There was a time when reality TV really did seem to be a barefisted assault on viewers in their comfort zones. This could happen to you. A tsunami washing you away in your beach cottage, a brute with a baseball bat braining you in a road rage incident, a bureaucratic screw-up with your electricity bill leading to suicide. Yes, it all happened – ask not for whom the credits roll – but then so did an entirely different kind of real-o-tainment in the form of Survivor, Big Brother, Idols, The Amazing Race and much more that you just wish could have happened to you. With a million dollar payoff coming at the end to sweeten the agony of it all. So what happened to the reality?
Short answer: TV turns everything to mulch. No matter how real it started out the end result is sound and fury on a talking box signifying, well – what does it signify? All of these shows, from mudslide disasters of the century to dreary nudity-in-the-shower scenes in the Randburg house specially built for peeping lenses, are supposedly slice-of-life specials parading under the general label of reality TV. Reality it is not. Rather, each is a framed portrait of something that some team of media people consider to be authentic, unmediated, true, riveting, shocking, and naturally, marketable.
Human kind can bear a great deal of reality if it is packaged right. Advertisers like it too. And reality can be a great weapon in the arsenal of campaigners hoping to change the way the news media reflect social struggles. Just look at how reality videos of abuse coming out of Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq have played into the hands of antiwar protestors.
There is a long answer to support all of this, but rather than indulge in academic flimflam about the theory of framing, here’s a chilling story from real life. In former times, up to about two decades ago, I was a professional whitewater rafting guide and trainer of river guides. My outfit operated on the Tugela, Orange and other rivers, and one day we had a drowning on the rising Mkomazi River near Richmond in what was then Natal.
An inexperienced kayaker tackled a major rapid alone, without telling anyone, while we guides were supervising the group on a chicken run. By the time we realised he had gone off alone he was already floating face-down at the bottom of the rapid, his white helmet barely visible in the muddy torrent.
All efforts to revive him failed. It fell to me to paddle the body downstream in a two-man inflatable, but with the river beginning to flood we capsized wildly and I found myself groping after the whitefaced corpse as we tumbled along in the current. To lose a life was awful but to lose the body entirely would be shameful. Eventually I caught the corpse, which limply wrapped its arms around me in a moment more horrifying than anything in the film Deliverance, and manhandled it back into the raft.
The reporter who interviewed me next day was only interested in the fact that the dead man was an American and this could be bad for tourism. It wasn’t – our bookings shot up as adventurers perversely sought us out to prove that they could do it – but my experience of the accident and the media picture that emerged afterwards had almost nothing in common. True, a man died. But personal feelings had no place in the way news reports contextualised the event.
And for that matter, the real story of what was going on in the Mkomazi valley, the scene of mass devastation as Inkatha and the ANC battled over political turf, was not reported at all for many years to come – at least until “black-on-black” violence found its way onto the agenda of the news media. Journalists walked around with their frames held high, looking for other kinds of less politically sensitive stories. Traffic mayhem on the Richmond road was a popular theme.
Quite simply, the frames we apply make the story, not the other way around.
One has to say that today, wide-awake reality TV teams do not overlook private emotions. They probe for them. They expose them. I wouldn’t have had a chance following the river fatality if a tabloid TV crew with a passion for emotive bites had cornered me for a confession. The genre functions by framing intimacies as public events. That’s why it grabs and holds our attention as conventional documentaries never do because they deal with the dull externals, not the titillating secrets of our inner selves.
Even when the topic of a reality TV show is something like the spectacular eruption of a volcano, we relate best when the victims tell of their experiences. Yet it is the artificially created reality of Big Brother and Survivor that has proved to be the real winner in this genre.
We all love it, don’t we, when the spirit of “competition” in Survivor degenerates into vengeful tirades as the contestants prepare to vote each other into oblivion. Temporary alliances give way to backstabbing. People couple and then cheat on each other. Savagery just beneath the surface bursts out as the mask of sociability drops and people emerge as their “true” selves.
Media coverage and criticism of reality TV reflects two main attitudes towards the genre, both of which are pretty superficial. First, there is the cash-in syndrome, the readers-love-this-stuff-put-it-on-page-one abdication of news responsibility. After all, the shameless exhibitionism of the contestants is matched only by the blatant voyeurism of audiences, and both deserve what they get.
Columns and columns of pseudo-news are filled with what Big Bad Brad said behind his hand or did beneath the covers. This leads to the second major response – that reality TV is a kind of ethical study of people under duress, the anthill behind the glass, and we can learn a lot from it. Like we can about ant behaviour, for what that’s worth.
To me, reality TV is about mobilising the technology of the camera and sound equipment to convey immediacy. This has a lot in common with the earlier genre of cinema verité, a movement that began in the sixties when lightweight, compact 16mm cameras with portable sound equipment began to be used in rolling street interviews. Later the same technique found its way into exposés of the lives of the rich and famous. Now we have digicams.
The effect is one of spontaneity. But let’s not kid ourselves, reality is being framed all the same, deliberately and tellingly, to create a link between the audience, at one remove behind the cameraman, and the performers, be they Big Bad Brad or the victims of Hurricane Andrew. Both are menacing. We need to be aware of the dangers that surround us, and prepared to deal with them. It’s really handy (and fascinating) to watch other people trying to cope and learn what lessons we can.
Like the audiences of Greek classic drama or medieval morality plays, the audience occupies a privileged moral position from which it can observe and judge how people behave, then smugly retreat back to normal (unmediated) life to gossip around the coffee machine at work.
Reality misrules, OK?