the isle is full of noises
on the reckoning of Monica Garcia—real housewives of salt lake city, season 4 finale
‘Islands are metaphors of the heart,’ writes Jeanette Winterson. For the Dog Woman, Winterson’s protagonist in Sexing the Cherry, this particular island metaphorises the wild place of her own heart, untouched by man and incapable of sustaining life; such is the artistic merit of an Island. It lends itself to narrative by virtue of its solitude, and the unrelenting wilderness that emerges from such solitude. Man fears solitude; man fears becoming islanded. It follows that when the island becomes a literary setting, we orchestrate the perfect storm of character exposition—stranded with nobody but each other, beholden to each others’ worst fears and shortcomings and with no buffer of polite society, the most visceral part of the soul becomes exposed.
When the cast of the Real Housewives of Salt Lake City’s fourth season touch down in Bermuda, it is an undertaking not unlike that of Odysseus and his men docking at Circe’s island, or the boys who survive the plane crash in Lord of the Flies. Of course, modern-day tourist honeypot Bermuda is not exactly the uninhabited land which populates folklore. Still, its positioning in the Bermuda Triangle imparts upon it the same ominous mysticism that might just drive six wealthy, delusional, emotionally-unhinged women to insanity. In the clinical psychologist Mary Phiper’s Reviving Ophelia, she invokes the Bermuda Triangle as a metaphor for the abyss into which young women’s selves deteriorate under the pressures of womanhood; ‘as ships disappear mysteriously, so do the selves of girls go down in droves.’ In much the same way, it is on the beautiful shores of Bermuda that the women of Salt Lake City disintegrate, paring back their artifice to reveal their most unadulterated performances of fear.
After three episodes worth of international luxury, incoherent fighting and mounting tension, Mysteries, Revealed? sets the season finale stage with a shot of menacing rolling clouds and a lightning strike. This is an especially campy flourish when you realise that there has been no storm in Bermuda for all four days of the cast trip—in fact, the weather has been enviably pleasant—but in the world of reality television, editing is the paintbrush which separates documentary footage from narrative cinema. Thunderclaps punctuate the transitions of the opening montage, cutting between all of the women arguing at a dinner without revealing the mysterious target of their ire, to a haunting monologue of Heather Gay on a beach warning ‘she is not who she says she is.’ The edited tempest is a pathetic fallacy, you see: it captures the turbulent relationships between our central characters, and forebodes of the real tempest about to unfold. This is Agatha Christie’s island in And Then There Were None, and it is now the audience’s task to unmask the murderess behind this devastated social dynamic.
Just like the beginning of Singer’s The Usual Suspects (1995), Mysteries, Revealed? opens on these clues of a crime scene before flashing back to a sunny morning in Bermuda. ‘We are in the eye of the hurricane, and the peace is deceptive,’ the editors warn us. They invite us into the detective’s chair and tempt our intellect; this is not some frivolous bitches fighting at dinner show, and it never has been. Something of great filmic sensibility this way comes.
The prime criticism often leveled at reality television by joyless pragmatists is that none of it is actually ‘real’. ‘It’s all scripted,’ they jeer, noses deep in a Mad Men subreddit and sculling kombucha. The knee-jerk response is obviously that if any of these reality stars were particularly gifted at acting, Kim Kardashian would have won an Oscar for Disaster Movie; but when the criticism is taken in good faith, we must admit that highly-involved production is a necessary constraint of the genre. Perhaps real authenticity was possible in those early iterations of Real World or Jersey Shore, but in the post-social media age, self-awareness has become too heightened for anybody to be truly ignorant to what being in front of a camera entails.
It is not that reality television is exactly scripted, but it is also not as if producers just roll camera and see what happens. There is an invisible directorial touch sculpting the narrative form, whether that be as gentle as leading questions or as heavy-handed as inviting enemies on set. In turn, cast members play their part not exactly by acting, but by taking an improvisational ‘yes, and?’ approach where they willingly take producer’s bait and lean into the emotions of their scene partners.
What we are left with is a choreographed replica of life itself, a whole genre which attempts to engineer the beats of our own real social interactions and cattle-prods real emotions out of its casting experiments, all through a terrifyingly manufactured process. The recent advent of shows like Jury Duty and The Curse speaks to our cultural fascination with this idea: that, perhaps, there is real artistic merit to seeing what happens when you play God with reality.
