Jersey Shore, Part Zero

I saw two minutes of Jersey Shore a month ago.  It was my first and will be my only exposure to the television show.  It has taken me that long to process it enough to comment.

A few years ago, the MTV reality show True Life aired an episode called I Have a Summer Share.  A group of narrowly focused young people had a few weeks every summer at a cottage on the Jersey shore.

The episode of True Life offered a glimpse into a way of life that wasn’t foreign completely; it wasn’t that divorced from the behavior of high school jocks.  Thuggish activity, barely civilized, but the behavior was human.  Imprinted by familiar codes and patterns.

The behaviors were just distinct enough from behaviors I had seen before.  It was interesting to see the reactions to situations that were nevertheless familiar.  The individual roles were played with some vigor.  A musclebound hulk got in fights yet out of luck in love, caught in that loop and stuck in the closet.  A party girl fed her finale fetish as she established a relationship just enough to break it up.  A pretty boy lit up the club, did a churlish dance with the party girl, filled the gaps between their dalliances easily with other easy women.

It was easy to imagine where these people would end up in twenty years.  They will gaze in bewilderment at their faces in the mirror, wrecked by late nights and alcohol.  They will still smoke cigarettes as the corners of their mouths crinkle, as their teeth and skin yellow yet more deeply.  They will either marry luckily or remain mired in manual labor.

Jersey Shore is as if the characters on True Life were not only inbred but altered chromosomally.  Not only devolved, but backed down another evolutionary branch.  It is as if the clean line from ape to man had been forked and a subspecies of humanity had matured alongside us in an isolated hothouse, left to spin each other’s faults into a sea of random idiocy, until a hailstorm or meteor shower fractured the hothouse walls and set loose a race of bulbous and muscular mammals with bad skin and faces like hardened dough.

They have learned to void their cavities.  They cackle like hyenas and spout low-density communication.  They clean and stiffen their hides and fur.  They cover their hides with the skins of other animals and bits of cloth left for them by homo sapiens.

It is not apparent what the future holds for these creatures.  They may all die in the same fire.  They may choke on barely chewed steak.  They may die of perforated bowels from eating their own teeth.  They may drown drunk in a tub.  They may be executed after conviction of mass child rape and ritual sacrifice.  They may dissolve slowly into a puddle of gel.

Jersey Shore is not reality.  It is not surreal.  It is not post-modern.  It is not ironic.  It is subreality.  Its only profundity is in its sadness.  It is depression in a short sharp shock, and it leaves a hole in the heart and the head.

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One Response to Jersey Shore, Part Zero

  1. Matt E. says:

    My older son (who lives w/mom 100 mi.N of me) subjected me to some Jersey Shore a coupla years back when he was still a minor (thus excusing him? hmm). He claimed not to much like it. I was just curious enough about pop “culture” to check it out. The only thing more crushingly depressing than the show were the commercials, which were even more horrible than I remembered them being when I was his age watching MTV. They were so over-the-top, subtlety-free, blaring, commanding; insulting. Ugh.

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