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 fuck 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.

2: It’s not what she says, but how she looks. Lauren is a classic protagonist-as-beautiful enigma. Largely unable or unwilling to articulate her feelings, we learn everything we need to know about her feelings from long (comparatively speaking––this is still TV), deep-focus shots of her facial reactions to situations. Often, conversations with Lauren will be almost completely one-sided, with a widening or a narrowing of her eyes substituting for speech; at one point in the premiere Whitney asks Lauren about her ex-love interest Brody, and Lauren answers by taking a long sip of tea, her face obscured by her red fingernailed hand holding the tea cup. Similarly, Whitney’s seemingly constant disapproval of Lauren is never contained in the actual words she uses, but in the way she says them, and even more so, the way she’ll cock her head and stare at Lauren after the words leave her lips, waiting to watch them land and sting, satisfied in the knowledge that Lauren will never, ever, defend herself or verbally fight back.

Antonioni film that this is JUST LIKE: Most of them––Antonioni’s female protagonists were most expressive in silent close-up––but Blow-Up is chiefly about expressing internal frustrations by looking at the external.

3. Practical problems become inconsequential in the face of person trauma (or: nothing ever happens)

That shoe dilemma mentioned above? After Whitney recovered from her convulsion, it wasn’t mentioned again. Later in the episode, Lauren accidentally burned a borrowed couture dress with a curling iron. Was she fired from her job at Teen Vogue, or at least given a reprimand? No, she just borrowed a new one, which she then wore on a midnight Vespa ride with a chain smoking French boy. On The Hills, actions and missteps almost never have actual consequences, and if they do, we don’t see Lauren, Whitney, Audrina and Heidi dealing with them, because an interpersonal issue always comes up to distract their full attention and that of the show. The Hills is about young people who are self-absorbed they’ve become completely isolated from the basic cause and effect relationship of reality, and as such, you can watch episode after episode and not actually see anything actually happen.

Antonioni film that this is JUST LIKE: Zabriskie Point, in which a hippie boy abandons his politics, steals an airplane, flies into the desert, and has psychedelic sex with a stranger. Then everything explodes, to the sounds of Pink Floyd. That literal obliteration of narrative structure is, ironically, for what Zabriskie Point is best remembered.
4. Modern architecture as shorthand for moral emptyness/alienation. The Season 3 premiere was unlike most episodes of The Hills, in that it took place entirely outside of Los Angeles, but imagery of that city is so integral to what The Hills does that helicopter shots of the West Side as glittering grid make up the bulk of the opening credits and set the background for most promotional materials. An average episode makes ample use of establishing shots of LA buildings, which sometimes rival Audrina for screen time. Often we’ll see long montages of exteriors around where characters are meeting, and almost every episode ends with an image of LA represented by a shot of silverly skyscrapers blurring into the hazy blue sky. In representing congested Los Angeles as the “unnatural” environment that supports and breeds “shady” characters like Spencer and Heidi (as opposed to idyllic oceanside community Laguna Beach, glimpsed in the very beginning of the credit sequence to remind us from where Lauren was spawned), The Hills is maybe more dedicated to drawing an urban landscape as petri dish for ennui than anything since…

Antonioni film that this is JUST LIKE: …L’Eclisse, which comes to its own non-resolution (see Item 3) with a famed city montage.

5. Pouting. Lots of pouting. Or: the bourgeois luxury of unhappiness. If Lauren and Heidi actually do anything at their jobs, or if they have ambitions beyond maintaining their bank balances and entry to clubs like Les Deux, it’s not the place of The Hills to document it. We’re to understand that Lauren’s access to, say, complimentary couture is a privilege, but because it’s all so effortless the poor girl is burdened with the luxury of time and empty headspace, which has NO CHOICE but to devote to worrying about the fine nuances of her relationship with dubious swimming scion Brody Jenner.

Antonioni film that this is JUST LIKE: L’Avventura, in which a woman disappears on a vacation and her friend and boyfriend set out to look for her, but ultimately become too wrapped up in their own unhappy affair to be bothered. Antonioni once said that his “only hope is to see the Italian bourgeoisie defeated,” but in his films he often managed to glorify their decadence whilst at the same time demonstrating how those who want for little materially have ample time to rot spiritually and emotionally. OMG––what if the The Hills is radical!