Come Back Home to California

I could blame it on being stoned at the time, and perhaps I should. The Nog-N has begun showing reruns of Laguna Beach, and there I was, unsuspecting, to catch a rerun of their second season premiere. Viewers of Laguna Beach - and, later, The Hills, the Laguna Beach spinoff featuring Lauren "LC" Conrad's new life as a Teen Vogue intern in Los Angeles - will remember this as the season premiere that introduced the world to Jessica and Jason, if they remember it at all.

Of course, logic would say they won't remember it at all. MTV shows show up on DVD, or certainly Laguna Beach does, but do not typically stick in the memories of their viewers. Laguna Beach is perhaps more effective and memorable for its core viewers than, say, The Real World or any of the latest Bam Margera/ Steve-O shows premiering, but I would hesitate to think of its viewers as containing a list in their minds of what occurred or when.

But this is where I was unsuspecting - minutes into the episode, past the Kristen Cavilleri voiceover of who all the "new people" were, there was a montage, set to the tune of Atherton's "California," a song I'd never heard before, but was so extraordinary I went home and downloaded it. In the montage: Steven, GQ-model heartthrob of season 1, skateboards out of his dorm in San Francisco. Trey, bad boy of season 1, packs up his room at Bard College in New York. Morgan, giddy chipmunk of season 1, drags a suitcase in the picturesque Utah mountains to her car. There's Lo and LC and Christina, all the faces of season 1 (conveniently titled for our short-term memories), packing up and heading home one by one.

There was a reason this sequence was so good: each of these people was quite simply themselves. Trey's room was a mess as he dug through shirts scattered everywhere. Morgan looked pooped and used both hands to lift up her hefty suitcase. Whatever the action, these were characters presented without judgment, without voiceover - simply as they were, one after the other, drawn with thoughts occasionally visible on their silent faces as a chorus of "Come back home to California" lulled each of them through trains and airports back to the shores of Orange County.

Laguna Beach is not a popular thing for people who are not in high school to admit to watching, and certainly not men. Its biggest fans, I have to believe, are women who identify with the LC's and Kristen's that it chronicles - white women of financial privilege and physical perfection who utter phrases like (as Kristen does, referring to Steven) "Boys are stupid, I'm giving up on them." I once said that the reason it was successful was that it was so beautifully shot, it made viewers forget they were watching a reality show, and MTV could essentially create a scripted show without approaching the need for an actual script.

But the lush, filmic cinematography of Laguna Beach does something more than hoodwinking - it, I believe, truly captures the experience of teenagers, and, perhaps of all of our most insecure behaviors. For those viewers that are not in high school, and are not female, and are not born of financial privilege, the most common derision of Laguna Beach must be that its characters are "spoiled" are "annoying" are "ditzy" are "superficial." These things are all true. Of course they are. Teenagers are awful, that's why we don't hang out with them much.

But what I think gets lost is that the show accepts each person in its cast for all of those traits, and, at times, even explores what it means to exhibit being annoying, or ditzy, or spoiled. These characters are simply who they are, and the show, unlike most reality shows, does not tell you with whom to identify or the "role" each plays. Perhaps to truly probe a teenager's personality, a viewer would have to give up the luxury of liking each of them all the time, as truly, no teenager is likable all the time.

In Season 3 of Laguna Beach, its stalwarts of season 2 make some appearances, then disappear again, moving along to a new group of high school "make-ups and break-ups." This was, I imagine, dismaying for some, but it thrilled me, as did every minute of the histrionic year - of Cami and Kyndra's degrading snickering and dismissal of the show's main characters, Tessa and Racquel, as well as their endless obsession with Tessa and Racquel's every move (how else would they know what to make fun of?). Of beautiful, naive, vacant Tessa's protective insecurities being so present and powerful, they begin to interfere with Racquel's outside friendships. Of Racquel's "love" for gorgeous, mute Alex, who in turn says - when he breaks his skater resolve and speaks - things like "I guess I'm just not expressive, you know?"

Season 3 made the smart move to begin following a cast in their Junior year, so as not to have to jettison its focus the following year, and in doing so made, to me, the most thrilling TV moment outside of The Sopranos in the past year. Its final montage, leaving its characters as they went off to college and prepared for a summer without one another, is breathtaking in its way of watching a group of teenagers, each completely incapable of expressing the crossroads each has come across. Cameron watches all his friends leave, and seems to have gained unexpected bursts of anger towards bratty, vindictive Kyndra. Tessa has had to accept that Racquel and Breanna (LC's dimwit little sister) have fixed their friendship, leaving her without exclusive rights to Racquel, and worse, her longtime male friend Chase has gone to Hollywood to start a band and didn't say goodbye. In the end, Tessa stands alone on a beach, listening to Chase's message of "I'll have to catch you next time I'm in town." Tessa closes her phone, and says something staring off at the sunset waves. What did she say? I can't remember - "yeah, see ya," I imagine it to be. I'm alone, I think, in recognizing that embroidered line, that gesture with her phone, clenched in her fist beneath her chin, as the sensation that all humans go through on occasion - the feeling of abandonment, of suddenly having to fend for yourself, of staring at that endless, unyielding ocean. That feeling doesn't just hit the capable, I suppose, and I also suppose that's why I love having Laguna Beach on reruns on Nog-N.