I’ve been slowly gathering material for an academic article about the film references used by both bloggers and “real” journalists to talk about MTV’s The Hills. Stories and blog posts that discuss the show using the language of academic film/media criticism, some likening certain aspects of the show to the films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Eric Rohmer, have begun to stack up. Now, Jim Carrey and Peter Weir have been thrown into the mix, with a post on PopWatch titled, ‘The Hills’ is Like ‘The Truman Show’, Only Awful.

This cinematic reference is, in terms of the literal conditions of The Hills‘ production, probably more accurate than most, but when held up to any sort of scrutiny in terms of the content of the show, it’s proven to be off the mark.

Of course, The Hills *is* like The Truman Show, in that events in its stars’ lives as “real” as marriage are mediated by producers, for the sake of creating better television. But unlike The Truman Show, The Hills‘ Heidi and Spencer are well aware of that mediation, and they manage their own behavior in response to it. They have no allusions that their lives or their relationship is private–on the contrary, there’s ample evidence that they go looking for cameras to mediate their reality even when the show is on hiatus. The Truman Show depicted a fake world created by television producers to capture the real reactions of one unknowingly manipulated man. The Hills takes place in a real world populated chiefly by television producers and blank slate beauties who seemingly live to have their lives taped; the producers aren’t building a world from the ground up, but are tweaking a reality in order to capture the knowingly manipulative behaviors of a handful of really fake people.

Call me a sucker, but like so many bloggers before me, I think the versimilitude of the fakery that goes into The Hills is astounding. As the old grunge chestnut goes, these kids fake it so real that they’re beyond fake. The situations–such as Heidi, Whitney and Lauren’s obviously contrived professional lives, and Lauren’s much-publicized fake date with a male model–may have been created to give these three blondes something to do, but within those strictures, the camera is almost always concerned with capturing not the way the girls act, but their wordless, seemingly spontaneous reactions. What’s actually happening on a plot level is never as important as what Lauren, in extreme close-up, seems to be saying with her heavily-eyelinered eyes.

The Hills‘ refusal to offer any kind of confirmation or exposition beyond those close-ups is, I think, extremely satisfying for those of us who go spelunking for meaning in visual media for a living. Justin Wolff recently prefaced a 2000+ word, virtually shot-by-shot analysis of a single Hills episode with the one-sentence review, “It was like eating a cake made entirely of frosting.” I couldn’t say it better myself.