The Hills Have Eyes (And Also Legs)

I recently finished all of Laguna Beach (2004-2006) and most of The Hills (2006-2010) on MTV, and since I’ve taken to writing about reality shows, I thought I’d offer my commentary on these moments in time. I watched Laguna back in middle school (when my parents weren’t home because I knew they’d disapprove) but it had been so long that I had to jog my memory.

Both of these shows “star” Lauren Conrad, a wealthy teenager that was born and raised in Laguna Beach, California, about 50 miles south of Los Angeles, and follow Lauren and her friends through high school in Laguna (including a “sordid” love triangle involving Lauren, Stephen Colletti, and Kristin Cavallari), and then college slash young adult life in Los Angeles. I found these programs fascinating as a microcosm of southern California culture in the latter half of the first decade of 2000s but there’s also some residual cultural commentary that’s worth looking into.

• Lauren Conrad is an interesting figure because she’s … boring in a way most public figures, especially on reality TV, are not. She’s a nice-ish girl but not overwhelmingly kind, pretty but not in an unrealistic glamazon way, not very intelligent or especially witty but probably knows who the Vice-President of the United States is if she thinks hard, and that sets her apart from the vast majority of her reality star contemporaries. In the words of Thomas Rogers back in 2009 on the release of Conrad’s first book, L.A. Candy:

  Much of the appeal of Lauren Conrad, like the Bella Swan character in the “Twilight” novels, is that she’s a near-perfect cipher for young women. It’s her very blankness that made her so well-suited for “The Hills” — and a much better choice of star than the woman who will replace her on the show, Kristin Cavallari, because she doesn’t create drama. Drama happens to her. It’s a feeling that many junior-high-age girls (and some grown-ups) can easily identify with: I’m just trying to be nice — so why is everybody being so mean to me? That blank innocence and persistent victimhood, not coincidentally, is also the appeal of the main character in Conrad’s novel — a surprisingly entertaining, if somewhat vacuous book.

  On a meta level, what Lauren Conrad’s enduring appeal teaches us is that a lack of agency and real ambition is one of the most desired qualities in women even in 2025. In other words, these articles and posts are pure rage bait that aim to demonize women who aren’t common in the first place. Even most politically liberal women don’t want deeply fulfilling prestige careers, and they could probably be paid to not work, but that doesn’t stop right and left-wingers alike from hating them. If Lauren Conrad wasn’t a reality star and from a wealthy family, I don’t think she’d be a businesswoman with a fashion line since she lacks any real ambition or drive to be anything more than who she was born to be, which is why the girls and women of America liked her so much.

• It’s kind of funny just how obvious the underage drinking and drug use was on Laguna and then The Hills.

• All reality shows are scripted to some extent, but the behind-the-scenes drama on The Hills has always been a touch beyond that. In The Hills, Lauren and her one-time best friend’s Heidi Montag fell out not over boy problems but over Heidi’s boyfriend (and eventual husband), Spencer Pratt, telling Perez Hilton that Lauren and her ex-boyfriend Jason (the same Jason that cheated on Jessica back in Laguna) had made a sex tape, and then calling Lauren’s vagina “beef curtains” on MySpace. I personally think the sex tape absolutely existed, and that Lauren’s wealthy father shut it down, which is why Lauren and Heidi’s friendship was irrevocably broken even when they worked together. All that said, Heidi and Spencer are still together even now, and they’re still just as fame hungry as ever so I guess some people really do find their true loves!

• Seeing Heidi go from the pretty but generally normal looking young woman on the left to the woman on the right kind of upsets me. I thought she was beautiful in the first place and I hate that she didn’t feel that way (or that Spencer¹ didn’t feel that way). I know that I’m irrationally Pollyanna slash Andrea Dworkin on plastic surgery and all forms of beauty culture including makeup and high heels, but I genuinely do want all women to be happy about how they look in their natural forms. I wish for us all to not feel the desire to undergo any form of body modification that we wouldn’t do if not for the resultant social benefits or social consequences from abstaining. I know I’m never going to convince most women that they have inherent worth regardless of how they look, let alone talk them out of choice feminism, but that doesn’t change how I feel.

  

• Funnily enough, I liked Lauren’s high school nemesis, Kristin, way more as an adult than I did back in middle school. Kristin was always more agentic than Lauren and more difficult to like, but she had real self-respect in the Joan Didion sense, from the time she was a teenager. She never asked for sympathy she didn’t earn, and she owned up to her mistakes in a way very few women do at 17 let alone 70. In the season 2 episode “You Can’t Trust Him”, while imploring her friend Jessica to realize that she’s being cheated on, Kristin flat out goes, “Jessica, I’m telling you from someone that used to cheat on her boyfriend, those are signs of him cheating,” and I don’t think I’ve ever heard a woman, or in this case a girl, admit to cheating on national television. On The Valley, Bravo’s Vanderpump Rules spinoff that’s a horror story about what happens to women when they have children with the wrong men and what happens to men that refuse to grow up even after marriage and fatherhood, Michelle is rumored to have been (physically and/or emotionally) cheating on her now ex-husband Jesse for a year prior to their divorce. However, Michelle still has never copped to infidelity despite all evidence pointing towards it. I’m not sure where I’m going with this but it’s just interesting that a 17-year-old girl had the dignity to own up to her actions and indiscretions while a woman who’s twice her age didn’t, and honestly, I don’t think she ever will.

• Audrina Patridge dating and more annoyingly, loving Justin Bobby as much as she did and maybe even still does, back in her early 20s and over a decade later when she’s divorced and has a child, is so frustrating. I have had my share of romantic hangups but at the end of the day, I got over mine in due time, and never went back, and Audrina can’t say the same. It’s normal to wonder what could have been with your past flames, especially when you’re lonely, but when you’re 40 years old and a mother, you can’t be in love with the same person you were in love with at 20. That’s even more pathetic than Jax Taylor moving back in next to his friend and former roommate, Tom Schwartz (Bravo’s go-to sidekick for toxic men) after they both got divorced and are now to the rotten people they were at 25 (and probably dating women that age as well).

• Brody Jenner (who never actually dated Lauren) being Kim, Kourtney, and Khloe Kardashian’s former step-brother and is Kendall and Kylie Jenner’s half-brother makes perfect sense the more I think about it, especially when I conceptualize this dynamic in the larger Hollywood sphere of people in their general age group, including the Biebers and Hadids and well, Selena Gomez and Taylor Swift. It’s no wonder that Bella Hadid peaced out to Texas with her hot cowboy boyfriend; all her “friends” in Los Angeles kept on fucking her ex-boyfriends (or even her current boyfriends), and I don’t blame her for wanting nothing to do with it.

• All that said, I find it kind of nice that Lauren, Stephen, and Kristin have all buried the hatchet despite their “love triangle” from Laguna Beach. It probably helps that Stephen and Lauren were never serious and Kristin and Stephen have been broken up for over 15 years at this point, but still, I kind of love that Stephen and Kristin have a podcast together that Lauren guested on. Maybe time does heal all wounds, and then again, maybe some wounds, like Lauren Conrad and Heidi Montag’s somewhat codependent friendship, go too deep to risk tearing open.

1. It really depresses me that men ask for their partners to get plastic surgery a la Jax Taylor paying for Brittany Cartwright’s boob job in 2016 and telling the plastic surgeon how big he wanted her breasts to be, like if my husband thought there was something “wrong” with my natural body and/or face, I’d be devastated and I don’t think I’d ever look at him the same way after the fact.