The Case Against Laguna Beach
Laguna Beach is worthless, harmful, insipid, addictive
EVAN JOHNSON STAFF
PHOTO: COURTESY OF MTV
Featuring a shit-pop soundtrack and a host of unremittingly boring, shallow, unlikable teenagers, season three of MTV’s Laguna Beach is so strangely low-concept and devoid of ideas and intelligence that it almost tricks you into believing that it has avant-garde aspirations. In all this it’s very similar, I understand, to the first two seasons of the series, which followed “real” teens through the daily toil of life in “one of the wealthiest, most beautiful beachside communities in the world.”
Season three features a new batch of characters apparently, though I doubt if any of them are distinguishable from last year’s. Particularly of note: new narrator Tessa, whose apathetic comments reveal no insight whatsoever into herself or anyone else, or anything at all, for that matter; Chase, aspiring musician and lead-singer of Open Air Stereo, an amateur Nu-Rock band that I will simply not describe; Kyndra, who has “the best party house” according to the press notes (thanks, press notes); and Lexie, whose breasts are too small and has kind of a funny nose.
You’d think the series could brew up some real drama in this cauldron of cash and hormones, but the love triangles and clique-rivalries are so hampered by the frothy, arbitrary psychology of their teenage constituents that any and all conflict ends up achieving no more tension or intrigue than a commonplace bureaucratic mix-up, like a double-booked appointment at a periodontist or a T-4 slip lost in the mail. It’s just like high school.
The degree to which these people come off as both interchangeable and repugnantly superficial is quite stunning at first, but it becomes apparent that MTV probably has a large hand in this. Certainly the “reality” behind the show is edited and otherwise manipulated to better help it meet MTV’s requirements for bland, unimaginative television, but it’s also likely that the teens themselves are attempting to re-create themselves as bland, unimaginative human beings in order to accord with both MTV’s standards and those of their community, which, it should be noted, is also home to Girls Gone Wild creator Joe Francis.
Ostensibly, Laguna Beach is “reality television” and I suspect that there are two reasons for this. The first, which I think reveals the feverish intensity of MTV’s cynical, business-savvy ethos, is that it’s cheaper and easier to just follow around a bunch of teens than it is to go through the trouble of hiring people to write and perform. The second is that I don’t think that even the most talented and chameleonic television writer could intentionally write something this vacuous. According to my drool-stained notes, the most intriguing sentiment expressed in the entire first episode of season three goes like this: “he got really hot this year . . . he even hooked up with Jessica.”
The main difficulty in getting involved with this show is that doing so requires empathizing somehow with its spoiled teenagers, and, apart from the possibility that these young exhibitionists are themselves being exploited and humiliated by MTV, doing so is an exercise in moral corruption. I don’t mean the bombastic and largely fictional moral corruption envisioned by Focus on the Family — you know, Moral Corruption as all-night homosexual-only hot-tub orgy, replete with immigrant- supplied, inner-city-bathtub-brewed Meth and a sack of small, eager rodents, STDs generating themselves out of thin air through the sheer demonic forces of sodomitical friction.
No, I’m referring to a more quiet and banal moral corruption, that which erodes, confuses and displaces a person’s understanding of the real suffering in the world. I think that Laguna Beach traffics in the latter. Watching the show, you can just barely hear the faint hiss and puff of hot air pulsing through your head and out your ears; that’s an empathy-fart.
This show makes people stupider. I actually believe that if you administered a series of intelligence tests (just little things — recognizing objects, memorizing word-lists, etc.), you’d find participants faring significantly worse after having watched as little as five minutes of the show. I know I’m stupider for having watched it: I plan, as soon as possible, to rent and watch every episode of the first two seasons. Seriously.
