Remembering Whitney Houston in reality (TV) and truth
The Atlanta-filmed reality show Being Bobby Brown” remains as a YouTube testament to her tragedy and triumph”
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- No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity.”
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The day after we sat on the couch watching four hours worth of Whitney Houston’s funeral coverage on CNN, my wife burst into the bedroom and blurted out a confession. She’d just indulged in an old episode of “Being Bobby Brown,” and she felt dirty, guilty, complicit.
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Watching grainy YouTube footage on a laptop can have that effect on you, especially when the show in question is largely responsible for defaming the once-pristine image of America’s sweetheart.
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In the week and a half since she’s passed, Whitney Houston’s been dissected and re-examined up one side and down the other by media types eager to absolve themselves of any guilt over her celebrity-induced death yet equally anxious to capitalize on the conjecture surrounding it. I’ve been reluctant to add my own two cents to the public discourse for fear of sounding too sentimental or overly cynical. But coming to terms with her legacy hasn’t been nearly as daunting as the attempt to reconcile the polarized responses from those quick to canonize her for her successes on one hand and cannibalize her for her failures on the other.
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The resulting fervor guarantees that she will be remembered for generations to come, good or bad. But how we choose to remember our cultural heroes, fatalistic flaws and all, says a helluva lot more about us than it does them.
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Will she always be the pure, pop ingenue who literally beamed with admiration and self-love in the 1986 video for “The Greatest Love of All”? Or, was that icon forever eclipsed by the barely functioning addict in a dysfunctional marriage that made “Being Bobby Brown” must-see reality TV in 2005?
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When I interviewed Quincy Jones that same year for another publication, he practically balked when the show came up. “What do you think about it?” he threw the question back at me. I almost hated to tell him I was an undercover fan.