This article, by the intelligent and culturally engaged Amanda Hess, is a series of short essays about the way that fan culture has affected (infected?) election politics. The theme I am drawn to jump off from is the mirror between reality TV subject and the public. Namely, if any member of the public can easily use what’s happening around them (‘reality’) to create content for the purpose of creating a personal brand, then who is creating who? Who is creating a bigger splash, the subject of a news item or those that take it and use it for their own brand? Who is the beneficiary here, e.g. are Marianne Williamson’s policy proposals during a debate performance as valuable to her as the memes they inspire are to the content creators? Is reality TV reinvigorating the subject/object question or just turning the deconstructionist philosophy of post-modernism into another shitshow?
Reality TV is the stone in the pond, allowed to exist through technological advances in digital editing, photography and storage. Docu-soaps in particular set the mold for the personal ‘brand’ (Kardashians being the penultimate example). This stone lands in the pond of our cultural consciousness and ripples out with concentric rings of energy traveling roughly at the speed that tech developers can produce platforms and the public can apply to the building of their own reality TV character brand. Through these platforms the general public creates their own reality TV persona’s. Some are purposeful, some are viral accidents. Influencers, kidflueners, YouTube stars, viral sensations et cetera all use the same tool kit that we use for creating reality TV personas for our shows. Capture, curate, release, then hope for ratings.
The best moments in making reality TV is when you find a moment that can be its own tee shirt. These are almost never the planned moments. As a reality TV editor there is tremendous power and opportunity to unearth these moments. A co-worker called a ‘story producer’ tells or writes a short description of the scene as it’s been shot – it may go something like: this scene is about Jack slipping on a banana peel. Then they give you a rough version of the scene, which we call a stringout in the form of a program file in the digital editing tool we use called AVID and appears as a linear timeline of video clips. Depending on the culture of the show’s workplace this stringout will be a rough compilation of clips important to the scene, or a concise sequential rough cut, or occasionally an editor will just be given all the shot footage with only a vague idea of what they are to focus on (e.g.: Tommy has fight with Louise about the library book). A good editor always makes more than they are given. The stringout is the blank tee shirt, the editors job is to find the words for the tee shirt.
As a ‘Self’ reality TV subjects are as complex and varied as all humans have the potential to be. Let’s use the Villain character as an example. The Villain of a docudrama or summer dating show is likely no more flawed than your average desperately thirsty 24 year old. However through our centrifuge in the TV lab we have spun out only the slice of the personality pie that we wish to present; by the time the show gets to air we have selected just the tiniest sliver of the total person for viewing. All of us have the potential to be mean, biting, angry, coarse, dismissive, or disparaging. If a camera was on us for a day we might in brief flashes exhibit all of these unflattering characteristics. Put us in emotionally challenging situations and add insecurity, alcohol and a healthy dose of producers’ wile and you are almost guaranteed to get a little shade. Now imagine a clever editor takes only these handful of moments and artfully arranges a convincing story using only your worst moments from the day. What has happened is we have taken a normal flawed human and used only the images and sounds and situations that accentuate the qualities of a villain. We have hybridized through generations of cutting, splicing and revising until we have grown a character with the exact attributes for the particular flower arrangement we wish to present to the audience. What we do is is like junk food chemistry, we manufacture the flavor crystals and we put them on your snacks and you cant stop eating.
Donald Trump is a wonderful case study in this. The President we have is a persona built by reality TV in exactly the way I have just described. He believes himself to be a successful businessman, even though the facts do not support this. But, because he has seen himself on the TV screen being a successful businessman and has internalized this character to such a degree that he does not remember that Mark Burnett created the character for a reality TV show called The Apprentice. He may have thought to himself that he is a successful businessman before the show, but it was Mark Burnett and the reality TV machine that created the character that Donald Trump now lives and believes is his ‘Self’. Those that support him believe the Apprentice character is Donald Trump too, but they would not understand the pre-Apprentice Donald at all: The legitimacy thirsty try too hard cootie carrying bankrupt socialite alleged-rapist con-man of Park Avenue. As a creator of reality TV I know for a fact that I could have created an alternate show called The Flop that would have depicted the same person, with the same footage that would have painted Donald Trump as a bumbling, arrogant con man who can’t help but fail. I think Comedy Central or Funny or Die would pay a ton of money to own that show and they wouldn’t have to shoot a lick of new material.
Does Donald Trump know that his persona is enmeshed in this kind of deconstructionist trap? It’s trap where the finger’s point imagines it is touching its own point just because there is a mirror in the mind. It can make you crazy if you think too hard about it. Trump or any other reality TV character might struggle to distinguish his original Self from the one that is actually flavor crystals from the TV chemistry lab. Eventually the Self of a reality TV star becomes a mixture of his nature and the way he has been nurtured in the petri-dish of media exposure. For many of us the ‘who’ one is, is fluid through time anyway. Events are assigned different meanings (or not) as we get further from them. Thanksgiving is a family dinner between benevolent European freedom fighters and welcoming natives… or it is Gentrification: the Holocaust Edition. It depends what version of reality you choose to focus on in the edit bay. Reality TV allows us a text to dissect and therefor demonstrates the difficulty in pinning down the thing called Reality.