The Real Housewives franchise has its own brand of choreography which has been perfected over its near-two decade run. The simple premise of the show has always been about a friend group of wealthy women; they should be close enough to spend months hanging out at various galas and dinners for no purpose other than hanging out, delusional enough that their reactions to relatively innocuous inconveniences should be telegenically disproportionate, and reactive enough that they are willing to fall out with their friends (in other words, castmates) routinely while still being forgiving enough to repair the social dynamic. It is a cutthroat game of social politics, and if what you seek is tenure, you must be resilient to social pile-ons and character assassinations, and loyal to allies with enough expediency to dance on their graves if they are no longer socially viable.
The first third of Mysteries, Revealed? is an almost caricaturist tribute to this particular formula. Morning on the fourth day in Bermuda sets us up for a classic Housewives storyline, germinating in a scene between boisterous newbie Monica Garcia and Machiavellian sexy baby Whitney Rose, hungover in bed together as they discuss the events of the night prior. Garcia is rounding out her exceptional debut season with polarising fan reception, inspiring an intense audience reaction with her emotional impulsivity and quick temper—in an era where self-censorship threatens to destroy the foundations of reality television, Garcia seems shockingly transparent. It is this same honesty on display when she tells Rose that she had overheard Lisa Barlow calling the latter ‘dramatic,’ and her ability to justify pointless instigating with her ‘honest and real’ persona lends itself perfectly to Housewives antics. Rose, ever willing to play gullible in order to gain screentime, happily takes the bait and endeavours to confront Lisa at dinner.
With the interaction now dissected, let us pare back to the choreography actually underpinning this scene. Intra-cast conflict is the lifeblood of the Real Housewives franchise. The most basic formula to achieve this is for one housewife to make a cruel comment about another behind her back—let’s call this the point of embarkation. In order for this conflict to be produced effectively, a messenger housewife (often renowned as a shit-stirrer archetype) must subtly communicate these comments back to the victim and land the point of ignition. Later, an event must be hosted which brings all cast members together so that this conflict can reach boiling point and both affected parties can spar. From here, they may reach the point of resolution or no return, depending on what seems most feasible. These are the ‘beats’, this is the engineering, this is the factory line assembling reality.
In another scene, we see Rose approaching Heather Gay to hash out their completely pointless fight from the night before. This is the resolution phase of the process. As viewers, we have a learned expectation for how these feuds play out—so it is startling when Gay apologises to Rose so quickly after she had seemed so emotionally affected the night before. It feels uncanny, almost like a brush against the fourth wall; these women are supposed to be emotionally invested in their arguments, to hold their castmates hostage and emotionally blackmail them for at least an episode before reaching forgiveness. Why is Gay going off-‘script’?
An anomaly in the manufacturing process: this is our first loose thread to pull.
It is reasonable to consider the subsequent scenes of the cast going shopping in Bermuda as ‘filler’, but they too play a vital role in the world-building of Real Housewives. They construct the world of luxury and detachment these women live in, an almost fantastical universe untouched by the earthly concerns of the working viewer. We get strong character notes, like Garcia’s card declining to remind us of the economic disparity between her and her castmates; kitschy editing moments like the subtitling of goats saying ‘yaasss’, affirming the show’s commitment to camp and comedy; and, most importantly, scenes like this assert the show’s central premise, the women’s friendship. They travel together, they shop together, they laugh together, all because they are friends. Conflict only has stakes if we believe there is something worth losing, and Real Housewives goes to great pains to remind us that something deeper unites these castmates, some sisterly bond legitimate enough for them to travel to foreign countries with only each other for company.
Like a great postmodernist work, Mysteries, Revealed? dedicates twenty minutes of its run-time to honouring the form of its genre so that it may spend the remainder in deconstruction. The tempest is upon us.
Heather Gay, muffled voice overcome with emotion, on a hushed phone call while cameras are down; a cameraman and producer sprung to action, attempting to barge into her room; Gay firmly pushing them out, shaken and emphatic in her refusal; subtitles over her mic feed, spelling out ‘I’m freaking out,’ ‘I’m shaking,’ ‘I can’t believe it’s her.’ This scene has been highly anticipated since it was teased in the pre-season trailer, but it is somehow even more spellbinding to watch in action. The editors masterfully conceal all concrete facts from us besides the enigmatic ‘her’, but what we can take away is Gay’s palpable anxiety and the peculiar shattering of the fourth wall. Real Housewives has always gone to great lengths to pretend the camera is non-existent—the cast is always ‘this group’, the reunion is always ‘New York’, every action must have an in-world motivation beyond the show—and for production to pull back the curtain, even going so far as to reveal their unsavoury disregard for Gay’s privacy, feels exciting and intense, perhaps even unsettling.
