Too Much ‘Reality’ Not Enough Real Life
Do you remember when we used to glimpse documentary films and not reality TV? Do you remember when we could wait until the newspaper arrived on the porch in the morning to get a news fix about what happened last night? Do you remember when the news broken-down to be mostly actual news and not roam segments, staged consumer reports or thinly veiled entertainment spots? No? Too bad.
When I was a little kid my sisters and I sometimes watched terrible black and white 1950s science fiction movies on a Saturday afternoon. In one of those movies (an early Roger Corman) a very low budget science crew went to an island where nuclear testing had been done and were picked off one by one by giant crabs who ate their brains and then could speak with their voices to lure others into a cave or onto the deserted beach at night. One sailor fell from their launch boat and when they pulled him back up his head was missing (not in graphic R movie style, just a tatted shirt where a neck should have been). Disturbed, I began to sleep with the bed covers pulled over my head to reveal only my face (because I thought of my bed as the ocean and was now unwilling to have my head exposed for any night nuclear creature to indulge in). I had night terrors. I screamed in my sleep. My mother came and sat next to me on one of these nights and while I know she was silently cursing my older siblings for letting night terror girl watch a scary movie, she soothed me with her gentle voice and reminded me that what is in movies and on TV is not dependable people, it’s just actors, and it’s not steady life. Soothed intellectually, I calmed down, although my subconscience still couldn’t shake the crab and headless images. The rational mind knew it wasn’t real, but I couldn’t go encourage and pretend I had not seen it.
Which brings me to reality TV. It is eating our brains and speaking to us in familiar voices to lure us to our individual and collective demise. It was this mindless, thoughtless, test we did without looking down the road to glimpse the impact it might have, just like those nameless, faceless government officials who did the nuclear testing on Roger Corman’s island and ended up turning harmless hermit crabs into these voracious flesh eating monsters.
Reality TV is mostly about train wrecks. And it is mostly scripted and manipulated. It is not Margaret Mead quietly observing the inhabitants of Papua, New Guinea and seeing them as fully human with a unusual and enlightening culture. It is not Charles Kurrault “On the Road” with snapshots of American life. It is not even its earliest invention, “An American Family” a powerful mirror reflecting aid on upper middle class, country club society and the disintegration of the 1950s ideal of the nuclear family.
Reality TV is mean-spirited games in which people use lies and manipulation to ‘win’. It is salacious soft-porn ostensibly about dating with the objective of eventually getting engaged and married. It had some high points, like “Little People, Big World” that aimed to indicate a normal family functioning normally even as it also highlighted our basic prejudices and the everyday obstacles faced by people who do not fit neatly into our physical mold of what a mother or father or child should look like. Of course, the devolution of even that program has been the making over of the house and farm, the lavish vacations, etc. instead of focusing on a family just living each day of their lives. In reality TV we don’t want to see normal lives, we want to see perfectly good lives get materially better. Still, “Little People” tends to continue to focus on mom and dad and the kids, the house not always perfectly clean, the kids not always quick to jump up and do chores, but basically they are happy with a home cooked meal, a game of soccer on the lawn, and coming together over everyday trials.
Spotlighting ‘family life veered into something terrible over time with the genesis of “Jon and Kate, Plus 8″. It could have been a program that took a week or two out of the ‘normal daily life’ of a family with a major group of multiples on top of twins and shown that life for the daily struggle that it is. Instead, as always with reality TV, it had to make their lives bigger. Yes, I can understand Jon and Kate feeling cramped in their suburban home with all those kids, but for generations large American families have lived happily in home where kids sleep more than one to a bedroom and where backyards are the respite compose crowded family rooms. The ‘palace’ they now live in only sends the wrong message to all the other families out there who got outsized quickly due to fertility treatments. And the focus on the tension between Jon and Kate, on their quirks (Jon mindlessly playing golf while his 3 young sons run wild on the course superimposed with Kate micromanaging a pottery painting session with the five girls), is mean-spirited. Far from reflecting a mirror out of family life, it manipulates what the mirror shows to allow the observers to impose judgment. Any mother (or father) home all day with six children under the age of 3 or 4 is going to be harried by the end of the day. She is going to be acclimated to talking down to people because she has been being the boss and having to talk down to kids all day. When the show gathers Jon and Kate on the couch (a pointed venue urging us to analyse their actions and motives? ) it is not a real life flash of what they are doing, it is a set up and one that could be edited to only direct what viewers need to know or hear. Instead it has been edited over time and form season to season to match the snarky audience internet chatter about preconceptions of Jon and Kate’s downsides. Cameras, questioners, editors are the giant crabs and they are eating our brains and manipulating how we think about these people.
