In Which We Answer At The Penultimate Second

Trivial Pursuit

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

I recently sat down and viewed the final three nights of The Million Second Quiz, an NBC game show endeavor that took place over ten nights and involved a complex web of rules. Contestants sat in an outdoor "money chair" near the Lincoln Tunnel, racking up winnings as challengers attempted to unseat them. Audience members could play along with an official app, and if they got enough points playing the virtual game, they could "line jump," skipping the show's tryouts and heading straight onto the in-person show in New York.

There were other regulations involved but they were so baroque that I could drink a single glass of wine (Château Diana, $6.99 at Duane Reade, really more of a bottle of tangy juice than anything else) and the rules were gone from my mind forever.

Quiz was the live television blur that I'm sure we're all accustomed to now. Dramatic music. Repeated claims that this was the most revolutionary television show to exist, ever. You could play from home. You could watch the action 23 hours a day online. Ryan Seacrest hosted, of course. Paul Telegdy, NBC's president of reality and late-night programming, described the voyeuristic nature of Quiz as "Orwellian," as if that were a desirable thing. According to celebritynetworth.com, Ryan Seacrest has amassed 240 million dollars, much of it from exhorting audience members to get excited about things. He is a professional exhorter.

Million Second Quiz was, of course, not very good. It was a live, boring failure. Its app crashed the first night, its rules were too confusing. One NBC exec admitted to not understanding how to play. Contestants appeared anxiously blank or under the influence of benzodiazepenes. The questions themselves were horrifying, an E! network Trivial Pursuit. One question was about what kind of accessory a “Birkin” was; the money-seat contestant confidently answered that it was a kind of open-toed sandal, and looked weirdly nonplussed when it was announced that he was wrong.

Basically, the show made me nostalgic for another game show: Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? That show was, for a short period of time in 1999 and 2000, my earth, moon and stars. Maybe I loved it so much because I was nine and didn't know any better. Maybe I loved it because it was on five nights a week, my second tier babysitter; if omnipresence makes something Orwellian, then Regis Philbin was the best Big Brother a girl could ever ask for.

Would I hate Millionaire if I watched it now? Would I hate it the way I hated the cheesy, Minority Report, glass-and-neon-digital-numbers aesthetic of Million Second Quiz? I don't know. Sure, my taste hadn't evolved, but I think I loved Millionaire at the time not for the decor and the cheesy sweeping music and the way the lights dimmed at the beginning of each new question, but because I knew that everyone else was watching it. It was absolutely crushing the ratings. It was getting 30 million viewers a night. Those numbers are insane now. Quiz could barely break five million.

Maybe I hated Million Second Quiz because I somehow knew that no one was watching, even before looking up the ratings. I could sense that it was abandoned. The exhorting was for naught.

Before it was over, I tried ‘playing along’ on the app game. It’d be unfair to judge the show without testing out their full immersion tactic, right? The questions tread usual early-round territory: well-known paintings, well-known musicians, well-known puns. I totally trounced my competitor, an avatar named JasonK. I really just handed him his ass. And there was no glory in it. No glory in the same way there’s no glory in saying something mean about someone on Reddit or in the YouTube comments. There was no human connection, and no stern moderator, no Regis to ask me if my answer was final. On Millionaire, Regis was gravity. Regis was finality. Regis was Knowledge Personified. A lack of Regis meant the stakes were nonexistent.

And there was no glory because JasonK and I were two schmos in a sea of schmos watching and doing better things than us. JasonK and I were doing this Regis-less thing that NBC told us was super-radical and revolutionary, even though all the apps and the real-time livestreaming and the miles and miles of Seacrest smiles didn’t make up for the fact that giving a shit about primetime network game shows is not something that 30 million people do anymore. JasonK and I were alone. The winner got $2.6 million. What is the name of Kim Kardashian’s cat?

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about The Bling Ring. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Friends For Ever More" - Steve Mason (mp3)

"From Hate We Hope" - Steve Mason (mp3)

In Which We Lop All The Chandeliers

Peasants

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

The Bling Ring
dir. Sofia Coppola
115 minutes

Seven years ago, Sofia Coppola made a movie called Marie Antoinette. Spoiler alert: at the end of the movie, Marie Antoinette gets robbed in a pretty major way. The peasants storm the château, ruin her stuff, make off with her head. We don’t get to see the revolutionaries lopping the chandelier from the ceiling, just the shot of a bunch of crystals in pieces on the ground.

A couple years ago, a handful of upper-middle-class teenagers burgled the homes of Hollywood people like Orlando Bloom, Megan Fox, and Audrina Partridge. Then, on a tip from a classmate who heard them bragging about stealing Rachel Bilson’s shit, they were arrested. Nancy Jo Sales covered the hullabaloo for Vanity Fair in an article called “The Suspects Wore Louboutins”; in the full-length book that came after the article, she compared the teenagers’ thievery to the 18th century peasants who stormed Versailles.

