BET’s Baldwin Hills: Injecting Race and Class into the Projective Drama

Baldwin Hills

Early practitioners of documentary film, like John Grierson and Dziga Vertov, felt that the genre should serve a prosocial purpose, acting as an antidote to the oversimplified fantasy world created by the fiction film. The purpose of documentary was to “mobilize viewers to act in the world, with a greater sense of knowledge or even a more fully elaborated conception of social structure and historical process.”1 This ideal documentary, conceived as a lifting of a veil or as a call to action, is a far cry from the current state of reality television. In particular, the success of the “projective drama” (Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City, My Super Sweet Sixteen) indicates that a lot of contemporary reality TV thrives on fantasy and escape (even though these programs are structured as lifestyle models for their young audiences).2 However, BET’s Baldwin Hills, a scripted reality drama about teenagers living in and around what is known as the “black Beverly Hills,” effectively straddles the line between projective drama and rhetorical document, offering audiences an opportunity for escape as well as a chance to engage with the challenges and responsibilities faced by Los Angeles teenagers.

When Baldwin Hills first premiered in 2007, many critics noted its similarities to MTV’s scripted reality dramas, particularly its “cinematic” look and its foregrounding of the spectacle of wealth.3 However, while the casts of Laguna Beach and The Hills are all middle- to upper-class and white, the Baldwin Hills cast is composed of African American teens from a variety of social and economic backgrounds. Furthermore, although all of these programs function as escapist, consumerist fantasies, Baldwin Hills differs in its ability to engage with a broad range of concerns faced by teenagers of all backgrounds, including gang violence, drug and alcohol addiction, teenage pregnancy and parental divorce/estrangement. As one of the few reality programs explicitly targeting African American youth, Baldwin Hills aims to dismantle certain assumptions about black teens and their goals, choices and environment.

Baldwin Hills’ polyvocal approach to the teen experience is further bolstered by the fact that each episode is narrated by multiple voices. In fact, more than one person might narrate a single scene. This strategy implies that every cast member’s experiences and opinions are integral to the program, and ensures that a diversity of perspectives are expressed, rather than the single perspective of one star personality. (Watch an episode of Baldwin Hills here.) By contrast, every episode of The Hills is narrated by and centers on the life of one person, Lauren Conrad (and now Kristin Cavallari), whose narrational voice is omniscient and omnipresent.

One Baldwin Hills cast member who receives a lot of screen time is Staci, a working class teenager residing in a low-income neighborhood adjacent to Baldwin Hills known as “the Jungles.” Staci and her fellow, wealthier cast members would not interact under ordinary circumstances since they attend different high schools, live in different neighborhoods and move in different social circles. Thus, in order to facilitate interactions between these cast members, Baldwin Hills adopts a technique frequently employed by scripted reality shows: the orchestration of seemingly “random” encounters. In projective dramas staged encounters are used to create friction and “drama” between already tense cast mates, but in the context of Baldwin Hills they offer the possibility of facilitating productive dialogues between teenagers whose lives are otherwise highly structured by geographical boundaries. For example, when Staci runs into some Baldwin Hills residents at a coffee shop the girls decide to sit together. Staci then recounts a disturbing story about a gang related shooting that shocks and disturbs her listeners. While the girls freely admit that they cannot relate to Staci’s life, her story leads them to discuss their own fears. Garnette admits, “I’m scared of so many little things. I’m scared all the time, actually.” Such conversations are a standard convention of the scripted reality drama, but in Baldwin Hills these otherwise artificial moments are capable of producing a diverse portrait of the contemporary teenagers’ lived experiences of Los Angeles.