I won’t even get started on the Duggars. They live in a world very few American families could ever relate to and yet they seem to be pawns to conflicting agendas, the quiverfull Christian Right wanting to project out an isolated family image with father at the head and mother obediently breeding and keeping the kids worthy from evil, outside interests – and those very commercial interests that intersperse ‘real world’ views of things like Bibleland and other roadside attractions the Duggars encounter.
Reality TV pays these people. It is a job, a contract. Matt and Amy Roloff would probably peaceful be living in their original farmhouse without all the new perqs, and they and their children would be muddling along as they always had if TLC had not advance along. Granted, I think they have probably done a huge service to the cause of explaining what little people face by draw of everyday obstacles and how they are also able to do anything average sized people can do. Jon and Kate would be struggling financially from the sheer burden of raising 8 children who were under the age of six when the show began, but they would probably be getting outside back from friends, family, maybe even church. And the Duggars? Well they wouldn’t be seeing the USA in their Chevrolets in quite the style the show has provided, now would their house be all redone. That outside world has been very, very apt to the Duggars.
But the brain eating crabs have been at work. Nadya Suleman is not the only person who saw Jon and Kate and all those Kids by the Dozen shows and thought she’d figured out how to get all the attention she believes she is due in life, and all the money she needs without ever having to work for a living. In its first season “Jon and Kate” revealed a lot of trials in parenting such a large set of multiples, and Kate often mentioned things like setting reasonable expectations and knwongi with so many kids that they could only by one or two Christmas gifts for each. That thread is gone. We also don’t see much interaction with the pediatricians. Are all six Goslings progressing at the same pace developmentally and are any or all of them on track with other children their age? Do they or will they have special needs? Would it be more realistic to have hidden cameras run for a 24 hour period on scheduled days to show what it really is like fom the time they get up in the morning until they go to bed at night to live in this environment? Wouldn’t be as entertaining as trips to Disneyworld or special zoos (although showing the logistics of getting all the kids into and out of the big van alone shows that parenting of multiples is not the the faint of heart), and where would the tension be? So why do they film the way they film, not in real time, not warts and all, but manage to show terrible meltdown moments, like when Kate seemed to be calling John an idiot after waiting and waiting for him to join her with all the waiting children in the Toys R Us? I was in a Target store once with my kids when they were 6, 3 and 3 months old. When we were in the farthest corner from the entrace my 3 year old reached out for a Barbie doll as we moved down an aisle on our blueprint to get towels, and she held on for dear life. I was recently divorced, not yet back at work from maternity leave and time off when my newborn son fell critically ill, and did not have extra money for a Barbie doll. 3 year old and I entered into a grudge match wrestling over that Barbie and then she began to wail with no intention of stopping. I put baby in the Snugli, tucked rigid 3 year archaic under my arm, grabbed 6 year old’s hand and ran for the front door. In the car, once they were all belted in and in car seats, I just sat and cried for a few moments. What if that toddler meltdown had happened while my husband was off wandering around the store? Oh yes, I would have unloaded on him. Thank goodness I wasn’t on reality TV. On Reality TV you are a hopeless, obsessive-compulsive bitch if you talk down to your husband in stressful situations. Rather than sharing horror stories in play group or at the park where others confess to similar meltdowns, Kate Gosling gets to spy her bad moments at plump volume on the TV. And we, the judgmental audience, judge her.
