When I was in college, we read a story about 12 brides who were wed on the same night. The next day, their marriage sheets were taken out and displayed. Eleven were stained with blood and one was white.
All the students in my class immediately assumed the twelfth bride had previously given it up, while all the other women were virgins. But our teacher pointed out there was a host of possibilities about why that the bride’s sheet was white. The husband could have been impotent. She could have refused him. She could have been raped before her marriage. Anything could have happened on that white sheet, while only one thing happened on the bloody ones.
And this brings me back to The Hills. Though Spencer Pratt is a famously bad English student, he understands the importance of the open-ended narrative. Sure, creating a sex tape is a specific sexual act. But the idea of a sex tape raises a more interesting question: What’s on that tape? Anything from hand holding to furry role playing could be on it. A rumor of a sex tape is much more intriguing than a rumor that Lauren is into erotic asphyxiation.
It’s times like this I’m glad I majored in English.