And now, whatever Gay has learned on the phone has readied the ground for one of Bravo’s most cinematic sequences yet. She stands alone on a beach, mournful and resolute, shades on to protect her vulnerability while her dress flows dramatically in the wind; one by one, Whitney Rose, Lisa Barlow, and Meredith Marks, the three other castmates who have been on Real Housewives of Salt Lake City with Gay since its inception, join her on the beach as witches attending a sabbath. Four women in a tight huddle, their hair blowing in the wind, as if each represents some great and glamorous corner of the world, leaning in with true fear and anticipation to learn whatever might have perturbed her. For as often as production clumsily attempts to prove these women are actual friends, there is a tangible and moving sense of sisterhood in their gathering now that cannot be denied. It would seem the producers took a page straight out of Big Little Lies, and the visual reference is pure, exquisite drama.
Fifteen episodes of this season have been spent foreshadowing this exact moment, and the payoff must be executed with a proportionate sense of theatricality. As Gay tearfully reveals her information to her friends, her confessionals are interspersed throughout. They act as a conduit for her interiority, and she is able to play the reluctant detective who details and explains the process of her discovery; it is like an inner monologue, and it plays like a whodunnit reveal from Poirot. Real Housewives of Salt Lake City is always scored beautifully and characterised by strong choral elements that nod to the religious undertones of the Mormon homeland, and this scene is no different, with strong synths and violins underscoring Gay’s dramatic reveal. She points to the clues: Monica Garcia’s connection to Jen Shah, her overfamiliarity with the cast, her identity fraud to avoid paying bills to Gay’s business; she points to the witnesses, her hair stylist; the murder weapon, RealityVonTease, and the blood of screenshots; the motivation, parasociality. Finally, she solemnly reveals the charge, something even worse than murder. Character assassination.
Monica Garcia is charged with cyberbullying the cast of Real Housewives of Salt Lake City.
The crimes of Garcia are fascinating in that they hold equal parts camp and gravity. On one hand, we watch Meredith Marks at her soapiest, distraught and histrionic as she laments ‘why do people keep hurting us?’ in a frame that can only be described as Nicole Kidman-esque, all while knowing that RealityVonTease is an Instagram fan account with 5,000 followers. It is pitch-perfect comedy that the great villain of the campiest show on air right now is somebody with terminal posting disease. But the more meta element of these women’s complaint is the idea that a crazed fan has found her way on-screen and within proximity of women who she had essentially been harassing for years prior, and this makes the dynamic that much more fascinating.
It is a recurring joke within the Real Housewives fandom that the Salt Lake City franchise feels like a community theatre production of the show. While all iterations of the show are cynical to some degree, Salt Lake City feels uniquely self-satirising; all of the women have such theatrical and outlandish personalities, their social dynamics change so constantly that it is often hard to keep track of who likes who, and it almost feels like a SNL skit that parodies the show’s premise. While the creep of self-awareness has affected all reality television, these women feel particularly aware that they are on camera. In other shows, this can become a problem, as reality television largely becomes less about the reality of a social world and more about the reality of making a television show. Yet for the women of Salt Lake City, this element somehow makes it more enjoyable. It is a show about being on a show, and rather than just being who they are, they are being who they think we want them to be, which tells us even more about who they really are, and somehow through all of these degrees of abstraction and fabrication, we see something even realer and more compelling than we could expect.
But it is within this context that we are met with the question of Monica Garcia. Four women who began their careers in reality television four years ago, clearly fans of the show or at least highly aware of the platform it provided, on television in pursuit of fame, are now railing against another woman who has ostensibly tried to take the exact same path. Is that fair? Is Gay the judge, jury and executioner on who is a fan and who is a Housewife? Is the latter such an esteemed position that a lowly fan-blogger is undeserving of the title?
The finale’s showstopping closing number takes place in the form of Gay’s Bermuda Triangle dinner, and it is a beautiful culmination of the great thematic questions that have been posed thus far. On an interpersonal level, this is Garcia’s final chance to prove that she is worthy to sit at the table with her fellow castmates, to see whether she has contrition for her actions and the flexibility to move forward; but on a more philosophical level, this has become an examination of the genre itself. Can reality television succeed when it becomes about itself? Can anybody just be a person anymore, when every opportunity to be seen is an opportunity to perform, and any real relationship is buffered by the desire to perform for some audience? Is anything even real? Perhaps the Bermuda Triangle metaphor speaks to the loss of identity itself, the selves that vanish as we distort ourselves for the camera.