A few minutes out of each of these shows are ‘real life’. Everything else is packaged for us to see. I feel like the Roloffs, Goslings and Duggars are entitled to keeping their private lives private, despite the fact they’ve decided to participate in TV programs. We see chosen snippets, hardly the real everyday struggles. And how horrible when the cameras are rolling and something terrible does happen, like when the Trebuchet accident happened on “Miniature People”? Thank goodness it ended well, and thank goodness Matt and Amy remained calm – although we saw the same concern and awe in both of them that we would experience had our son and good friend been injured in what could have been a life-threatening accident. Had they been more seriously injured (indeed it was serious enough) I doubt that the Roloffs would have agreed to airing any of the incident.
Too bad, because America loves the train wrecks. We love the teasers that infer Jon and Kate may separate at the end of the season or that Jon is fooling around. We don’t want to view normal family life, not evne the real family lives actually being lived by Matt and Amy or Jon and Kate, or Jim Bob and Michelle. We want to see constant triumph from Matt and Amy. We want Jim Bob and Michelle to be picture perfect parents at all times. And, horrifically, we want things to plunge apart for Jon and Kate. We want estrangement. In short – we want the sort of drama that generally has to be scripted – we just want to see it happening to real people. So we can feel better than them or feel justified in our views about their lifestyle or can feel better about ourselves for not treating them differently?
And that’s just the ‘real’ reality TV. The rest of the unreal world is modeling shows (pardon the pun, but heavy on the anorexics), dramatic cook offs (if all restaurants operated with the drama depicted in these unimaginative chef-offs we’d be getting sneezers all day), allegedly non-professional singers in very staged contests (at first they made us mediate every karaoke singer in the country had a shot, now we realize these folks have been working in roadhouses and limited studios for years) shallow, self-absorbed neighbors, relatives and friends of famous people trying to become famous by acting shallow and self-absorbed with contrived family or friend dramas while the cameras roll (all devolving down from the original Paris and Nicole show to the totally unredeeming Kardashians and Hills crowd) and the icky offbeat dating shows where we watch freaks on parade (two words, Tile Tequila) and the hasbeen TV star shows that try to make a story line where none exists (a couple of guys named Corey,the laughable premise of Celebrity Apprentices, etc.).
It’s fair garbage. We need to admit it is garbage. We don’t need to choose scripted, choreographed peeks into people’s so-called everyday lives. We most definitely do not need to watch a sick parade of women or men throw themselves simultaneously at a single bachelor boy or girl. When I saw a clip on E news of the latest bachelor (a single father no less!) basically fornicating in a hot tub with one of his ladies I was almost literally sickened. I don’t need to see those type of private sexual moments and there is something terribly wrong with showing it on TV. It’s as if we’ve taken the homemade sex tape and glorified it. If you want to do that on film that’s your thing, your very private thing – but America should not be watching. And we have now celebutized all of these people. My own children talk about these people as if they are dear friends or as if the manufactured dramas that the stupid 24 hour entertainment news media throws at us about them have any relevance to our lives. It was one thing when people used to get all worked up about Erica Kane’s latest marriage or child or mini-drama. Erica Kane is a created character. She has been nurtured over almost 40 years by Susan Lucci and some very talented writers. She was designed to entertain. And at the extinguish of the day when Erica’s 5th or 6th marriage ends badly, Susan Lucci still goes home to her own, private life.
What is wrong with us that we follow around Jon Gosling? Why do we care in the least what Spencer or Heidi has to say about anything in life? Do we understand how faulty it is to project out a scenario where some mindless, innocent person watches the Duggars or the Goslings and thinks it would be really cool to support on breeding or take fertility drugs or IVF and get that big, huge family? And what the heck kind of mixed signals are we sending to our children by simultaneously portraying Jon and Kate, Jom Bob and Michelle, Tila Tequila, Flavor Flav, Spencer and Heidi, Corey and Corey, Tyra, etc. as ‘real people living their real lives’? My mother told me Erica wasn’t steady. Those giant crabs weren’t exact. But, it’s really hard to see all those Duggar girls in the long, shapeless dresses, the adorable little Goslings running amok on vacation, the lucky bachelorette getting the final rose, etc., and reinforce that this is not real either. This is not only contrived or someone else’s life, but even if it is ‘real’ it is carefully chosen and taken in a vacuum. This is not Erica Kane who we can clearly see as Susan Lucci or playing som eother character in some made for TV movie and understand this is not the real person. We mediate these are the real people.