Coppola must have noticed the connection. In The Bling Ring, the chandelier is back up, sparkling over a rack of cocktail dresses and Louis Vuitton jewelry cases as a small gaggle of girls (plus one boy) scavenge for treasure in Paris Hilton’s mansion. Our contemporary Marie Antoinettes appear in a montage of pixelated TMZ snapshots. The peasants take selfies and put them up on Facebook with captions like “Who’s stepping out with me tonight :)” and “Wanna smoke a bluuunt?”

First: The Bling Ring has more than a few funny moments. The comedy, intermittent though it may be, is the product of the actors, most of them unknowns, who spout marblemouthed adolescent blandishments as if programmed to do so. “That’s chilllll,” they say. “I love Chanellllll.” “So hottt.” “Ooh, this is Balmaainnn,” the raspy blonde coos, holding a gunmetal dress up to her abdomen. Watching these actors interact with each other produces the same effect as listening to teenagers talk on subways or park benches: contact embarrassment and intrigue.

They drive to the beach, yelling over Rick Ross’s guest spot on “9 Piece”. They smoke their joints dramatically, shuffle around to EDM in six-inch heels, insult each other’s outfits or tell each other they look sooo hotttttttttt. They are the children of Laguna Beach and The Hills, only less wistful and more nihilistic. You could wreak serious havoc with characters like these.

As an interpretation of a piece of journalism in a glossy magazine, the film is only sporadically faithful. Quotes are reproduced verbatim, and the narrative progresses much in the way Sales documented it — Marc (Israel Broussard) meets cute, troubled Rebecca (Katie Chang), Rebecca introduces Marc to celebrity kleptomania, more people get involved, everyone gets caught, Marc spills the whole story. But for readers of the Sales story, something is missing.

One major element of the original Bling Ring story absent from the movie is the reality television factor. Alexis Neiers, the young woman who appears as “Nicki” in the film and whom Emma Watson plays, was being filmed for an E! reality show called Pretty Wild at the time of the burglaries, though for reasons that had nothing to do with the burglaries. Her apprehension and trial were major plot points on the show. Real-life Neiers, as she appears on Pretty Wild, is actually kind of fascinating. She’s a mess, an addict, a model who saunters around her house with her “sister” Tess, both girls exuding a sexuality that is, in a single word, terrifying.

Everyone knows that reality television isn’t real. Neither are movies. Still, in the vacuum of unreality, movies have the ability to take the idea of a real person and further animate it, tell another side of the story, make that person even more real somehow. The Bling Ring misses this opportunity. Coppola’s version of Neiers is Watson looking cold and brittle in a pink Juicy sweatsuit, executing one excellent spin around a stripper pole that looks like it took three weeks to perfect. Her reality television background is nonexistent; the only camera that follows her around is the camera on her own iPhone.

So if you’re receiving the story firsthand from Coppola, you probably wouldn’t catch anything significant about the delusional nature of reality TV, nor would you know about the complications of Marc’s status as the rat of the investigation. You’d just see the stuff. So much stuff.

The first two-thirds of the movie are devoted to the stuff. The dresses, the gilded bracelets, the piled-on necklaces, the pillows with Paris Hilton’s face on them, the crystal bottles of vodka, the rolled-up wads of cash stuffed in leather trunks and metal cases, the Ziploc baggie of cocaine, the pistol on Megan Fox’s fiancé’s nightstand. It’s all so shiny and beautiful. It turns the audience into magpies. It made me want to go shopping.

We rarely see any of the kids do anything with the stuff. The few scenes when they do — when the crew’s ringleader smiles to herself in the mirror through a mist of perfume, when the initially hesitant Marc tries on a pair of Hilton’s hot pink heels and falls in love with them, when one of the tertiary characters picks up the gun and briefly becomes a maniac—are magic. The rest is just stuff.

Maybe the problem is the lack of suspense. We all saw what happened to the kids. The Antoinettes became victims and received their restitution. Between Sales, Pretty Wild and TMZ, there are no unknowns. Even when a story’s out there, a handful of explosive characters can make for a good story. Coppola defuses them. We know these kids are shallow, vapid, superficial. That’s why we want to watch them. It’s too bad the movie, which could have been dynamite, doesn’t rise above those same descriptors.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. She last wrote in these pages about the king. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Til I Lost" - Tom Odell (mp3)

"I Know" - Tom Odell (mp3)

In Which Bartenders Want To Know Why Her Cheeks Are So Red

Shrines

by MOLLY O'BRIEN

Highways are the same everywhere. It's what you see on the side of the road that changes from country to country. In France, it was wide fields of gold flowers. In the Czech Republic it was the tiniest farm houses imaginable. In Thailand, it's the shrines: covered in patterns so small they’re hard to make out, colorful and gazebo-like, the tips of the roofs turned up like elf shoes.

