Another season of MTV’s faux-reality melodrama and grade-A guilty pleasure The Hills debuted last night, and it was greeted by yet another New York Times review comparing its “plotlessness and dreamy cinematography” to the cinematic style of Michaelangelo Antonioni. As you know, I’m a big fan of cinema-conscious analyses of the Hills. But when the NYT’s Ginia Bellafonte calls The Hills (a highly manipulated soap opera about “real” people, produced for the consumption of young, female mass audience) “Antonioni-esque,” what does she actually mean? I carefully watched the season premiere this morning on MTV.com and came up with five areas where this tale of California blondes of the aughts converge with Antonioni’s mid-to-late century masterpieces of modern isolation.
1: Pressures of modern life and relationships lead to physical illness. When Lauren and Whitney arrive in Paris, their itinerary says they’re supposed to go to Colette to pick up shoes “for the girls,” and then pick up their own ballgowns at Alberti Ferretti. At Lauren’s urging, she and Whitney get the gowns first, and by the time they arrive at Colette, the store is closed. Without blaming her friend and co-worker with actual words (see Item 2), Whitney has a physical breakdown in the back seat of the car. “Ugh, I’m so nausous,” she says. “Deep breaths, deep breaths, deep breaths…” She then throws her head back and has some kind of minor seizure, involving much tongue flippage. Lauren looks on with eyes progressiely narrowed, as if to say, “What the **** is your problem?”
Antonioni film that this is JUST LIKE: Red Desert (above), in which the industrial city of Revenna is painted (literally––Antonioni took an extraordinary degree of control over the set design of his first color film) as a toxic wasteland, pushing Monica Vitti from run-of-the-mill ennui to a psychosomatic sickness that no one else understands.
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