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 by-all-accounts 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.

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