"Real Housewives"
“The Real Housewives of Orange County” Season 3
Context: This show created by and aired on Bravo follows the lives of five actual “housewives” living in a privileged gated community in Orange County, California. In recent years, shows such as The O.C. have created buzz around places of extreme wealth and privilege, and Orange County in southern California is one such place. The episode I watched was a rerun from Season 3—which means that this show got high enough ratings and enough advertising dollars to produce three seasons of nonsense. The show was created and produced by Scott Dunlop, a native of Orange County.
Content: Most of the women on this show looked alike (large breasts, tanned skin, coifed blonde hair), so it was very difficult for me to tell them apart and keep their stories straight.
Their daughters tend to look alike as well, and there were few young men on the show. Colton, a 15 year old son of one of the clone housewives, appears to be constantly in trouble for having parties when his mother is out of town. Like any responsible parent, she expresses concern over her son’s behavior, but he repeatedly demonstrates to the audience that she has absolutely no control over him—she takes away his golf cart, and he finds a way to break the lock; she asks him what happened to all of their beach towels and he makes a scene in front of his friends, yelling that he “doesn’t give a damn about her goddamn stupid towels.”
The housewives are introduced in the credits, bragging about how much money they have, how much they love money and partying, and how important it is for them to “look hot.” One woman tells us that she thinks there is nothing better than tanning, having golden skin and blonde hair. She says that she knows it’s probably not a good idea to tan so much at her age, but she is driven to look good. She tells us that “one of [her] biggest goals right now is to be as hot as [she] can” as she is turning 40 in a month.
Form: The opening credits of the show are quite telling. Script appears across the screen, telling us that 7 million families live in gated communities. Gated communities are highly exclusive, and residents must usually sign restrictive covenants promising to adhere to a certain set of aesthetics and behavior. Considering that one of the women tells us that she wishes to be a unique individual (manifested through the construction of an underwater volcano in her prospective backyard pool) to whom it is “important to me to be the best, to have the newest and greatest” clothes, jewelry, etc, it is highly ironic that she strives for this individualism in a setting in which individualism is signed away when one moves in.
This show is all about products. The three daughters of one housewife drive a Hummer customized to market some energy beverage their father created. None of them can even drive or park it safely, and one girl even mentions that “you always have to crash a brand new car once to break it in.” Crass materialism seems to make up much of their existence. One woman goes on a Harley ride with her husband(?) and some of his friends, and she confesses that be best part of the biking experience is the unique Harley shopping. These women live out the American cultural fantasy of bourgeois consumerism—they appear to be able to spend money however they wish. However, they also spend ‘rashly,’ allowing the audience to participate in a certain degree of disdain for their irresponsibility. The paradox of the audiences’ position: aspiring and fantasizing their lifestyle while simultaneously viewing their inability for thrift is echoed in the type of commercials aired.
Commercials ranged from Sandals resorts for upper-middle class couples (luxuries and gourmet restaurants, etc) to LA Weight Loss ControlTrim (so women viewing have hope of easily looking as ‘hot’ as the housewives), to other shows on the same channel to (my favorite) Glad bags. The Glad storage bag commercial best exemplified the paradoxical position of the viewer: Glad bags are the thrifty alternative to those ‘expensive Ziploc’ brand storage bags. A smart housewife (because it sure wasn’t a man demonstrating the quality of the plastic bags) knows that she shouldn’t spend too much money on a throw-a-way item. The commercial went so far as to imply that thriftiness is moral, and one way a smart woman can show this is by purchasing one bag rather than the other. Talk about a mixed message.
*As a side note of interest, my boyfriend’s (not as wealthy, but solidly upper-middle class) parents live in OC, and he went to high school with one of the sons who didn’t appear to be present much in Season 3 but whose family participated in the show. The kid was a spoiled jerk—clear evidence that while some of these families’ petty concerns over tanning and matching Playboy track suits is constructed, it has quite a bit of basis in reality.