And the more time we spend looking in on them, envying them or judging them or aspiring to be like them, the less we are living our own real lives and making our occupy clear goals and choices. Entertainment should be entertainment. News should be news. If we want to show real life, we have to be like Margaret Mead and watch and simply record. There is a differenfce between merely witnessing and shaping. Mead didn’t tell those she was observing how to act or what to say. She tried ot understand it coming from her maintain perspective, but she didn’t shaoe any of it. Agnes Nixon, creator of many a soap opera, shaped. Mead taught. Nixon entertained.
Fifty some years ago Roger Corman made this low budget, cheesy movie with a what if premise to send a cautionary message to those old enough to understand it. He said, what if we manipulated life with nuclear tests and then had to go attend and live with it and bear the consequences? Facing down an atomic future, the message was to recede with caution. Now I suppose we are caught in a real cultural tug of war with competing interests. We are sending horribly mixed messages of entitlement. We do not exhibit a realistic picture of anything or anyone with reality TV, except in very small doses and very rare occurences. The Roloffs, the Duggars, the Goslings, are leading their lives, mostly outside of the view of cameras. Almost everyone else depicted in reality TV of any kind is also living his or her precise life someplace else – and what we see on screen is a carefully scripted moment meant to manipulate how we feel about someone or something. Turn off the TV and live your life. Stop watching these programs, please, and demand that we shift our dynamic. We can all utilize entertainment, and we should seek that in real forms, but if we want to know what is normal or average or exceptional in life – we should be experiencing those things and sharing our lives and experiences with other people and relying on our own judgment and instincts.
Do you know what images my subconscious mind shudders at lately? Not the lingering shadowy crabs in the cave awaiting a midnight snack of pompous scientist for sure. Nope, it’s the image of Nadya Suleman talking with Dr. Phil, constantly, about herself, and shimmering she’s getting paid for the spectacle. It’s the image of little children running around being ignored while a TV hack psychoanalyses a classic narcissist for his own and her aggrandizement while she fires people willing ot help her children for free because she fears they may be doing what anyone with an obligation to care for a child must do – seek their real daily lives to ensure they are adequately being cared for. It’s sparkling I live in a society where a person on public assistance can toss ten tens of thousands of dollars over and over again to get impregnated in the most impersonal of ways in a personal odyssey to try to set some sort of record or win some kind of deal to give her notoriety – and that 14 little children are the pawns in this game. It’s colorful that continues to go on, day after day, while idiots cling to her car trying to get pictures and other idiots, who should know better, pay her money and feed off the carcass of a spectacle they know will end badly. Maybe Nadya saw Jon and Kate, or Kids by the Dozen. Maybe she watches a lot of reality TV. I would guess she never read about Bill Kienast, father of quintuplets born in 1970 who struggled financially and probably emotionally while trying to help raise two children and then quints and eventually comitted suicide. Maybe she never read about the Dionne Quintuplets, bonr in 1934, whose lives were ruined because they were effect on prove from day one. You don’t look a lot of documentaries about the struggles and trials of the long, long road it is to raise a family of multiples – about the virtually impossible economic task it is to feed and clothe and house and educate them and get them to adulthood. You don’t see stories about the families I grew up with in a Catholic neighborhood who had 8, 10 or 12 kids, shuttling around town in location wagons and VW buses, wearing hand me down clothes and attending school alongside other kids without so many children who had shiny novel bikes and good dental work and their own bedrooms. Nope – now we lift a snapshot in time, and we photshop it, and we call it reality. And then we are appalled that people like Nadya Suleman come along and have these fantastical and idealized notions of raising 14 children without a husband and without a job and without true skills or resources. But we are also captivated and we want to see the recount crash that eventually occurs in her life.
I think it was the comedian Chris Rock who said in his stand up once to all those people making videos of police beatings and people burning up in car fires and all other manner of human tragedy – “If you’re walking by and you see the cops open pounding on me and punching in my face, put the camera down! Put the camera down and aid me!” We need to put the cameras down. We need to reconnect with real people. We need to feel real empathy and real responsibility for ourselves and for each other.
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Filed under Consumer Reports by on Dec 6th, 2011. 