The construction of this dinner is one of Bravo’s finest; the windy night brings a stormy eeriness that befits the theme, and Gay excels in her Housewife trademark of hosting a psychologically devastating social game. This time, the women are asking questions to each other in puppet form, and they have organised themselves into a plan of attack. They begin by orchestrating petty squabbles between Barlow and Rose, and then Gay and Marks, designed to lull Garcia into a false sense of security—then, in the final moment, Gay strikes. Her receipts, timeline, proof, screenshots (the line heard around the world and quoted in Congress) nail Garcia to the cross, and like the most frivolous murder mystery of all time, she unmasks the Instagram profile and asks: why did you do it?
The detailed arguments of the final confrontation are not quite so important as the exposition of character they reveal. Something primal comes out in the five women confronting Garcia, a real sense of fear, anger and insecurity that we are not often privy to; it is the fear of protecting your job and closing rank in your trusted circles, but more importantly, it is a fear for safety. Garcia is an impostor among them, a woman who has lied about her knowledge of them while she has tried to befriend them, a woman who has harassed them consistently for years on social media and smiled in their face. It is not just their disgust at sharing elite space with a fan, but a genuine fear of how far parasociality can go. This is the threat that comes with creating celebrity out of revealing your personal life, and the women are viscerally terrified to come face-to-face with the beast.
Through all of the artifice and manufacture necessary to create a situation like this, what we ultimately produce is something at the very core of the human condition. All of the women are at peak performance as they grapple with their sheer panic: Lisa Barlow is at her most venomous mean girl, wielding her superiority complex to make sure Garcia feels her own smallness in their presence; Meredith Marks tries reasonability, but her beachside melodrama belies her love for playing the anguished victim; Angie Katsenavas almost throws a vase but is too afraid to, bless her heart, as desperate for acceptance within the group as Garcia and terrified of losing her footing; even Whitney Rose, always so willing to play the helpless fool, finds a newfound strength to reject Garcia’s bullying. Like cornered animals, these women bite back to protect themselves and one another, finding a camaraderie in their allegiance to fame.
Monica Garcia was a supernova, and it only made sense that a star so bright would burn so fast. She was a perfect character for the tempest she instigated, but not a character meant for longevity. While her parasociality is not an unforgivable sin, it automatically positioned her in deference to the women she stalked, and fundamentally threatens the premise of a show about women who can believably trust and confide in each other as equals. If that were not enough, her willingness to go scorched-earth did her no favours, and she was unable to have levels in her performance; everything felt one-dimensional, even her sadness and rage, as if she were performing for a group of gay guys who would finger-wag all her shady reads. In a world of ever-flowing social dynamics, her inflexible lack of remorse was a final nail in the coffin. If anything, her finale performance plays as a cautionary tale—as reality television democratises fame, the rise of Monica Garcias is a danger to the artistry of the genre.
But where Garcia threatens the artistic potential of reality television, it is Heather Gay who demonstrates its power. Gay runs this finale like its titular antihero, in a breathtaking performance of emotional complexity—orchestrating the beach vignette while delivering her suspect reveal with such finesse, devastating Monica in a verbal altercation before making a heartfelt speech about everything she and her friends had been through with Jen Shah. In a final blow, she produces an impeccable moment of character development when she reveals that Shah had given her a black eye the season prior, and she had been afraid until this very moment to reveal it. This is Heather Gay: both a camera-savvy genius who is keenly aware of the camera and constantly attempting to posture as likeable and relatable, but also a traumatised ex-Mormon whose deep well of insecurity compels her to act in humiliating and malicious ways. The peaks and valleys of her story are rich and fleshed-out, and capture all of the beautiful nuances of her personhood.
This, too, is reality television: the medium of long-form narrative. We have seen the life of a woman, even when she is pretending and performing, her true soul lurks beneath the surface and reveals itself to us in glimpses and accidents. Try as we might to hide from the camera, perhaps the face we turn says the most damning thing about us. And what could be more compelling to watch than these damning things?
I wonder how all of this is subverted by the reunion, which is by definition a meta-narrative of commentary intended to collide with the narrative of the show. We really see the light fade in Monica, who had so much fight in her during the actual filming.
I think this is my favorite thing I’ve ever read on substack. Reality tv is a hugely under appreciated genre and you put into such precise words why it’s so fascinating. Really really really loved this piece!