| But if you’ve been watching, you’ll have noticed that
The Real World: Chicago does no such thing. The residents are
seldom seen in front of their building, since locals wearing “MTV
Sucks” T-shirts made a point of hanging out near the entrance;
nor do they patronize many neighborhood businesses, since a fair number
of local entrepreneurs put “Real World Not Welcome Here”
signs in their windows. The daily reality of the cast was a gloriously
claustrophobic exercise in ostracism. The neighborhood took on an
identity that years of gentrification had not succeeded in stripping
from it (indeed, such gentrification was probably what attracted the
MTV cameras in the first place: MTV has always preferred this world’s
Greenwich Villages and Sohos to, say, its Long Island Cities or its
Uniondales) and made its antagonism toward the intruder in its midst
plain. |
