Still Trying To Explain The Gap In Reality

 I already mentioned professional wrestling as disrupting our notions of truth and reality. Today, it is reality TV.

Bookforum published Time to Face Reality A.S. Hamrah's review, Emily Nussbaum charts the history of a TV phenomenon.

I never watched much reality TV, probably a couple episodes of Cops. I have to say Real Housewives of Atlanta was popular in prison. I think it had to do with the breast implants. Come to think of it, these were also popular: Cheaters and Maury. I never liked their cruelty or mendacity. Reading this made me like them even less:

Cue the Sun! puts this in a new perspective. Despite Nussbaum’s gleeful fascination with the genre, she also exhaustively exposes how reality TV made producers wealthy while they exploited their casts and the people who worked on their shows, non-union labor all. The company I worked for was run the same way. What reality TV did was inscribe this system into a particular form of television, combining the way its workers were exploited with the way its cast members were taken advantage of on camera and off, and then after the shows were over. Reality TV has always been more about reunions than unions. 

But this is where today's problems with people thinking the real world is unreal, where Trump's incapacity for the truth is greeted with an "Aw shucks, that's just his way of shaking things up."

The phoniness and manipulation seem obvious now. At the time the differences between the real and the fake were not as apparent, though they were subjects of controversy, especially in their more racist forms. Today it is almost gauche to point out that things were not as real as they were meant to be seen. The fakeness of reality TV is a truism that supposedly only bothers the unsophisticated. Nussbaum’s book works hard to make distinctions between the naive viewers of yore and the wised-up reality-TV gluttons of today, enlightened superfans who know what’s what and revel in artifice. 

Political phoniness gets people killed, and lives ruined for the selfish pursuit of power, not the public's good. political manipulation is propaganda. True believers in the phoniness or the manipulation are derelict in their duties as citizens, dupes, or complicit in the harm done to the nation. Probably all of the above.

And what the original essay says about reality TV I hear echoes in our political culture:

At the same time—here comes the tricky part—you have to give yourself over to its unreality, which you then accept as another form of reality that is not dissimilar from what the producers wanted you to believe in the first place. I call this the double twist, in which self-awareness is enough of a pardon for wasting time and bad taste. In the double twist, liking something you know is bad becomes smart if you think you know how it works. Here, the dated concept of the guilty pleasure is obviated by performative stanning, and we see once again how fandom pretends to elide all the market research, focus grouping, and brand analysis that goes into telling the superfans how smart they are for liking the latest iteration of whatever it is they already liked. 

Turn it all off, people.  Reality TV and its political version, Fox News. Reality is not pleasant. I know that maybe even better than you do. There was a time it buried me in despondency and nihilism. The only way I have managed to get back on my feet was to find out what mattered to me and defend it against the ugliness that once overwhelmed me. We can be better than what TV producers and political consultants want us to be.

sch 7/7