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DOWN THE TUBE
Amish Country
by Lee Siegel

Only at TNR Online
Post date: 08.02.04
UPN's new reality series, "Amish in the City," has been called a cross between Witness, the Harrison Ford movie of a few years back, and MTV's "Real World," one of the original reality shows, which is about daily life among a group of teens and twentysomethings. But Witness told the story of a big-city police detective who takes refuge in an Amish community from some murderous corrupt colleagues. The cop, with his foul language, and his violence, and his gun, is the outsider in a society bound together by piety and humility. In the end it is his natural decency, as well as his willingness to sacrifice himself for the community's safety, that binds Ford's character to those who have taken him in. "Amish in the City" is quite a different story.

CBS, which owns UPN, had originally wanted to produce a reality show that involved taking people from rural Appalachia, setting them down in Beverly Hills, and letting the fun begin. A roar of protest put a stop to that. Some groups and one Republican Congressman also protested the network's plans to transport some Amish kids to L.A. and match them up in a house with cool, non-Amish city-dwellers, but, as CBS/Viacom's chairman Leslie Moonves boasted, "The Amish don't have a lobby group." (But neither do the Hasidim! Leslie, listen to this: Moishe, Shmuel, a seafood shack in Maine! We can call it "Oyster"!) Still, Moonves was so anxious that he had UPN sneakily pretend that it had dropped the show almost up until its debut last Wednesday. He needn't have worried. Republican and religious opposition to the show, and especially the official uproar over Janet Jackson and her (CBS-broadcast) breast, almost ensured a positive response from critics.

One critic for a major newspaper patiently explained to readers that the show's three Amish young men and two young women were on a rumspringa ("running wild"). This, she instructed, is an Amish rite that allows people, once they reach the age of sixteen, to go live in the world outside their community and decide if they want to return to the fold, be baptized as Amish, and dwell among their co-religionists for the rest of their lives. (The experience, which sometimes leads to various kinds of excess, such as drugs, and even crime, was explored in a New Yorker article some years back, and also in a 2002 documentary called The Devil's Playground.) The series, this critic assured everybody is "high-minded" and "refreshingly kind-hearted." How nice and contrarian. But what she didn't mention was that the show, like every reality show, is carefully staged, edited, and scored, and its participants closely guided, coached, and protected. She wrote about this encounter between hip Angelenos and sheltered Amish as if it actually were a rumspringa, the raw experience of an alien life undergone without family or friends to depend on, during which the adventurous Amish have to find their own income and shelter. She actually wrote about the Amish in "Amish in the City" as if they were living spontaneously, away from camera crews, chauffeured limousines, and a luxurious house--as if the show didn't consist of spliced-in interviews with the producers, neat narrative lines and predictable conflicts. She actually wrote about this slickly produced reality-show as if it were ... reality.

At the beginning of Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, a private club consisting of prominent and powerful white men somewhere in a Southern town assemble a group of black boys in a room, throw coins down on an electrified rug, and force the boys to fight each other for the money. At the end of this depraved contest, Ellison's hero gets the wickedly ironic gift of a scholarship to a state school for blacks; he goes home to bed and has a nightmare in which he unrolls a diploma and reads the words: "To Whom it May Concern. Keep This Nigger Boy Running." Under the guise of "kind-hearted" respect toward its marginal subjects, "Amish in the City" is a kind of gladiatorial combat, dispelling its false harmonies--people are just people--with a steady rhythm of conflict between its two groups. Though the city kids sometimes say rude things, and though the Amish sometimes have the last word, it's the Amish who have come to the city-people in L.A. to be transformed, not the other way around. And being the butt of rudeness cuts both ways. You can laugh at the Amish and pity them all at the same time.

The show makes sure to subtly affirm the city-kids' contempt, now and then. Ariel, a slinky blonde, says, "I think I was more willing to accept these people when they got out of the Amish clothes." By the end of the first special two-hour episode, the Amish are indeed dutifully dressing like the cool Angelenos. They're also talking like them, and eating like them. Maybe they haven't been made the subject of a perverse battle royal à la Ellison, but they've been thoroughly deconstructed. In a gesture toward even-handedness, the producers instruct the non-Amish to put on traditional Amish garments and drive around L.A. But the guys wear the hats askew with dark glasses, and their shirts out of their pants; the girl pull the heavy skirts up over their thighs when they sit down. I'll bet even money that Barney's does an Amish window in the fall.

Such careful handling of the Amish as we do get treats them like invalids. Mose, seemingly the most religious and mature of the Amish, an inventor and a teacher, goes to the ocean for the first time and plunges in. Within seconds, the reality-music gets dark and foreboding. Mose, we are told by voiceovers as he is in the water, almost drowns! He comes out of the water and throws himself down on the blanket, wiping tears from his eyes. In fact, he was only a few feet from the shore, and he wasn't fighting the waves or sinking beneath the surface at all, except for one pathetic moment when he deliberately puts his head in the water and the music takes its darkest, loudest turn. It would be hard to drown anyway, when a cameraman--or maybe two--is happily recording your desperate attempts to stay alive.

The miracle of Tivo's rewind and slow-motion-replay, frame by frame, even reveals, I am sad to report, a smile flickering across the dying man's mouth. Well, he is religious. It also reveals that he wasn't crying when he seemed to be, and that the Amish woman who said her first sight of the ocean made her weep--she should have expected it; the episode had been carefully constructing that "surprise" for the previous fifteen minutes--didn't have a tear on her face. Mose himself is a very resourceful fellow, despite his problems with wading. Later, he tells us in a voiceover that he fell into a state of spiritual despair over his moment of near-death--we see him reading the Bible (spiritual) and putting his head in his hands a lot (despair). Minutes later, he's running around, speaking in silly voices and making everyone laugh. And there is a funny thing about Mose. As he tells us at the beginning of the series, he's already been baptized. He was "forced" to be baptized when he was seventeen, he says, which means that he's not on a rumspringa, like the other Amish on the show; he tells us that he's already taken his own rumspringa. Maybe we shouldn't worry about this Amish guy. He's as sneaky as UPN.

As if "Amish in the City" had cleared its conscience by contriving the appearance of "kind-heartedness" toward the Amish--by doing what? by not going after them with cattle prods?--it acts without restraint toward its other participants. This is the most homophobic show I've ever seen on television. By means of very quick cutaways and manipulative interviewing, it presents Reese, a gay club promoter who came to L.A. from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, as hysterical, effeminate, mincing, mean-spirited. He is very open about his attraction to a straight guy named Kevan--so open, in fact, that it's hard to believe he's decided to approach Kevan so blatantly without a little behind-the-scenes encouragement. At one point, he playfully slaps Kevan's face with a sock, and Kevan springs at Reese, calling him a "fag" and knocking him out of his chair. The group roundly agrees that Reese had it coming to him.

Read the rest at the link above.

-Rudey