Subverting Reality (and the Past) in NYC

"Reality TV" has so taken over our culture that we even elected a president because he starred on a reality show. As we know, there's precious little "reality" in "Reality TV" -- it's as manufactured and edited and manipulated as anything fictional, a subversion of reality -- but good reality TV, like any good fiction, doesn't need to be literally, factionally true to capture an essential, emotional, revealing truth.

Such is the case of The Real World. 

Back in 1992, when the genre was in its infancy, MTV stuck a bunch of twentysomethings in an NYC loft, filmed their comings and goings and interactions, and crafted what became a cultral phenomenon that reverberates in many interations today. Many Real Worlds ensued, in many different cities, but The Real World: New York was the OG, the one that started it all -- and now it's back! The new Paramount streaming service rounded up the original Real World NYC cast and stuck them back in the same loft and is basically doing the same show over again. But doing it again almost 30 years later is revealing a great essential truth -- you can't recapture, repeat, revive, or "do over" the past. It's over. It's done. You can remember the past but never relive it -- as Fitzgerald wrote, it's a boat against the current, a dark field rolling out under the night.

But the past isn't just there to be remembered -- it's also there to be discovered. For example, last year the director Joan Micklin Silver passed away. She made movies like Hester Street and Crossing Delancy, a great NYC director of the Jewish American experience. Before she ever made feature films, however, she made short films about NYC life. I was fascinated to learn about these, and they should regular New Yorkers (including her own daughter) running around the city doing odd things like touching fur or a black boy in a housing projects who owns a duck. These are odd, subversive looks at reality in NYC back in the 1970s. It's worth reading about and watching these films here -- and gazing upon a time, place, and people that may be gone but still fascinate.