The reality TV star lives two realities – their remembrance of their own experiences and the depiction of those experiences as shared with the public on the screen. The subjects understand that the TV factory foreshortens their physical existence in a way that distorts the actual lived experience as they remember it. Reddit and Twitter and Instagram are full of insider commentary on any given episode. On these platforms stars play games of one-upsmanship, settle scores and start new beefs that sometimes create as much noise as the episodes themselves. The modern reality star is often posting to Twitter or Instagram after each episode and many take questions from fans as well. In the question/answer sessions you can hear the audience and star probing the foreshortened reality question. A prototype exchange goes something like this: Fan: “Are you really as big a douche in real life?” Star: “A TV show is only 45 mins long, they cant show the complete picture, they only show what they want to show.” On its face this is a truth. Underneath is a complex psychological layering that centers on the subjectivity/objectivity tensions that are inherent in consciousness. Yes, in a certain light this villain character really is a douche, but yes in another light we might agree he is not a douche. Where, in fact does ‘reality’ center, how many realities are there, and who gets to claim which reality as truth? Roshuman is a film school classic that goes to the heart of this philosophical conundrum, and so are docu-soaps – deal.
This is the age of reality TV, where subjectivity is up for grabs to the greatest manipulator and there are many: alternate facts, deep fakes, Russian influence campaigns, social media distortions. It has become harder than ever to decide what reality is the ‘true one’ while at the same time tech gives us instant access to more and more evidence to support each opposite point of view thanks to Google, YouTube and Wikipedia. If we are to believe in individual choice can we believe in objective truth? For that matter why do we take Hellenistic ideals as the foundation for our beliefs? Why do we take the bible as a foundation for our morals? These are questions that reality TV is tickling if you are paying attention. It is the ‘why’ to reality TV’s staying power. It is the curious thing we cannot shake. It is a documentary on the subject/object conundrum that we refuse to accept. There are equal and opposite values (as in ‘worth’) to Marianne Williamson’s policy proposals and the memes created by content creators.
This denial of reality TV’s central question is an agitation that almost requires it to be derided. In this way it is like sex – “the flesh is weak”. Oh really? Is that the same flesh that can bring down a president, put more humans on earth, start the Trojan war, end innocence at the base of the Tree of Life? Sounds like the flesh is strong and the argument against it is weak. Sexuality is perhaps the most subjective experience we have, anyone who has filmed themselves having sex knows that they are hotter in their head than in bed. Soft lights, nice smells, smoke and mirrors – that’s what evens the playing field and invites sensuality into the land of lovemaking. Reality TV is the sex of the entertainment world and as such is thought of as somewhat dirty. Documentaries and dramatic films are the chaste genres, the ivory tower. Documentaries are above being called a fake because their premise is that they are attempting to tell the whole real story and ‘serious dramas’ are too serious to have their very convincing actors called out as just being believable fakes. Reality TV is in the middle…one part documentary, one part believable fakes. But if reality TV is the sex of entertainment then it too is not weak. It was strong enough to prop up the TV world while it found its sea legs during the collapse of broadcast network dominance (see my post about the disruption of TV post production here). It changed the aesthetics of television. It altered our democracy. It has so thoroughly influenced our culture that it is difficult to discern our political debate from reality television. In fact, I’m quite certain (based on Trumps handling of the impeachment inquiry – he is tweeting RIGHT NOW as I write from bed in Echo Park) that the genie is out of the bottle and a candidate not fluid with reality TV best practices will NEVER be elected again.
We now are floating in a world of reality stars, on TV, on Fox and CNN, on Twitter, on YouTube, on Instagram – basically anywhere images can be shared and reactions can be generated. The more attention a personality garners, good or bad, usually the higher their star rises (and that goes for products, events and governments too, not just individuals). If you put yourself out there you are almost guaranteed to get a response of some kind. When you make yourself seen today you make yourself eligible as a cast member so to speak. Images make this possible, txt, moving picture, static photo or meme. We have always (in modernity) been surrounded by images such as advertising, decorative arts, propaganda, signs and symbols. Yet these images were not ‘real’ and we are in on it when that line was being played with. We know the difference between what has been written for actors and what has not. There are notable points of crossover throughout time, but mainly we know the difference between real and fake. A sign may say ‘eat at Joe’s’ – that’s an add for Joe’s. But now there’s a third way. A new emerging philosophy that has not been coined as of yet, one that discards the binary tension between subjective and objective and is both at the same time. Is it any wonder dark mater, quarks, different dimensions and other radical ideas are emerging anew in Physics? Maybe the eastern sages already knew the truth and science, language and practice are just catching up now. As for reality TV, it’s done been there. It’ll be it’s own mirror thank you very much.