As Gilles Deleuze says in Negotiations: 1972-1990, "It's
rather worrying that there's an enthusiastic audience that
thinks it's watching some cultural activity when it sees two
men competing to make a word with nine letters." O but how
the televisionary bric-a-brac of information dissemination has changed
since the death of this eminent philosopher and reclusive critic.
We have been launched into a new era of "dynamic television"
that postures itself as showcasing a representative slice of our
mundane (re)public, and by devising entire television programs on
the basis of our messy particulars and processes toward final products.
Some might say that television has entered the golden age of bringing
the quotidian struggles of the masses to the masses rather than
to rely on the fantastical imagery of impossibly "beautiful"
people and their "rich-people" problems that do not
reach us. I, however, will argue a different point; that in fact
"reality television" can bear no purchase on the real
which is otherwise distilled into the reinforced stereotypical images
and tropes the more sensibly dynamic and cavalier among us have
come to despise. What is real about "reality television" is precisely the codification and dissemination of aseptic images
meant to be embraced by the gibbering consumer public, labouring
under the heinous assumption that a totality of consumers will form
neatly packaged universalizable units in a global tribe of consensus
for the ease of ubiquitous marketeering machines.
To observe just how asinine this suppurating
phenomenon actually is, let us return to the source of our critique:
the reality television shows themselves. By plopping ourselves before
the image/code-dispensing machine, suffering the ignominy of vomit-inducing
reality-TV, we can discover just how low the apex of common culture
actually is. For the ease of classification, we reduce the categories
of reality television programming into a typology: home improvement,
competitive dating, and the artificial creation of popularized idols.
Home Improvement
Shows of this stripe include the infamous "repressed neighbours
manifest their deep-seated resentment for each other by a muted
strategy of revenge to defile another's home décor
with ridiculous and cheap interior design" and "overt
therapy strategy to cure afflicted persons of collection fetishism
and pack-ratism through a recrudescent Christian strategy of purging
possessions toward absolute minimalism." Shows of either type
usually feature sexpot organizers/narrators and hunky carpenters
with rippling physiques. Personal clashes between the mainstay characters
function as a means of depicting predictable sexual tensions that
purposely remain unresolved to ensure audience loyalty. The candidates
selected for either interior design detail or reduction of personal
possessions are also of a predictably low calibre, common Joes and
Janes as semi-bourgeois middle-class nobodies with very little to
offer this world but mundane clerical labour. Meant to appeal to
a common social denominator, the selection of candidates for these
home improvement projects must have as little character as possible
and their values must be conformist to the point of complete anonymity.
Muting all eccentricities is essential to the continuance of these
programs, for differences of character are only allowable under
very limited constraints in order not to inflame the xenophobic
and fickle audience that could just as easily switch to another
reality television program of a similar kind. It is for this reason
that said home improvement programs will not wander outside its
selected demographic to broadcast from your local ghetto slum.
What is the appeal of programs of
this nature, beyond the eye-candy of the hosts and mainstay labourers?
Presumably, the average audience exists in this blurred average
income bracket and can relate to the travails of the candidates
by way of constitutive misrecognition. Moreover, the making over
of a house is a quick time slice for development-metamorphosis stories
that only take an hour to bring to term; that is, these shows are
always ready to recap the before and after details of the house
under transformation, the audience being willing suckers for non-radical
and minor consequence juxtaposition. In addition, it gives cubicle
jockeys in the audience an intimate look at physical labour without
the responsibility of actually performing it. This effectively assuages
the guilt of getting fatter and weaker in a non-active lifestyle,
and gives the slim margin of hope that one day camera crews will
descend upon their modest middle-income shanties in directing them
to engage in home renovation projects they themselves are not likely
to do. In being directed to renovate one's neighbour's
house, one is also absolved of any responsibility to improve upon
one's own home, and gives one the opportunity to seize all
those borrowed items never returned, or to snoop around for some
dirt to be used as neighbour-to-neighbour political leverage at
a later date.
In sum, it is just dandy for the audience to sit and be deluged
by images of labour and vicarious neighbour revenge, as well as
being the voyeur in the spectacle of watching as neighbours pretend
to fawn over their new décor while seething inside. It sends
the clear message that home renovation is only worthwhile under
strict conditions: that it be televised, that sexy people oversee
the project, and if the renovation is being done to someone else.
Competitive Dating
We all remember the scene in Merchant of Venice when Portia entertains
the eligible suitors for her hand by way of a competition to choose
the right casket. The only truly modern component of popular reality
dating programs is that we are now televising our embarrassing failures.
