We watch reality TV shows to see a narrative emerge from the daily flux
One of the hallmarks of our post-modern age is its ability to recycle anything and everything. Heart of Darkness was a key modernist text about barbarism in colonial Africa; now it is the title of a computer game. And Big Brother was the invention of the savagely disillusioned George Orwell in his dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, his nightmare of a world in which everyone was under constant surveillance by the authorities. Now Big Brother is a “reality TV” show and the idea of the ever-watching camera has become the central concept of a new form of entertainment. Tragedy is on its way to becoming farce.
Big Brother, the television programme, has burst on to South African screens with a blaze of hype. Born in Holland, the idea has now spawned about 40 similar programmes around the world. There are also, of course, the Survivor-type shows that have taken off in many places: a group of people are dumped in a remote place and have to struggle against Mother Nature and each other to survive. But the fascination of Big Brother is its ordinariness: these are people more or less like you and me, not actors, not stars (though some may become celebrities), and the challenges they face, incarcerated in a house together for a few months, are the ordinary human problems of how to get on with each other.
Except that it’s a game, and there will be a winner at the end and not necessarily the person who is best at interpersonal relations. It is more likely to be the person who is best at manipulating the others, making sure that he or she is not the one voted out of the house by the others and the public. Wrong-footing his or her housemates, making them look bad or at least less interesting, is probably a more useful skill in this context than washing dishes or preparing food.
The whole Big Brother concept has been damned in many quarters overseas for encouraging the basest human instincts our voyeurism and our sadism. Which perhaps it does, but then it has that in common with a huge range of popular entertainments, as well as some of the most elevated art (and, probably, the news). Many cultural artefacts play on exactly those drives, perhaps offering a forum in which they can be exercised without too much social damage. This is the realm of fantasy, where anything is possible and everything is permitted.
Yet the people in Big Brother are real people, not fictional characters. And that is an essential part of the appeal for the viewing public. It seems that art forms have become polarised in the post-modern world: we want outright fantasy, like Planet of the Apes, or we want reality itself. Not for us the conscientious realism of the high Victorian novel, for instance, in which the real world is represented in fictional form, with an attempt to replicate its complexities and its nuances. We no longer need fiction to provide a window on reality, to tell us who we are and what we want. The appeal of “based on a true story” is immense, as any movie promoter will attest. How much greater, then, is the appeal of a truly true story, let alone one unfolding before our very eyes?
In an essay on autobiography, poet and critic Craig Raine notes: “With fiction, the reader constantly asks why? Autobiography apparently answers the question before it can be asked: incidents, details, are included because they happened.” The straightforward depiction of reality need not justify itself the way a work of imagination would. It does not have to strain for verisimilitude. It simply is. That is the appeal of reality TV as opposed to a soap opera (which is bizarrely surreal, anyway) or a sitcom (which is formulaic).
But then that is the appeal of pornography as well. Whatever titillation one may get from a lavishly filmed love scene in a movie, with its golden lighting and tactful camera angles, one still feels the distancing effect of the aesthetic. It may be marvellously convincing, even moving, but we know it has been contrived, set up, invented. The actors are pretending. Pornography, on the other hand, has the fascination of the real: this is really happening, these people really did this to each other.
Or is it really so simple? The reality of Big Brother (or pornography) is not entirely unmediated. In fact, the processes of fiction are visible in Big Brother. Yes, the people are real, but the space is fictional: the situation is artificial. The Big Brother house is no more real than a set on a stage, and the rules governing the lives of the participants act in a way similar to the conventions of fiction. It is rather like a novel in progress: take some elements from real life, some real people (or aspects of them), real situations or events, and then place them in a fictional space, an experimental or hypothetical space. Ask “what if?” and allow these elements to develop in unforeseen directions. That’s exactly what is happening in Big Brother.
The fact that the contestants are real people with lives outside the frame, as it were, of the programme, doesn’t necessarily make them any less fictional. Once they’re in the frame, that’s all we see. Moreover, it could be argued that all personality is a performance, any self a role developed in interaction with others. We all have personas that represent aspects of our total selves; the whole self is not visible at any one time. The people on Big Brother have been extracted from their non-televisual lives and they are in the process of turning into characters before our very eyes.
And there is a large degree of selection taking place, too, from the choice of candidates to the editing of the footage. The people on the show have been carefully chosen to fulfil a range of demographic and dramatic requirements. And what most of us see will be selected. It is a safe bet that few viewers will want to watch 24 hours a day of 12 people in a house. One may want to dip in and out, catch glimpses of what is going on, but most interest will be focused on the edited digests of the day’s events, the rambling flux of the quotidian boiled down to half an hour’s worth of viewing each day, and then reduced further to half an hour a week. Which, again, is exactly what fiction does: it selects from the inchoate flow of life and then shapes it into some kind of form, a form in which patterns will emerge, significances will develop.
That is what we are waiting to see. Not just the first naked body, the burgeoning love affair or the furtive sex, the beginnings of friction between these characters though these are all things our voyeurism demands. We want to see a narrative emerge from the ordinariness of the daily flux, see our reality returned to us with some kind of shape, which is the lure of fiction. By voting for the expulsion of one or other candidate we can even pretend we are playing a part in the shaping of that reality, that we have some control and that is all most of us ask of life anyway.