Real Life

Image by Casual Polar Bear

 
I'm having an interesting media moment in my house, which is: I'm watching Fleabag, one of the greatest television shows ever created, alongside The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives, one of the worst. 

For those unfamiliar with either, a brief summary: Fleabag tells the story of a London woman in her early 30s as she navigates life after the deaths of her best friend and her mother. She runs a not-very-popular cafe; she sleeps with all the wrong men; she has a sprained relationship with every living member of her family. It is an uproariously funny show, mostly because she breaks the fourth wall constantly: Phoebe Waller-Bridge addresses us, the watcher, in nearly every scene, usually to hilarious effect. When it's not funny, Fleabag is moving and gracious in its life force. It is television art. 

By contrast, The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives is none of those things. This show follows an evolving clutch of Mormon women, and their friendships, marriages, and families. It was greelit as a result of a swinging scandal originating on TikTok, but the show has grown into something more than that: a self-aware beast of reality television, in which cast members—playing "themselves"—openly discuss things like "storylines" and "clout" with each other, and in which the filmed fly-on-the-wall content is in direct tension with the confessional talking-head segments. The women oscillate between their Mormon morals and screaming at each other, their mothers, and their baby daddies. Compulsively watchable, but also: yikes. 

What unites these shows, ironically, is the how they treat the presence of an audience. Fleabag uses her asides to share jokes, honest truths, or a devastating eyebrow quirk. The show works so beautifully because it exposes the moments where we perform for others—or don't. On SLOMW, the women are encircled by camera operators in their daily lives, but marital problems, interpersonal drama and breakdowns are conducted—I'm struggling not to say "performed"—as though they aren't. The most compelling personalities on SLOMW are usually the exact people you would back away from in real life: messy folks who cheat, lie, pick fights, and create drama. They are compelling, but mostly because they're glassed in behind the TV screen. 

And, of course, there is us. The audience. Is that what we are?

One of the more striking divides in modern life is the one between people who are habitual sharers on social media, and those who are not. Almost everyone I know uses some kind of social media—Facebook, Reddit, Pinterest, Instagram—but only a small number actually shares much online. This has led to a bit of a content drought for everyone, in which the things we used to share, like written posts, videos, and photos, are being replaced with advertisements and algorithm-driven content to fill the void. Unsurprisingly, this leads to a sense of disconnection, as our online social spaces are replaced with nonsense. 

For those of us who still post relatively frequently, it's become necessary to consider the role of the "audience" in our posting. I don't delude myself into thinking that I, a civilian with no ad deals and fewer than a thousand followers, hold a sense of influence in any online sphere. On the other hand, there are things that I do and don't post or reshare, simply because those things don't align with my online activity—what some might call my "brand." 

Kathryn Jezer-Morton talks about the idea of a personal brand in her book The Story of Your Life. Jezer-Morton is a social researcher, and she focuses on how our relationship to social media has flattened our lives into a few acceptable narratives. Because we live in the West, redemption is front and centre: the idea that we can overcome our challenges and emerge into stronger versions of ourselves. We want to be seen as fun, or successful, or beautiful—not just because those are appealing on their own, but because we've been taught that the opposite alienates others from us, creating distance that hurts deeply in this age of loneliness. The flip side, of course, is that no one's life is all fun, success, or beauty, and by hiding these other, less appealing parts of ourselves away, we end up isolated anyway. 

I recoil at the idea of a personal brand—I find it craven—but I have to concede that I do have something in that category regardless. Let's call it something else, then, something less commercial. Call it my voice, my POV, my values matrix, or my personal archive. I've been living a semi-public life since I signed up for a Diaryland account in 2002, and I often need an audience to feel motivated to do, well, many things: I like writing for a writer's group, or posting a workout selfie, or getting dressed for the school run. Knowing that someone, either online or in real life, will see me doing something helps jolly me towards a better version of that thing. 

I have to admit, I sometimes do hold back on sharing the hardest parts of my life. In 2018 and 2019, I had a Very Hard Time. There were a lot of really tough things happening in my life—things that I still hesitate to share. But the holding-back instinct feels less about cultivating a positive personal brand or specific image for some kind of audience (my friends and family and some forgiving strangers, mostly), and more about a disinclination to conjure those Very Hard Things again. It is spitting three times to ward off the evil eye, or holding your breath past a graveyard, or cutting an ex out of a photograph—by not looking too closely at those very bad things, we can maybe slither past them without getting stung. 

Would it have been a service to others to share those Bad Things? Maybe. Maybe it would helped someone feel less alone, or helped someone understand me better, or just widened the field of possibility for what we all talk about. And yet, to this day, it feels like any benefit that might have been gained by sharing would have been outweighed by the negative effects of focusing on the hard years. So I kept it secret. I still mostly do. 

Back on TV, the Mormon wives are disintegrating. As much as that show brings in external drama, it doesn't air everything: videos of one cast member in the midst of a domestic dispute have hovered off-screen for two seasons. We know that Taylor Franky Paul is experiencing some Very Bad Things of her own, and the way SLOMW contains it, and doesn't, is a fascinating example of reality television production. As a cultural product—and, yes, as a brand—the show can include tearful interpersonal drama, salaciously toxic relationships, and hesitant reunions. It can't include domestic assault, drug addiction, or child apprehension. What happens offscreen is still visible to us, but not as part of this particular story.  

At the end of Fleabag, our main character walks away from the camera. After being by her side for two seasons, we are suddenly no longer invited to be the audience. She is going to do things on her own now. Maybe someone else will receive those asides and eyebrow quirks; maybe no one will, and that's okay. She disappears. The show does not go on.