There are shows that purposely mismatch partners for laughs, but
most of these shows operate under the tacit assumption that sex
will result of a successful union, which is why these shows make
it their goal to invite the participants in going on dates which
involve hot-tubbing and dinners saturated in sexual innuendo. Shows
of this type are concise and non-flashy versions of the multiple-partner
selection by elimination dating programs. The first type is honestly
very stupid, appealing to a very low brow audience, but the latter
type operates by a mixture of vapid soap opera decadence, predictable
nail-biting suspense through the means of prolonged camera shots
of silence and close-ups on the emotional transformation of the
face during the tension of elimination. There will either be an
eligible prince- or princess-type, removed from their element and
placed in a luxurious mansion all for the purpose of an ego-war
between a kludge of competitive suitors. What is characteristically
asinine about this process--apart from the completely impersonal
retrograde depiction of mate selection to the dark period pre-feminism--is
that the competitors are essentially the same: moderately well-to-do,
conventionally attractive individuals who only differ slightly,
but are all equally vacuous beasts insofar as they deign to participate
in such a demeaning activity. The end result, sometimes a marriage
based on very little substantive connection, is achieved by a process
of negative determination, or elimination, based on a superficial
selection criteria. Competitive dating is Hegelianism without the
big words, brought down to the level of pure socio-biological idiocy.
Of course, shows like these appeal to those who live vicariously
through the characters, and whose mummies and daddies never told
them they were special. Worse yet are the variations on this theme
where the eligible bachelor is depicted as a millionaire, the stench
of money attracting all sorts of vapid valley girl gold diggers
who are willing to overlook fundamental character flaws to get at
the riches. And then, in the end, the carpet of dreamy riches are
pulled out, and the winner must be resigned to the prize--a
pauper marketed by a lie--and then must be forced to reevaluate
her priorities if the feeling of being duped is not too overpowering.
Apart from depicting women in this unsavoury, submissive manner
as trophy wives in training, willing to debase themselves for a
life of comfort, it is just plain stupid and unentertaining to those
who have even one last vestige of personal integrity. The only real
function it may serve is for either Gibbonesque cultural physicians
in need of finding more symptoms of social decline, or for dribbling
tarts who need a replacement for their
baffling fixation on the Royal Family.
The
Artificial Manufacture of Popular Idols
To what lengths would you go in debasing yourself just to be on
television? The guiding principle in all reality television, to
greater and lesser extent, is the price one sets on one's
own integrity. Reality television has confirmed for us just how
low that price actually is, and one of its creature manifestations
is the competitions to determine something so paltry and ephemeral
as pop star status.
Can innate talent be discovered, manufactured,
and manicured for mass production? There is solid diabolical genius
behind the mandarins who invented these talent-search competitions,
for who knew that televising a usually closed-door process of selection
could gain such ratings? No longer just sitting and waiting for
real talent to emerge, these teams of talent scouts scour every
city in search for that one malleable individual with some conventional
level of singing talent who can be metamorphosized into a popular
phenomenon. By rifling through the hopeless wannabes, having a few
laughs at the embarrassment of others who try and fail, being snippy
and exhibiting low-level critical wit, shows of this kind succeed
in abiding by a Frankenstein principle: from a collection of parts,
we can build you. Ah, what monsters these pop icons be! Constructed
by the popular demands of the mediocre music industry that creates
chart-busters by the dozen only for these to be replaced in short
time by the next new phenomenon, the status quo is championed yet
again! Let all difference and real talent step aside! The pop-icon
making machine will only admit to yet another series of repetitions
guaranteed to gain popularity due to a very fascistically organized
marketing machine.
After we suffered the return of the Christian choir through boy-
and girl-bands, the trend has been to market single-act talent,
broadly and loosely defined. Who are the usual suspects that win
these monotonous contests but ethnic minorities, which reinforces
a wretchedly archaic stereotype that the only means of success for
these groups is through music and athletics. Muted racism equals
ratings.
What has reality television taught us? Obsession with the minutiae
of our very mundane existence, recast into a plasticized setting,
starring the average individual who comes to represent the idealized
being to be transmitted as culture-code, all culminate to form the
rigid designation of icono-classes: become that sign which is sold,
for what is being sold is attainable. This new strategy of appealing
to the attainable ideal by narcissistically reflecting back to the
masses the averageness it so desires in this post-terror media society
creates new divisions. True difference is marched up to the saccharin
slaughter bench of common normalcy, and made to submit under the
axe of a social image blended to the point of homogeneity. Reality
television succeeds where previous forms did not: in leveling the
summits of individual difference, and by merging the celebrity and
the average nobody into a cohesive mid-point unit--the creature
that produces what it consumes, and distributes a diluted system
of values under a more severe and surreptitious moral set that has
its fount on the extreme right. Marketing cruel infantilism to the
mores has never been more profitable as the tired old wheel of the
dialectic keeps turning.
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