May

16

With the whole “Lauren, Lo and Audrina get a house” storyline, either the producers totally dropped the ball or they have decided, probably wisely, to abandon even the pretense of illusion that this show is anything but “scripted.”

First we have the scene in the restaurant, when Lauren and Lo are talking about it all, then Audrina shows up, and is invited to join them as a matter of course. No indication that Lo is anything but fine with that.

But then for some mysterious reason that is never explained, Audrina is ensconced into the guest house - even though there are 3 bedrooms in the main house. Why? (Several episodes later, Audrina does say some things about being a very private person, but this is after all the drama has already started, and where was all this private personhood when she lived with Lauren?)

Lo, who has coexisted peacefully with Audrina just fine all this time, and we supposed considered her a friend, as soon as they get into the house, starts treating Audrina like a chunk of putrid roadkill. But we are not shown any events that would have caused Lo to be mad at Audrina, nor does she ever say she is. The most popular view I see expressed on the internets is that Lo feels somehow “threatened” by Lauren’s friendship with Audrina. Um, since when?

Lauren and Lo have been friends since they were what, two or twelve or something, and it is only NOW that Lo all of a sudden feels threatened? By a girl Lauren has known for a year or two?

In fact, the whole Lo character appears to have undergone a major rewrite.

YesterLo was this bright, sunny presence, this whimsical and friendly girl who sometimes made you wonder why in the world the show was not about her instead of Lauren, whose totality and essence was best summed up by a young man named Gawin, writing about his experience playing a one-time “bit part” on the show: “She was odorless.”
Technically, he was responding to a question about how Lauren smelled, but seldom has a three-word sentence said so much so well.

This whole “girls get a house” thing is just so glaringly obviously (if ineptly) constructed to launch a whole new drama source - Lo versus Audrina!

There are so many thousands of reasons why this is stupid, even I am not going to enumerate them all, but let’s just start with this.

If Lauren really were put in a position where she had to “choose between Lo and Audrina,” well, that is sort of a non-starter. Obviously Lo is like her oldest and dearest childhood friend, and Audrina is a girl to whom she was first introduced after she had left Laguna and moved to L.A. And just as an added fillip, it was the Evil Heidi who introduced them!

Next, we can move on to the fact that it is extremely unlikely that anybody’s oldest and dearest childhood friend - yours, mine or Lauren’s, is going to put you in that kind of position, ask you to “choose.” People who do things like that are not your friends. They are Spencer Pratt.

So essentially the producers are now asking us to believe that Lo has swallowed some sort of personality-altering potion, which has made her not only insecure, but mean and nasty and a practitioner of the SpencerPratterian doctrine of friendship.

Interestingly, Lauren’s complete and unquestioning acceptance of Lo’s transformation, and her utter inability to address the tension and issues arising therefrom with even the aplomb and people skills one would expect from a sixteen year old is met with complete and unquestioning acceptance by us.

THAT is most sadly totally in character for the odorless Lauren, who continues to dwell in a sort of fog of generalized vagueness that some of the more naive among us mistakenly mistook for thoughtfulness in the first season or two of Laguna.

And as I posted in a comment somewhere under some nick or other, it is not surprising that someone whose key adolescent-to-young adult years have been spent followed around by a camera crew is going to have some developmental impact, and we all hope that is the worst of it. Lauren has, for all intents and purposes, been raised in a 21st century Skinner box. She is an experiment, a “poor hamster,” a term coined by a poster whose name nor location I cannot recall as an appellation for any and all “reality show participants.”

I’m ashamed I can’t give props to the originator, it is brilliant, and immediately became part of my everyday vocabulary, and you will probably see it used here with regularity.

I guess that what with the Speidi juggernaut changing the face of American pop culture, not to mention the talk show circuit - and even the fancy soirees of political bosses - the Hills producers have been obliged to confront the awful possibility that Heidi might not re-up when contract negotiation day rolls around (and when that might be, I have no idea) or even what would have been unthinkable and beyond absurd just a year or two ago - that some entity or other might even be willing to put up the bucks to BUY the rest of whatever time she has left, and the poor Hills would be bereft of its reliable old dramafest standby: the Heidi-Lauren feud.

I am speculating on this only because it just seems to smack of a fit of crazed desperation on the part of some functionary somewhere, the idea that this whole “Lo versus Audrina” house thing could possibly take the place of Speidi.

And I can’t help but feel sorry for the thousands of young girls who Believe, for whom Lauren and the other Hills tribeswomen really are role models, and for whom the show really does represent a slice of reality as lived by everyday girls just like them who happen to be lucky enough to reside in the SoCal enclaves.

At least the ordinariness is real. But that will be a whole nother post!


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