And here is Heidi Montag, vehemently denying her recent wedding was nothing more than a publicity stunt:

“I look forward to everyone seeing the footage of our time in Mexico on The Hills, so they can see for themselves what a joyous occasion it was.”

There’s something so remarkably sublime about a statement of naked publicity made as denial against accusations of naked publicity.

Heidi Montag is fascinating. Many people may violently disagree, and I certainly understand the nature of that disagreement. Because the Heidi Montag who appears on The Hills, who frolics dainty on a Mexican beach in a thin bikini with her dbag boyfriend, isn’t very interesting at all.

But that’s Heidi Montag the character, the Heidi Montag of the show. The real Heidi Montag, the one who courts fame so brazenly, who cooperates with MTV producers paid to manipulate her real-life familial relationships, who doesn’t just go to the beach in a bikini with her dbag boyfriend, but who does so in a purposefully choreographed dance of staged paparazzi “spy photos”; that’s a richly complex, eminently captivating person.

Unfortunately, The Hills itself completely misses out on this fascinating complexity, purposefully avoiding any mention of the fame or notoriety the show has brought upon its subjects.

When a sex-tape featuring Lauren Conrad was first shopped to internet high-bidders, it became a huge international story, dominating tabloid magazines, providing Billy Bush and Mark McGrath with something to talk about for weeks and weeks. And yet The Hills treated the incident as some sort of close-knit gossip gone bad; Conrad and friends spent an entire televised season discussing “rumors” on a “website,” as if the entirety of the story existed in Facbook status updates and a couple MySpace comments.

So much banality when what actually happened in the actual real life world, just beyond the periphery of the televised reality we all ended up seeing, was intensely more interesting.

What’s it like to have legitimate celebrity gossip magazines printing detailed descriptions of your vulva for broad popular consumption?

We’ll never know, because The Hills, like most Reality Television, ultimately fails to meet its mark, remaining naively devoted to the characters it has created, when the process of creating them is by far the most fascinating aspect of their actual real lives.