The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ryan Lochte

The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ryan Lochte

1363878690_ryan-lochte-reality-show-zoomDavid Foster Wallace once suggested that the reason many of our finest athletes are so inarticulate on the subject of their athleticism is not because they’re dumb, but because it comes naturally. Like breathing for normal people, athletes’ particular physical genius is so second-nature to them that talking about it defeats the point. Buzz Bissinger, author of Friday Night Lights, once suggested during a heated debate that athletes aren’t stupid at all, but rather that athleticism is simply its own separate brand of intelligence. Both men had a touching dedication to the belief that athletes are decent, bright young people. But David Foster Wallace killed himself in 2008, five years before the premier of What Would Ryan Lochte Do?. Buzz Bissinger wasn’t as lucky.

Ryan Lochte is, of course, the superstar swimming champ from last summer’s London Olympics. Winner of five medals: two gold, two silver, one bronze. Record-breaker. Golden boy. Handsome. American hero. He also has an inability to speak coherently that makes Sarah Palin look like Oscar Wilde—an incoherence most people knew about within minutes of his record-breaking wins. Seth MacFarlane hilariously parodied him on Saturday Night Live, and nearly every interview he’s ever given made him sound like most of us do at about 3AM after a heavy night of drinking (“the reason I love swimming is because…racing”). Enter, unsurprisingly, the E! Channel, which has proven to have an apparently insatiable appetite for reality shows about brain dead people.

E!’s not alone. You could probably go back to The Osbournes and Newlyweds for the first examples of “documentaries” of famous people who aren’t very bright. Since then, everything from Real Housewives of Everywhere to E!’s own Keeping Up with the Kardashians has been thrown at America, and America has eaten it up en masse. I think there are maybe two reasons for the collective hunger for these kinds of shows. One is the most base: we like to feel better about ourselves. The hard way to feel better about yourself is self-improvement; the much, much simpler way is to look at someone who is much dumber than you and stay just the way you are. The second, more interesting reason we watch these shows is that we like to know that rich and/or famous and/or pretty people are actually shitty on the inside, so that we don’t feel as bad about being poor and/or obscure and/or ugly—it takes the upper-class’s power away and gives us the upper hand. This is, I think, a Good Thing. It stops money and looks from being things that we want, and stops people who have money and looks from being people that we envy: all the cash in the world isn’t going to give Lindsay Lohan’s mom a brain, and no matter how much time The Situation spends at the gym, he’s still a ridiculous human being.

What’s disappointing about What Would Ryan Lochte Do? is that it serves neither of these purposes. The reason the show fails to satisfy either of these criteria has everything to do with who Ryan Lochte is, and more specifically who he is in comparison with all of the aforementioned reality show celebrities. That latter category exclusively includes has-beens and never-were’s; would-be famous people like Ashlee Simpson (The Ashlee Simpson Show) or people who did something very minor forever ago (It’s Complicated). They are people who at most wrote a pop song and at least had sex on tape. They are Playboy bunnies, and they are ex-soap opera actors. Therefore, it’s okay to laugh at them, make them into jokes, turn our noses up at their stupidity, because, as mentioned above, it takes away the power they gained from their superficial pursuits in the first place. It’s infuriating that Paris Hilton can do whatever the fuck she wants to whoever the fuck she wants merely by dint of having been born rich, and watching her try to, say, live in a trailer and form a sentence that doesn’t include the words “that’s” or “hot” is a fantastic little piece of postmodern revenge we get as a mass audience: she got where she is by doing nothing, but at least now that she’s there, she’s still awful. But Ryan Lochte is not a soap opera actor or former pop star. Ryan Lochte is an Olympic athlete, and a very good one, and the Olympics are supposed to be the one thing we can all rally around, its participants people we can all admire. What public good does the show do by putting this guy’s stupidity on display? There’s no need or collective desire to take him down to our level, because Olympians are people we admire for being way above our level. Exposing him is like McCarthyism, exposure for the sake of exposure, and if there is a desire behind wanting to see him turned into a joke, I fear that it’s a nasty, cynical one, one borne of a desire to see even something as pure as Olympic athleticism mocked because it feels so unattainable.

Honestly, though, I don’t want this to sound like a civics lesson, and the show could have still been redeemed if it satisfied the first thing I talked about, which is allowing us to feel better about ourselves by watching someone we know we’re better than. But WWRLD? doesn’t even satisfy a need as base as this, because Ryan Lochte is not only stupid but he’s also like one of the world’s biggest dickheads, a fact we maybe suspected after his mom announced his penchant for one-night stands but that only really sinks in when you watch him in action. He won’t shut up about his clothing line, or his catchphrase (“jeah”—don’t ask), or the “Lochte Edge” (which, when pressed for what that even means, he responds, “I honestly have no idea”), or his patented sneakers (why a swimmer has patented sneakers, of all products, is anyone’s guess). The show ends up being about 60% self-promotion, in other words—unless you count all of the moments he’s with his family as self-promotion which, considering that they are being filmed by a tech crew contracted by Lochte himself to make himself more famous, you probably could. The other 40% is Lochte partying like he’s a second-tier Jersey Shore cast member, and acting like a general douche to every girl he meets (I’d say misogynist, but I don’t know that the thought process gets that far with him).

But the reason we can’t feel better about ourselves when we watch this display is that Lochte is presently famous—his best days are neither behind him nor a delusion of grandeur. They’re here, right now, and we’re watching them happen, and when he acts like a dick we have to also watch him take girls home from those bars (women will watch this and be disgusted, surely; guys, if you’re like me, will have Vietnam-style-flashbacks of the intelligent girlfriend you had who dated a total dipshit meathead right after you, and you’ll spend all night wondering all over again what in the hell she was thinking, and okay maybe I’m revealing too much here…). And so the show is kind of simultaneously teaching us that 1. even people who deserve to be famous are ugly inside, and 2. even though they are ugly, they still have better lives than you. Who is this thing made for, anyway?

Ted McLoof

About Ted McLoof

Ted McLoof is a writer at Rookerville and teaches fiction at the University of Arizona. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in the Minnesota Review, Bellevue Literary Review, Gertrude, Monkeybicycle, Sonora Review, Hobart, DIAGRAM, The Associative Press, and elsewhere.He's recently been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and a Best of the Net Award. He is very cool and very handsome and he'd like to buy you a drink.

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