Inside Reality TV by Ragan Fox

Author:Ragan Fox [Fox, Ragan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Media Studies, Performing Arts, Television, History & Criticism
ISBN: 9781351660136
Google: RZFoDwAAQBAJ
Barnesnoble:
Goodreads: 39221692
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2018-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Figure 3.2 Ragan as “The Ass Whisperer”42

“With no shirt on,” asked Lane, an oilrig salesman and former Texas Tech football player. Later, in a diary room confession, Lane stated, “In Texas, if you do have a dream like that, you do not tell anyone.”

The gay contagion sequence ends with a diary room segment featuring Matt, who joked, “This place is crazy. It messes with your mind. I’m in some homosexual showmance. And now I’m dreaming about shirtless Hayden.”

Our close relationship was performatively constructed as Matt’s downfall in the game. “Matty’s getting too close to Ragan,” Enzo claimed only days before he devised a plan to evict Matt. Enzo’s heteronormative narratization is par for the course in television, where homosexuality is regularly presented as an obstacle for heterosexual characters. Battles and Hilton-Morrow argue that when a “program explicitly deals with the question of sexuality, it falls back on the convention of treating homosexuality as a problem, especially for straight characters in the narrative.”43 On August 26, 2010, Enzo’s plan came to fruition, and Matt was eliminated from the competition. In a post-eviction interview, he sat across from Julie Chen, who grilled him about our friendship and the Brigade, a secret all-male alliance of which I was not a member.

“I was hovering between the Brigade and my little showmance,” he quipped. The live studio audience seated behind Matt and Julie chuckled.

Julie continued, “You and Ragan were best friends in the house. Why didn’t you tell him about your [other] alliance? Why did you ‘throw him under the bus?’ ”

“Ragan’s my little boy toy,” he replied. As if cued by a placard, the audience once again laughed. “It was a matter of playing with my heart or my head. My heart was with Ragan but my head was with the Brigade.”

By the time Matt was evicted from the house, audience members had grown accustomed to laughing at suggestions that our friendship was more than platonic. Production sanitized the joke of our “showmance” by featuring clips of and repeated references to Matt’s wife. The comedy of our friendship functions as “antirhetoric,” or discourse that “simultaneously promotes and disavows itself—renouncing its intent even as it amuses audiences and advances agendas.”44 The “straight-mistaken-for-gay trope” is commonplace in television and “derives much of its humor from the audience’s knowledge that the character(s) is/are not in fact gay.”45 My homosocial relationship with Matt may have been palatable to some viewers, because our coupling constituted a performative enactment of gay subjectivity without Matt ever having to “go gay” in the house.

My friendship with Matt became a popular topic of conversation among viewers, some of whom used their Photoshop skills to narratize the assumed missing elements of our ‘‘gay’’ relationship. EgregiousPhilbin referenced tropes of gay predators when he reworked the film poster for Single White Female so that it pictorially depicts a narratized interpretation of my friendship with Matt (see Figure 3.3). Single White Female is a 1992 movie in which a bisexual sociopath obsesses over, stalks, and brutalizes her roommate.

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