What happens when literary scholars venture away from the work and fields we’re trained in and rove the land of pignoli cookies, oranges, diamonds, and champagne? And what happens when we treat that escape seriously?
My big secret as an academic is that sometimes, I get tired of my research. I never want to quit it, but I do crave a break from it, and then I feel guilty about growing weary of the work I’ve dedicated years to. I research how 9/11 and the War on Terror affect domestic life—a topic that orbits racial unrest. Frankly, it’s exhausting and terrifying to read and write about how my very existence as a Brown person is seen as a threat.
On top of that, reading description after description of the towers falling and the imperial war, whether in literature or in real-life accounts, takes a toll. When I was writing a dissertation chapter about the relationship between 9/11 and material culture, I had a recurring nightmare in which I was back home in Atlanta eating fried chicken. Surrounded by friends, I bite into it and immediately realize something is wrong: I watch myself open my mouth and see ash pour out of a black maw. In my very first session, my therapist told me that I had secondhand trauma from all the reading and writing about 9/11.
So I need moderation in my research and writing process. I need rest. Like far too many scholars, I throw myself into a writing hole where I sit for hours and forget to eat. It’s why I have back problems. What annoys me is that writing lingers and waits. Words need time to marinate on the page to see if their flavors meld. And, more than that, I need to step away because looking at writing with rested eyes begets fresh ideas and connections. In other words, taking a break is crucial to writing. But that doesn’t mean I need to turn my brain off or forgo critical thinking when I take a break from writing. If, as Sheila Liming contends in Hanging Out: The Radical Power of Killing Time, indolence has a “creative nature,” my break-time creativity flourishes while reading reality television.
Enter The Real Housewives. My favorite form of creative indolence, the franchise offers a reprieve from writing and research and teaches me how to close read for the relationships forged between form and politics.
I began watching Housewives for the endless drama rooted in petty fights, for the high (and low) fashion, and for watching wannabe one-percenters lounge with their other aspiring friends. It was the perfect getaway from my research. As Brian Moylan writes in his history The Housewives,
It wasn’t that I wanted to live like these middle-aged women across the country, so much as I felt a certain kinship with them. There couldn’t have been a more opposite lifestyle from mine—and yet. They traveled in a pack, fighting and gossiping among themselves, just like I did with my crew.
Maybe that’s why fans refer to the housewives by their first names: an intimacy blossoms when watching these women live their lives. And while I agree with Moylan that there is a strange affinity between me and women I know purely through a screen, I found myself increasingly enticed by the literary qualities of the show and couldn’t help but pick it apart.
The Real Housewives has surprisingly complicated formal elements, and they aren’t too different from those found in literary texts. Castmates who lie on camera are unreliable narrators who aim to deflect, like Potomac’s Robyn Dixon whose stories were met with suspicion and doubt by both viewers and castmates after she consistently lied about her husband’s well-documented affairs. Post-production editing magnifies tone, mood, and atmosphere; think about what the music, unnerving long shots, and jarring cuts do in Orange County when Vicki Gunvalson (on camera at a party) learns that her mother died. To acknowledge and read Housewives in literary terms, therefore, doesn’t just revise the show’s popular position as “lowbrow” or “trash,” but it reveals what Mark Andrejevic deems the “lab-rat element of reality television: the promise that certain forms of artifice are necessary to get to something authentic and true.” The border between “real” and “fake” isn’t as rigid as we’d like to think.
If, as Jonathan Culler suggests in “The Closeness of Close Reading” close reading “teaches an interest in the strangeness or distinctiveness of an individual work and parts of work,” then a zoomed-in look at Housewives also uncovers how curated editing draws in viewers. Plenty of viral moments attest to this, but the producer’s hand is clearest when the façade of production falls apart, when we see the seams, when the below-the-line workers who make reality TV possible appear on screen. It rarely happens, but when the fourth wall shatters, we remember that the whole production is a well-oiled machine, meticulously crafted by hands that prefer to remain unseen. Seeing producers on screen disrupts the narrative continuity, because suddenly, it’s not just about the women anymore, it’s about the producers too. It’s about what should be a seamlessly structured text, revealed as a produced object. It’s about us watching it.
When I watch Housewives, I recognize that the skills and processes I use to interpret and teach literature carry into other objects, affording new understandings of seemingly simple narratives. Take, for instance, the show’s conjoining of observational documentary style and confessionals. This combination catalyzes a temporal malleability and waywardness that viewers are expected to keep up with. A season of Housewives is filmed, the castmates record individual confessionals after filming wraps but describe events in present tense, and the viewer watches the past unfold in their own present. Disembodied voices from future confessionals narrate scenes from the past too. On top of that, social media posts from the castmates and paparazzi complicate matters by spoiling seasons, leaking information, and advancing storylines after filming is over. Like the long winded tales Dorit Kemsley from Beverly Hills insists on telling, the stories are quite literally never ending.
