Empty Reality - "Reality" TV

Empty Reality - "Reality" TV is the latest sign that civilization is doomed. Of course, it's the latest in a string of signs going back to roughly the invention of fire.

Still, as this article by the NY Daily News' Wayne Robins describes it, it's disturbing watching "He-men and she-women from the Health Club from Hell eat near-raw duck embyos and crispy silkworm cereal, and wash it down with liquefied pig liver. For money..." on "Fear Factor".

I've never really watched much "Reality" TV. I saw the "reindeer testicle" episode of "Fear Factor", and the first episode of "Survivor II", and I'll confess a brief fascination with reruns of the first season of "Road Rules".

Robins' piece puts the craze in historical perspective:

In 1973, the PBS series "An American Family" showed reality as documentary filmmakers dreamed it could be: Put cameras and audio equipment in a family home and let them roll for a few months. The Louds, an upper-middle-class family from Santa Barbara, Calif., agreed to be guinea pigs for this experiment. The nation watched with rapt ambivalence as the Loud marriage began to fray. And son Lance became a lightning rod as his homosexuality emerged in public. The program was immensely popular and controversial, though, oddly, spawned no imitators.

"At the time, there was more ethical concern for [television's] subjects," says Susan Murray, an assistant professor of communications at New York University and co-editor (with Laurie Ouellette) of "Startling! Heartbreaking! Real! Reality TV and the Remaking of Television Culture," which will be published this year by NYU Press. "It was sold as a documentary, an anthropological study. People wondered if this was exploitive — would the Louds have gotten a divorce if cameras weren't in their house? It was more of a cautionary tale."

Now, anything goes, leaving many mature viewers aghast.

Not so much aghast as depressed. I couldn't quite put my finger on why I found it depressing. Fortunately (!), Robins puts his on it:

"I think the loss of authentic heroes — people who devoted their lives to improving the world — is notable," [Harvard professor and expert Dr. Howard] Gardner says. "People who take Gandhi or Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King Jr. seriously are less likely to spend their time playing video games or watching video junk. Life is so short when you have goals, so long when you are just a couch potato."

Perhaps that's part of the problem.

What sort of heroes does our age have?

What are the models for heroes? I'm no social historian, but I'm seeing three archetypes:

• Regular people who rise above and beyond themselves to accomplish the incredible - often under duress. Think Audie Murphy or Todd Beamer or Stanislaus Schmaizner or hundreds of NYC firemen and cops.
  
• Regular, and not-so-regular people who surpass the norms pretty spectacularly. Think Michael Jordan or Brett Favre.
  
• Leaders who excel at leading their people. Depending on your level of cynicism, think Martin Luther King or Fidel Castro.

American society was designed to downplay the latter of the categories - and it's largely a good thing. And we're so heterodox, it's difficult to get a big enough number of people to get a King or Gandhi-like leader to gather behind anyone that can be broadly considered a "hero". Ronald Reagan is a hero to the right, and Paul Wellstone to the left - but never shall the twain meet.

As to the second category - this sort of "heroism" has become commonplace. Athletic ability like that of a Satchel Paige (whose race precluded him being a "hero" to the culture of the day, as richly as he deserved it) or Lou Gehrig or Jim Thorpe was freakish in its day. Professional sports have created a mass market (albeit an exclusive one) for people who are born with or develop that level of talent - and the marketing apparatus has made it too commonplace for true heroism.

So it's the first category that really matters in this country. Right?

Perhaps. And in the days after 9/11, commentators thought that perhaps the time was again becoming right for that sort of heroism, that the speciousness of post-ironic society would give way to a society that respected this sort of thing on a more concrete level.

But can it happen? The last two years' events have given us ample opporunities for heroism of the most genuine sort, and Americans (and others) have stepped up to the plate.

But hundreds of them - Todd Beamer and Tom Burnett and the rest of Flight 93, the NYC firemen and cops) are dead, now - and Americans prefer to emulate living heroes, which isn't a bad thing; when we start creating a nation of kamikazes and Suicide Bomber martyrs, we're in trouble. Hundreds of others - the special forces troops that overthrew the Taliban against immense odds - are professionally anonymous; their stories will come out in years, if at all. Current military practice is to de-emphasize such things for security reasons. Quick - name a military hero from the first Gulf War. Can you? Probably not. There were acts of incredible heroism during the war - who were they? The biggest popular, non-command American military hero of the last twenty years is Scott O'Grady, the Air Force pilot shot down over Yugoslavia - and his actions were those of self-preservation and training, not inspiration. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

But I wonder this discussion isn't happening as the debate is already decided? Think about it - the nascence of the "Reality TV" business was before 9/11. The imitators are on the air today, but the originals were in place before. Perhaps - maybe? - our western-media-addled attention spans don't allow us to be patient enough to notice that the ennui that makes "Reality" TV so popular is waning.

Or perhaps the recent growth (and, possibly, current collapse) of Reality TV is a symptom of peoples' need for heroes to fill that vacuum. If they're the only ones available...

What do you think? I'll be writing more about this in coming weeks. It'll be an issue, with a war coming on.

Posted by Mitch at February 2, 2003 10:55 AM