Staged Encounter at a Coffee Shop

Baldwin Hills’ tweaking of the conventions of the projective drama is also highlighted in an episode in which the girls go shopping for party outfits. Willie, Ashley, Garnette, and Makensy shop at the expensive boutique, Ed Hardy. However, this conventional scene of decadence is undercut when the camera documents Staci’s more modest shopping excursion at the discount clothing store, Rainbow. While eager sales associates dote on the Baldwin Hills girls and show them expensive designs, Staci must dig through Rainbow’s vast selection of discount clothing by herself. The use of parallel editing in this scene creates a contradictory viewing experience for the audience: we can take pleasure in the fantasy of conspicuous consumption with the Baldwin Hills girls while Staci’s shopping trip is likely a more accurate reflection of the average teenager’s shopping experiences.

Garnette at Ed Hard

Staci at Rainbow

Another difference between Baldwin Hills and other projective dramas lies in its construction of space. MTV reality series that are named after the areas in which they are filmed (Laguna Beach, The Hills, The City) depict these locations not as geographical spaces where people live and work, but as assemblages of expensive restaurants and clothing stores. Although certain scenes in Baldwin Hills do fetishize spaces of consumption, the program also focuses on the diverse mise en scène of Los Angeles. For example, in one episode former NBA star Reggie Theus gives his daughter, Roqui, a new Lincoln Navigator. This display of conspicuous consumption, familiar from MTV programs like My Super Sweet Sixteen, is intercut with a scene of Staci walking through her economically devastated neighborhood. In this brief scene the mise en scène shifts dramatically from the landscaped greens of suburbia to the barren browns and bleached out yellows of urban blight. Here Baldwin Hills offers viewers pleasures similar to those found in other projective dramas—the gift of a luxury vehicle—only to undercut these same pleasures, reminding viewers that the black teenage experience cannot be encapsulated by a single image.

Roqui Gets a Navigator

Staci and Friends in the Jungles

Finally, like other projective dramas, Baldwin Hills offers its fans a “multi platform engagement” with the show. That is, viewers can read cast members’ blogs, take quizzes, watch behind the scenes footage, and post comments to message boards.4 The content of many of these posts indicate that fans are able to “relate” to the show’s cast members. When, for example, Staci became unexpectedly pregnant in season two and then suffered a miscarriage in season three, several viewers shared their own stories of loss on the message boards. Furthermore, many fans post e-mail addresses, social networking homepages and, in a few cases, home phone numbers. Beyond the hope that these posts might facilitate contact with one of Baldwin Hills’ stars, it is likely that many of the show’s fans are hoping to communicate with other young people on the boards who share their interests or problems. The overall tone of these posts differs dramatically from those found on the message boards for projective dramas like The Hills. For its fans, The Hills’ cast members are celebrities to discuss and possibly emulate, but not real people who might relate to their fans’ problems.

What is difficult to make clear in this short space is that Baldwin Hills does not reduce the African American teenagers’ experience to a working class/good and upper class/bad binary opposition. Though many of the cast members live privileged lives, they are also active in community outreach and education. Nor does the show valorize one teenager’s experiences as being more “real” than another’s. In this series Los Angeles is defined through a collective of voices and experience. As the opening credits state, “This is Baldwin Hills. And this is our reality.” While Baldwin Hills hardly fits Grierson’s or Vertov’s vision of the ideal documentary, it serves as an antidote to the alternately spoiled and hard-partying caricatures of American youth offered in most contemporary reality TV.

Image Credits:

1. Baldwin Hills

Images 2-6 were captured by the author from a DVD of Baldwin Hills: Season 1.

Please feel free to comment.

1. Nichols, Bill. Blurred Boundaries: Questions of Meaning in Contemporary Culture. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994. [↩]
2. Kleinhans, Chuck. “Webisodic Mock Vlogs: HoShows as Commercial Entertainment New Media.” Jump Cut 50 (2008). 15 Jul. 2008 
. [↩]
3. See, for example, Mike Hale’s “Posh Princes and Princesses of the Hills.” The New York Times.com 7 Aug. 2007. 3 Nov. 2009 . [↩]
4. http://betboards.bet.com/forums/ [↩]