Yeah, I'm talking about Jersey Shore, a show that has stirred retarded amounts of controversy for being about stereotypical modern Italians. There are stereotypical morons everywhere and just because they exist and a television network aims to show that they do exist doesn't mean that they're racist, pretending they don't exist is what's racist. Jersey Shore is a wholly justifiable account of stupid people being stupid in an environment where reckless stupidity is encouraged from birth.
I'm tempted to not even call Jersey Shore a show, but rather a social study. If an editor with some authority had realized this, Jersey Shore could have become a truly great documentary, but those of us savvy enough to see through the flashy editing and thick, gelatinous layer of drama see something far more interesting and perhaps a next step in social evolution.
Let's take their physical confrontations first. I've seen people get their heads bashed against walls and have their chests stomped in. When you see people in situations like that, there's a real possibility that a fatality will occur. Now, on the Jersey Shore, people will get in fights over nothing ("Go back to Staten Island!") and despite the mens' raging testosterone they do nothing but slap-fight. It's more of a territorial display than a confrontation driven by rage. Maybe it's the fantasy world constructed by MTV, but these people are never in danger of not having money or gym memberships or being harmed physically. The only real looming threat is alcohol poisoning, which shows up like the Ghost of Christmas Past to flash their lives before their eyes every god damn day.
For those of you who know the characters on the show (yes, they're fucking characters, and they may as well be animated), it's easy to say that the men are the most fascinating. Mike "The Situation"'s egomania could get him institutionalized, Pauly D actually comes off as a sort of shy nerd who thinks his DJing and neck muscles are going to keep everyone from noticing he has no idea how to interact socially, and Ronnie is a giant woman who spends a week every month shuffling around in sweat pants with his hair tied up complaining that women don't pay enough attention to him. And while historically, women murder themselves dieting and working out to be presentable to the men whose growling beer guts will bark at each other over which woman they want, the men now spend around two hours a day at the gym making sure their six packs are finely detailed enough that the tabs can be cracked while the women are constantly mistaken for a used tire dump. I'm not against women slugging beer like a keg and eating enough bacon grease to fry what's left of Haiti per se, but when the guys are injecting steroids into their eyelids to just be presentable, a problem is escalating.
The only one who seems to realize the absolute madness in the house is Vinnie, who is living his first summer as a 21-year-old at the Jersey Shore. My twentieth birthday is on Friday, so I completely relate to Vinnie's drunken antics, but most of the housemates are close to thirty and look like raisins baked in alcohol and glued to Sylvester Stallone's body. Vinnie bags more hot chicks and is more likely to comment on the insanity that flows through the house like vomit through Snooki than anyone else.
As for the women, the only outright insane one is really Snooki, a living balloon animal who is the brunt of some comic editing at least a few times, like the time that she dresses up like a pumpkin with tits and talks about how making out with and/or getting fingerfucked by a stranger in a club isn't really that big of a deal before we cut to her making out with a dude who's at the club with his girlfriend, standing about three feet away. She then storms out of the club and cries about how she can't find love when she takes off her underwear on the dance floor before picking herself up with a one-sided conversation about going to community college to become a veterinary assistant because "I fucking love animals". She also describes herself as "the fucking princess of fucking Poughkeepsie", a phrase that needs to be given a bath.
Otherwise, we have JWOW who seems to be under the impression that fake tits look like anything but soccer balls glued to your chest and that the Wicked Witch of the West had a sexy voice; Sammi, who is relatively sane for a seventh grade girl; and Angelina, whose position as most attractive girl in the house lasted about eight seconds before she started screaming at everything that was made of wood until she got kicked out of the house in the third episode. Snooki has become the celebrity of the women, and when that became apparent the producers clearly tried to push her into a relationship with The Situation, which was awesome because they spent the entire summer coming to terms with the fact that no one would fuck them. Unfortunately, I smelled foul play as soon as The Situation left Snooki naked in a hot tub, came up with a lame excuse for the cameras and went back downstairs to scrub his dick.
It's easy to make fun of these people for being stupid, and one of the reasons I waited so long to post this was to avoid being piled in with the many bloggers who were ragging on the cast of Jersey Shore for being stupid, but my real point is that in a modern society where all stresses are removed and the hunter-gatherer instinct is placated, the modern mating ritual comes front and center and Jersey Shore offers every kind of mating relationship possible, and it would seem that it comes by this conclusion completely naturally and innocently. That's a rare and truly incredible thing in art and I think it's worth pointing out. I think Jersey Shore gets to the center of human sexuality in a far more honest, compelling way than many great works of art that made its mission the exploration of sexuality. It's trash, yeah, but it's trash that stumbled upon something great.
PS - I made this infographic to illustrate the show for those of you who haven't seen it yet. It was going to be prettier but I decided it wasn't that important to the impact of my piece, so I left it the way it is. I didn't even bother making the background blend with my blog's background. Hohoho!
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