Save the Robot – Chris Dahlen

It seems safe to say that MTV’s new reality dating show, A Shot At Love with Tila Tequila, is the kind of show that nobody takes seriously: if 99% of whoever’s watching it don’t excuse it as a “guilty pleasure,” then I really will leave the country. The talentless and not so attractive Tila Tequila stars as a woman looking for love from a whopping 32 suitors – and here’s the gimmick: half are men, and half are supposedly lesbians, although the collection of L.A. area strippers and go-go dancers that passed the casting call look like they’d never go down on a girl without at least two cameras in the room. Maybe a couple are gay or bi, but the rest look like they desperately, hungrily want their moment on the small screen, even if it means Frenching a woman that the NYT graciously compared to a well-toned squirrel.

(That’s not even to get into the men. I mean, who cares about them?)

Now, without getting into why I was curious about the lesbians on this show, I’ll admit I checked out the cast photos. I mean, what kind of women would sign up for a debacle like this? And amidst all the skeevy portraits, one of them stood out. Ellie, a “spunky rock ‘n roll-type” from Reno, Nevada, had a shy, normal-looking expression. Amidst a lot of low-budget fashion victims, she looked kind of normal and sweet, like the girl next door at your coffee shop. She also looked doomed – unable to keep up with the pitbull-like atmosphere that this show could encourage. The MTV cast page breathlessly asked, “Will she be able to charm the pants off Tila Tequila with her rocker ways?” My guess was no.

Nothing could make me sit through this show or let it taint my TiVO. But MTV posts every episode scene-by-scene in their site, so – strictly for curiosity – I skipped to the one where Tila interviews the girls. Much of it is painful to watch: Tila, who seems painfully straight, walks around in a crazy gold chainy dress and asks a bunch of other straight girls to lap her up. Let’s get this out of the way – I’m a straight dude, so I have no right to judge anyone else’s sexuality or argue queer politics or any of that. But I know enough to realize when the sexual chemistry in a room has shot below freezing. As Tequila goes from couch to couch, chatting up different women and trying to spark quotable moments, it’s like watching people go through a really bad bet – and nobody calls bullshit to break the tension.

Ellie got her shot – but blink, and you’ll miss her. Early on, she’s in a room with three of the other contestants, trying to whoop it up and act excited. Later, she’s talking with another girl on a couch when Tila sits down for one-on-one time. In both scenes, Ellie clearly doesn’t know what to say or how to break in. She tries to make a couple provocative comments (”I’m very dominant”), but all of a sudden, we see Tila jump on the other girl on the couch. While they go at it, Ellie – who would later be referred to as “what’s-her-face” – sits looking kind of baffled and embarrased on her end of the couch, and basically waits ’til it’s done. She looks like she needs another drink, or a magazine.

And that’s when she “clicked” with me. ‘Cause I could completely, 100% relate to the expression on her face.

So I had to learn more. One of the principles of the new, Internet-enabled TV is that if you want to learn more about some corner of the broadcast, the producers have many narrowcasts available for you, the dedicated fan. If half an hour of Dwight Schrute on The Office isn’t enough, now he keeps a blog. So what could I learn about Ellie? The MTV page for the show only had the little blurb of info that I quoted above, and it didn’t even give her last name. They have the bandwidth to put everybody’s interviews and other footage on here, but apparently it’s not worth the time. As far as MTV’s concerned, she’s just some cannon fodder from Reno who missed her shot at the big time.

But MTV also has another site, a social networking vehicle called I Am On MTV. It’s in beta and the population’s sparse, but you can see both fans and actual personalities hanging around here. Ellie’s page is here. Her full name is Ellie Heagney, she’s 26, lives in Culver City, CA, and describes herself this way:

Hmm who am I? Many people who I’ve encountered in my life say that I am very hard to read. How hard can someone be if what you see is what you get. I am straight forward, No bullshits, No games. If that is to hard for anyone then you would have to get to know me for you to find out.

Heagney has fans on the site. People post her and she posts back, usually some kind of “thanks for your support” or “have fun” message. (She’s learning the first lesson of Tila Tequila’s MySpace fame – make friends, and write them regularly – but I don’t know how far that gets you on IAmOnMTV.com.) She has a few more photos of herself, but they’re grainy and chopped off, which adds to the mystery: here’s a site where she’s interacting with her fans, yet it’s still hard to learn much about her. She doesn’t have a blog, doesn’t go on about what a snot Tila Tequila was, doesn’t talk much about her life. She’s not doing big fan things – signing autographs or whatever – probably ’cause she doesn’t have a big fan base. But she’s not doing little, “this is who I am” things either. All told, I’m learning a lot more about Dwight Schrute.

I keep Googling. Is Heagney a model? (Scroll down on the page – no seriously, keep scrolling you perv, we’re making a point here.) Is she in this photo of an all-girls swimming pool party, being held by a girl who looks a hell of a lot nicer than Tila Tequila? Is this where she went to high school? And whoa – is this her, SPC Ellie Heagney on a skiing trip in Korea? It looks like her, shy Maggie Gyllenhaal smile and all. Was she in the military?

Obviously I don’t feel like I’m invading her privacy here – she was on MTV, and MTV published her name. But this would be a lot easier and less creepy if she were a fictional character, instead of a real one. I’ve been writing lately about how there’s not much difference – once you get into the media and especially, the Internet, real and made-up people rub elbows quite nicely. The truth of your story matters less than its consistency, and how often you blog about it. So Ellie is a character on a television show, even though it’s a reality TV show, and she’s a real person named Ellie Heagney. MTV has given curious viewers a way to learn more about Ellie Heagney – but not much more. In fiction, it’s easier to take a marginal character and run with her, because you have full license to wonder and speculate and fill in any gaps that the writers didn’t bother with.

But when it’s a real person, two things get in the way: 1. They’re real, and probably creeped out. And 2. there’s a nagging feeling that, even if I became obsessed with Ellie Heagney, even if I wanted to write fan fic about her and wiki her and do all the other kinds of things that say, obsessive Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans do with their favorite marginal characters, well, at the end of the day – shouldn’t she be telling us all that stuff? Characters are characters because we get to project stuff onto them. We learn about ourselves by watching what they do and letting them press our buttons. But in this case, we don’t have much right.

I mean, if she doesn’t want to tell us her life’s story, that’s her business. She’s the author of her character. And while other television shows and other kinds of transmedia narratives encourage us to go down rabbit holes, real life and I guess, reality TV, don’t always work that way. And yeah, if I wanted to press the issue or do some kind of story about her, I could do the journo thing and try to get an interview – but that’s not really the point here.

Besides, it’s been a day without any new info. I’ve pretty much moved on.

There’s one more snippet of Ellie on that Tila Tequila show: when Tila nixes her, saying, “Your shot at love has ended.” She gets up, quietly hands in her key and go home. During her extraordinarily brief exit interview, we just hear her say: “I wish she’d could’ve gotten to know me a little bit better.”