We drive by so many of these on our way to all the tourist spots. And I don't feel satisfied until we drive by an open shack peddling...yes...about two dozen of the shrines! They’re stacked against each other like lawn chairs. Everything has a source. Everything started out in a warehouse at some point.

Beside the shrines (I listen to Purity Ring’s debut album all through the trip, trying for language synergy), there are countless posters and banners and huge framed pictures of the king. King Rama IX. Long live the king! In his picture he looks so kind. Kind and wise — kingly traits. And he's everywhere. He's sitting on the walls of all the shopping malls, he's hanging on the doors of beauty salons and auto repair shops.

Only here's the thing — we're not allowed to talk about the king.

"At all? We can't even say nice things about him?"

"Just...don't talk about him." This is my sister, the Bangkok expert, who has been teaching English to little girls at a Catholic school for the past two years. (Buddhist girls at Catholic school: they give their English and American teachers Christmas presents without understanding why.) Kaitlin knows best. She knows whether the ice in the milk tea will be contaminated, she knows how to order food and direct taxis and bargain for counterfeit Beats headphones. And she knows that we shouldn't talk about the king.

But the king is the elephant in my hotel room. (A couple days later, we ride elephants in the forested part of an island. An elephant's skin is hairy and wrinkly, somehow tough and tender at the same time.) I can't stop thinking about him. The Thai people love him unconditionally, or so it seems. Do they love his wife as much as they love him? (They don't love his only son. In the media, the heir apparent is a thrice-married playboy who spends mad money on his European vacations.) What's his daily routine? Does he have sex? (Probably not — lately he's been laid up in the hospital, as he is 85 years old and sort of infirm.) Does he go on the internet?

When I google him, I click his wikipedia entry and receive a message: I'm blocked. You can't read items about the king from any outlet that might allow negative criticism. You can't critique the king yourself, either — lèse majesté laws in Thailand are so harsh that you could end up in jail for liking an anti-king page on Facebook or going on a blog rant against him. The king has been ruling since 1946, he’s mega-rich in a poor country, and he has supported several military regimes. Then again, he also helped transition Thailand to a democratic government, and he waged a War on Drugs that actually seemed to work for a while. Perhaps complicated feelings, combined with a law that forbids you to criticize your leader, have a lowest common denominator of simple adoration.

So the king appears with a constant rosy glow, a slick poster-glossy sheen of cleanliness (and thus, godliness). My family goes to the movie theater at Paragon, a megamall on Sukhumvit Road, and before Pitch Perfect begins, we watch a three-minute pro-king video with accompanying glorifying song. The song begins with one voice and ends with a lot (I can't tell how many, but at least as many as you can hear in "We Are The World"), and by its close, I have the shivers. Imagining this kind of montage (happy farmers, happy blue-collar workers, happy civil servants, benevolent leader smiling down from throne) played in American cinemas makes me laugh, especially when I picture George W. Bush or even Obama replacing Rama IX. There’s a big difference between “presidential” and “regal.”

We leave Bangkok and go to a resort on Koh Chang. I forget about the king — resorts remove you from people and their concerns. I drink rum punch, learn Thai words, watch the comedic duo of bartenders ask my little sister why her cheeks are so red.

New Year's Eve arrives and we go to the hotel party, a garbled event with a contortionist and a ladyboy cabaret show and a magician who keeps tormenting guests and cackling. One of the MCs is German; when each act ends, he tells us that “applause is allowed!!!” At one point, they raffle off a bunch of giant teddy bears. “Come to the stage...if you are five year old,” says the German. A Swedish kid sprints to the front, snags his prize. “Yes...you have won zis teddy bee-ah...because you are five year old,” says the German.

Dozens of resorts occupy the same strip of beach, and the way they compete with each other for the best midnight fireworks show is the way the American Revolution must have looked.

We go back to the room, I put the television on, and the king is on just about every Thai news network. His health isn’t great, and that appears to be the news for the new year. I asked Kaitlin how the country might react if he died. (If, as if he might not die at all for some reason.) “Ohhh, I don’t even know.” It would be bad. Or rather, it will be bad. I’ll still be long gone before it happens. My sister might still be there. I will want news of the loss — I’ll want to know what people in the streets are saying, what the funeral will be like. I’ll want to know what they will do with all of those hanging pictures.

Molly O'Brien is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about fainting.

Photographs by the author.

"Follow" - Blue Hawaii (mp3)

"The Other Day" - Blue Hawaii (mp3)