Nancy Jo Sales' piece in the latest issue of Vanity Fair on the astonishing rise of Jon and Kate Gosselin is fascinating, even if you're like me and have never watched an episode of their (now slightly-less since Jon's name has been taken off of it) eponymous television program. And I suppose the show is now almost besides the point: it's just part of the multi-platform tabloid, gossip-blog, and television mini-industry that's grown up around them. The piece tries, and doesn't entirely succeed, to explain what's so fascinating about the couple, their children, and the meltdown of their marriage. There's a bit of gender flim-flammery in play, gossip rag editor Janice Min thinks, the idea that Kate Gosselin has the most control in their rapidly dissolving union.
But I actually think the appeal is more universal than that. Having the eight children makes the Gosselins a bit of a freak show. We want to know how they survive with all those knees to bandage, all those first-day-of-school outfits to pick out, all those college tuitions to pay. They are our fears writ large. But because they have all those kids, they're also several degrees removed from us. We can sympathize with them--can you imagine the pressure on that family?--while also being relatively confident that we wouldn't succumb to that sort of pressure because we wouldn't be under it in the first place. It's a morality play, with all the weight that implies, and it's also just a morality play, with all the lack of consequences for the rest of us that the "just" implies. We don't actually have to learn from the Gosselin's mistakes as long as we can convince ourselves that we'd stop before we got into their situation.
Of course, marital unhappiness comes to childless couples as well as couples with eight children. Being a good Christian lady who wouldn't abort any of the fetuses when she got pregnant with six children doesn't actually render you incapable of demanding extremely expensive sushi on the record in front of a magazine reporter. The Gosselins are ordinary people who made what we think of as a relatively extraordinary decision to provide for their children by making them the object of other people's entertainment. But as Frank Rich pointed out about the Heene family "That circus is among the country’s last dependable job engines. More than a quarter of prime-time broadcast television is devoted to reality programs. And so, with only a high-school education education, Heene tried to reinvent himself as a cable-ready tornado-chasing scientist." In other words, the Gosselins' decision will seem as ordinary as they themselves are, and soon, too. It's only because they're pioneers that they're fascinating.