An image that has not been deliberately separated from its meaning adds great precision and certainty to knowledge.” The candid or clandestine image is assumed for being so to match the surface of reality. When a star of reality TV appears in the tabloids, it is tantamount to an accusation of fraud. And by the nature of their world, these headlines function as a prophecy.

Tabloids predict the future, not only because people are inexorably drawn toward the naming of events, nor because our credulous reality is mediated by the same screen that proffers entertainment, hence promoting the forged or merely inopportune photograph on the same level as any other supposedly fidelitous act of witness. What they report is inescapable prophecy because, should the whole world have the wrong idea of you, what does it matter if you disagree? The vulnerability of the celebrity is descriptive of our own standing as individuals in an age of mind-altering social media. In Sweet Little Lies, Jane is forced to see herself as the discomfiting Other to which all external appearances in her world are reduced.

Presently, we may be witnessing the final technologically-induced decay of Cartesian mind-body dualism; although effectively rebutted by certain advances in neuroscience, this fallacy, fervently professed by most of the population up to the minute of our present re-wiring, has nonetheless provided a site for fruitful discussion of individual sovereignty and rights, as well as occasioned abuses and denial of the same. In Lauren Conrad's world of appearances, its most familiar maxim could provide a framework for the same.

Cogito, Ergo Sum: to the public figure, surrounded by automata and bounded by inscrutable external reality, any assertion of individuality becomes analogous to such an assertion of interiority – an interiority that Descartes could assume to exist according to the principles of a God-created world. In the absence of such a world, any insistence on a private or even personal self is only isolating, and not a tool for outreach. To think is to be alienated. Hence one can be oneself only in a state of isolation – a condition that mega-celebrities have grappled with, magnificently and tragically, this entire century.

In such a world, the occupants of which are resistant to any attempt at the aforementioned mentalization, Scarlett's noble assertion of self-knowledge finally becomes the fatal solipsism it is so often mistaken for. For all of the attendant complications of her lifestyle, there is a terrible and beguiling simplicity at its core. And as Nicole Richie so eloquently puts it in the introduction to her novel, The Truth About Diamonds, “... in reality reality, life is anything but simple.”