Editors and producers of the show trust their audiences to follow along, but they also helpfully include analeptic moments (flashbacks) as quick reminders about something that happened in a previous episode or season. Leaving audiences in a kind of suspended animation, the simultaneously dreaded but eagerly anticipated “To Be Continued” at the end of explosive episodes participates in the skewed temporal order that denies closure. These methods to manipulate time certainly compel audiences to stay glued to their tv and return for the next episode. But the temporal instability also allows viewers to see how a housewife has developed over the course of her time on the show, a season, or an episode. Have her motivations changed or remained the same? Viewers find affinity with these women because we watch them evolve over time on screen, be it over fifteen seasons or over an hour. Temporal order and structure in Housewives offer ways to think about character, about performance, about personhood.
Television studies scholars such as Robyn Warhol and Racquel Gates have been intrigued by Housewives’ open-ended narrative structure and the other formal qualities that make it truly a one-of-a-kind franchise. While I disagree with Yael Levy when she argues that the show’s open-endedness is “a feminist resistance to a return to order,” I believe that readings like Levy’s demonstrate how close reading the show accentuates how reality TV’s formal conventions are routinely manipulated to reiterate how class, gender, sexual, and racial politics propel narrative.
Reality TV is both a mirror and a microscope to our social landscape. And to closely read it, to engage with its core compositional elements, reveals the contours of the rules and regulations that dictate our reality.
As a Brown viewer, I read Housewives for its racial politics before anything else. The franchise’s treatment of race, no matter the city, is a mess (and not in the good way). Alex Abad-Santos writes, “When you examine the lives of very rich people, you’re examining privilege and wealth that are byproducts of racial inequality, and a system that’s inherently exclusive. It’s not really a surprise then that some of those people are going to exhibit bigotry.” For example, in Beverly Hills when Crystal Kung Minkoff, a Chinese American woman and one of the few non-white housewives in the Beverly Hills’s history, discusses harmful racial stereotypes with her castmates, the following exchange occurs with Sutton Stracke, a white woman from Georgia:
Sutton: I am not talking about racial stereotypes when I am—
Crystal: —Well, it’s easy for you not to.
Sutton: Why? Because I’m a Southern white girl?
Crystal calls out Sutton on her white privilege, but Sutton cries white victimhood by equating stereotypes about Asian people to assumptions about people from the South. It’s infuriating to watch this scene unfold, but it’s not a surprise. This happens to women of color every day. Crystal searingly responds, “Are you one of those people [who] don’t see color? Tell me you’re that girl, ‘I don’t see color.’” The episode concludes with a tense “To Be Continued…” splayed in the center of the screen, and Crystal’s question hangs in the air. The show’s temporal organization, carrying over into the next week’s episode, bifurcates the political conversation. This in turn compels us to read the episode’s arc and structural aspects in inextricable relation to the women, their conversations, and their politics. Close reading this word choice, body language, and what ends up being a flaccid discussion about racial stereotypes in addition to the franchise’s structural building blocks recognizes how politics and form merge.
The scene’s intertwining of form and politics, then, witnesses much more than a bunch of rich women just hanging out. In reading the cast dynamic in tandem with the cliffhanger “To Be Continued…,” the uneasy scene becomes a reflection of how a woman of color—when resisting the white supermajority’s bullshit and deflecting strategies—is cut off, stifled, jettisoned, and ignored. Despite the hint that the Crystal-Sutton argument would carry into the next episode, it fizzles out and becomes a game of conjecture. The show tries to mislead the viewer by refusing to go there, perhaps afraid to reveal its white-centered politics if it allows for an explicit discussion about race. But even as it evades that explicit discussion, through that very evasion and through both form and content, it depicts the reality of racial dynamics in the United States.
I teach close reading as a kind of science: study the tiniest compositional elements to figure out the whole. Students in turn discover and explore a constellation of previously unknown relations. The most valuable lesson close reading offers, I think, is its transferability from field to field. Noting how caesura reflects the stumbling exhaustion of the soldiers in Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poem “Dulce et decorum est” helps us read how color and lines work in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks and how racial dynamics work in The Real Housewives. Close reading is a process–a method–that bridges gaps, putting seemingly dissimilar forms and texts in conversation. In other words, it underscores literary analysis’ affordances to other fields. As Paula M. L. Moya puts it in The Social Imperative, “What I have realized is that while I, as a literary critic, have much to learn from other disciplines, I also have a great deal to offer to them.”
By close reading the housewives’ dynamics, what they talk about and how they talk about it, and how the show’s formal qualities—the temporal disorder, for example—the show transforms into an examination of the ways class, gender, and racial politics are embedded in a very specific world. To read the show is to read for the intersections of form and politics, how the two speak to and about each other. At the same time, close reading Housewives offers a kind of escape into a world of ultimate privilege; we indulge in other people’s lives, and we build, negotiate, and revise our relationships with them through our screens and over years.
What happens when literary scholars venture away from the work and fields we’re trained in and rove the land of pignoli cookies, oranges, diamonds, and champagne? And what happens when we treat that escape seriously? Not only then do we revel in the breaks necessary to make our work better, but we also surprise ourselves by learning how to mine a text intimately, to look for how it’s made, how it works, and why it works.
Jay Shelat is an Assistant Professor of English at Ursinus College. His book, Domestic Denial: Terror, Race, and Home in Post-9/11 Literature, is under contract at the University of Minnesota Press. In his free time, he obsessively watches The Real Housewives and wishes the cast were his friends.