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Why would anyone act when they can just play themselves? – Spencer Pratt on Brody Jenner (both of The Hills) in Details
Spencer, Brody’s manager and best friend, insists that Brody can act better than most Hollywood stars, but it’s easier, more lucrative, and more fun for Brody to play Brody. Brody and Spencer are on a reality show. You and I are not. But many of us are turning ourselves into reality characters anyway – playing ourselves while drawing inspiration from others. That’s what I learned on spring break.
Our generation, definitely more than any that have come before it, borrows its personality from film, television, the Internet, and each other. We are not very original. But we are, in a weird way, all unique. We are like Scion Tc’s so loaded with accessories that it’s statistically impossible for us to be exactly the same as a similar model, even if, on the surface we are both silver and have rear lip spoilers or upper back tattoos.
As my friend Matt pointed out, the beach in front of The Ocean Sky Resort in Ft. Lauderdale was like a convention center full of the worst tattoos that sixty dollars can buy. For guys, these tattoos were in one of three places: the upper back, the shoulder blade, or the bicep. Much of the art was Native American or Asian-influenced with an occasional late-90’s barbwire throwback. For girls, the tattoos were in one place: the lower back. There were more flowers than barbwires above the tailbone, but rarely did I see a tattoo that didn’t have a twin on someone else’s back.
At least in the NBA and in hip-hop, the body art makes sense to the owner. Basketball players and rappers write their moms’ names on their necks, or draw their son on their shoulder, or demarcate a bullet’s entrance point on their third rib. To those guys, the tattoos mean something. But if you asked most of the inked-up spring breakers why they got their tattoos, most of them would tell you, if they were being honest, that they thought the tats looked cool. Once upon a time, the Chinese character for “peace” meant something to the person sitting in the tattoo parlor chair. But years later, it’s just a fad, serving only an aesthetic purpose.
The tattoos are still a form of self-expression, but they’re expressing a sentiment that was important to someone else – probably over a decade ago.
That was when I was in middle school, when kids were all about collages. Back then, the most popular form of wall decoration (especially for girls) was the pop culture magazine collage. You’ve seen these. The idea is to take as many pictures of Jonathon Taylor Thomas and Mark-Paul Gosselaar as you can find in YM and Seventeen, cut them out, and paste them onto a piece of orange construction paper along with words like, “Cute!” “JTT!” and “Totally Hot!”
I don’t know many people my age who still make these glossy amalgams, but I don’t think we have to anymore. We’ve become our own walking, talking, movie-quoting collages.
We all quote movies, but every group of friends has at least one kid who speaks almost exclusively in famous lines. Sometimes, if they’re good at impersonations, this is funny enough to pass as a sense of humor, and we will occasionally say, “Hey, do the Chris Farley van-by-the-river thing again!” And they will do it, and we will laugh for the one-thousandth time at the same jokes.
Occasionally our movie-quoting friend will say something that should be funny, but we won’t laugh because we will too busy racking our brains, trying to remember the movie it came from. Finally giving up, we will say, “What’s that from?” And the friend will say, “It’s not from anything. I just made it up.” But it will be too late to laugh. It’s a classic case of the boy who cried, “Hey, Dad, I don’t see too good. Is that Bill Shakespeare over there?”
One of the more common movie quotes – still – heard on spring break is, “I’ll do one.” This is what Will Ferrell said in Old School before funneling a beer, and this is what most shirtless, tan males say before they dump a Natty Light through a plastic tube into their stomachs in less than two seconds. These funnels are everywhere, even in family beachware outlets. The funnels have officially jumped the shark. When I was a freshman in college, we used to have to make them ourselves after buying plastic tubing, a mechanic’s funnel, and some duct tape. Funnels used to be a funny way to chug a beer. Now they’re big straws.
In Ft. Lauderdale, it’s like all the spring breakers are going through the motions, trying to recreate everything they’ve seen on MTV’s “Spring Break” and “Girls Gone Wild.” They are all impersonating their peers, spiking their hair like their peers, and getting tattoos like their peers. There are very few fresh takes on spring break (except for the guys that ran an extension chord onto the beach to a blender so they could make frozen daiquiris. Maybe they stole the idea from someone else, but it was still awesome.)
I’m not trying to rip on spring breakers. I, after all, own a tattoo, funneled a few beers in Ft. Lauderdale, and say, “I’ll do one”, at least once a weekend. I, like many other young people, steal from thousands of different sources, staple all the new material to myself, and call that me.
This me that I’ve created is on display in my facebook profile. It’s not necessarily the real me – there is no room in the About Me section for “Character Flaws and Life Regrets.” But it’s the me that I want other people to see, minus the pictures from last Halloween when I was wearing short shorts and pretending to dribble a basketball all night, and apparently when you dribble an imaginary basketball in a picture, you just-look limp-wristed.
Many of us have online profiles now, and when we meet someone new, this is the version of us that they learn about if they do their research. But they are not getting to know the true us. They are getting to know the character we’ve created, the edited highlight reel, not the uncut everyday real. Because our profiles in many cases serve as a first impression (or at least an early impression), any relationship that blossoms (at least in part) online, will involve two people that are playing themselves, just like on a reality show.
So in many ways, we’re all like Spencer and Brody (or Lauren or Heidi). We are playing ourselves. But the self we’ve created is a pop culture magazine collage of many selves that have come before us.
On spring break there were a lot of kids with tattoos that were quoting movies and funneling beers. But none of them were like me. I had a tattoo on the inside of my bicep (not my back), and when I funneled, I did it on one knee (not standing up), and when I quoted a movie, it was Batman Begins in a Scottish accent (“Why do wah fall? So wah can learn to pick ourselves OOP!”).*
I bet nobody’s ever done that before.
*Some of my friends and I have a theory: Colin Farrell could ruin any movie, even an otherwise infallible one like Batman Begins, because he still hasn’t mastered an American accent. So we started dropping Batman lines on each other, but in a Colin Farrell Irish accent, and then later we turned that into a Scottish brogue, but I can’t remember why. This is probably one of the least worthwhile footnotes in the history of footnotes.
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