Grease Up, Bro: the “Jersey Shore” Premiere

F. Scott Fitzgerald is a big, fat liar.  There are second acts in American lives, and in no medium has such a famous fib ever been more egregious than in the premiere of MTV’s Jersey Shore.  The first act is your menial life prior to 10:00pm on December 3, 2009; the second act is your incredible, profound, rewarding life after it.

For years now, our culture has become increasingly familiar with made-for-reality-television drama and the manner in which producers have chosen to deliver it.  Typical reality shows dedicate the first fifteen to thirty seconds upon return from a commercial break to a recap of the events that transpired prior to the commercial break; the same shows also dedicate the fifteen to thirty seconds prior to commercial break to a teaser of what will transpire after the commercial break ends.  And thus, any viewer paying attention (even when using the most liberal definition of the word “attention”) will see the episode’s climatic moment — the temper tantrum, the punch, the girl who just lost Flavor Flav’s heart spitting on one of the contestants still vying for his love — multiple times before and after it actually occurs in situ.

Upon first viewing of Jersey Shore, such an exercise seems impossible.  First, which of the tremendous, did that really just happen? moments constitutes the episode’s climax?  Pauly D lands a haymaker on the nose of a club-goer, five or six women remove clothing in the hot tub, JWOWW nearly exposes her breasts, proclaims her affinity for pierced penises, and in a drunken stupor, holding Pauly D’s white tank top, leaves the club to eat prepackaged ham.  And even if the episode did have a definable climax, a fifteen to thirty second recap or teaser could never accurately depict the fantastic sequences that frame Snooki’s “friend”¹ vomiting on the roof deck.  The reality of the situation:² every single second of Jersey Shore is miraculously superior to the second that preceded it.

Instead of ascending, minute by minute, to the climatic punch or spit or argument and combusting into thin air, the premiere of the Jersey Shore saga saturated two full hours with kerosene, lit it, and let the motherfucker burn.³  This isn’t suggested viewing television, and even the Must See TV! moniker can’t possibly do it justice; with enough holy shit moments to fill an entire season of other people-in-a-house reality shows, Jersey Shore is the Death Star’s tractor beam pulling in the Millennium Falcon, it is the glittering eye of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner: you cannot choose but hear.  You cannot choose but hear.

Beyond its unmistakable entertainment value, Jersey Shore is profound in a way that no other reality show has ever had the capacity to be.  Thus far, the two most complex, identifiable characters are Snooki and the Situation.  Snooki gets biletnikoffed⁴, acts foolish, assumes the other guidettes are mocking her when she hears them use the word “whore.”  Of course, this drenches Snooki in a liter of self-doubt and sadness, and she decides to leave the shore.  The Situation “feels”⁵ Sammy and Sammy “feels” the Situation, they hold hands at a night club, and then, after seeing the Situation in the hot tub with other naked women, Sammy starts to “feel” Ronnie — it’s your archetypal boy-meets-girl, excuse me, guido-meets-guidette, guido-and-guidette-fall-in-love, guido-and-guidette-break-up first and second act plot points.  This, of course, makes the Situation sad — his eyes betray any semblance of confidence he attempts to convey — but both he and Snooki are entombed in moments where they cannot fully express their sadness, are both entombed in lifestyles where despair is not, under any circumstances, an acceptable alternative to fist-pumping like a motherfucker.

Snooki, despite her inability to operate the telephonic duck — and what a fantastic metaphor that was, by the way — at least mustered the courage to find, however briefly, the black abyss of suppressed emotion beneath the tan, makeup, and hairspray and say, aloud to us and her housemates, that she was reconsidering her summer on the shore.  Expressing an emotion before going right back to suppressing it, a small, poignant plateau that the Situation has not yet been able to surmount.

We’re left at the end of the first two hours with enough wonderfully abysmal⁶ moments to fill a vat of Ronnie’s protein powder, enough meat-and-potatoes to fully grasp each character as his/her own unique concept — though we know the least about the psyches of Vinny (who really struggled with the revelation that he had pink eye) and Jolie (cockblocking bitch) — which is much more than anyone can ask for in an MTV reality series premiere. Still, there are other psychological, existential, metaphysical conundrums to examine as the season progresses — the sagacious pillow discourse between Pauly D and JWOWW, Vinny’s non-guido guido persona, whether or not Ronnie even bothered to pack more than one t-shirt, and which housemate the duck phone will flummox next.  These are important, timely issues, ones that certainly made me, after witnessing the lifestyle of these guidos and guidettes for only two hours, yearn for a world where greatness is measured by fist-pump tenacity.

Tagged as: Caged Bird Sadness, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Guidos, Jersey Shore, JWOWW, MTV, Pauly D, Reality TV, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Ronnie, Snooki, The Situation, Vinny