No Reality But Reality

Kelefa Sanneh, a writer for The New Yorker, recently wrote about reality tv, and far from the hand-wringing moralizing that you tend to get when hoary publications deign to examine the genre, the article has quite a number of insights that are worth highlighting.

After dismissing one author of a book who approaches reality television in a reflexively denigrating and superficial way, Sanneh introduces Brenda Weber, who is a lot more nuanced when she focuses in Makeover TV: Self-hood, Citizenship, and Celebrity on makeover programs (which gets defined so loosely as to include Dog Whisperer and American Idol in addition to The Swan and What Not To Wear).

Makeover shows inevitably build to a spectacular moment when “reveal” becomes a noun, and yet the final product is often unremarkable: a woman with an up-to-date generic haircut, wearing a jacket that fits well; a man who is chubby but not obese; a dog with no overwhelming urge to bare its fangs. The new subject is worth looking at only because we know where it came from, which means that, despite the seeming decisiveness of the transformation, the old subject never truly disappears. “The After highlights the dreadfulness of the Before,” Weber writes. “In makeover logic, no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form.” She might have added that no makeover is ever really finished; there is no After who is not, in other respects, a Before—maybe your dog no longer strains at the leash, but are you sure that sweater doesn’t make you look old and tired? Are you sure your thighs wouldn’t benefit from some blunt cannulation? Weber’s makeover nation is an eerie place, because no one fully belongs there, and, deep down, everyone knows it.

Sanneh alludes to an old reality tv axiom, that is, the genre appeals to viewers because we can easily imagine ourselves in the places of a program's subjects, and so what happens on the program reflects personally back on us -- in a word, projection. However, I use "subject" here instead of my usual "contestant" because I think that while this projection relates directly to makeover shows, it's less apt for or less directly connected to competitive programs -- even accounting for Sanneh's insight that the makeover subtext runs through a surprisingly diverse number of reality series -- because the worlds depicted in this sub-genre are posited as self-sustaining and insular. Moreover, any gestures to an existence beyond the confines of the show are peremptory and mainly serve to bolster the narrative (e.g. the editors including footage of a contestant talking about a difficult upbringing to garner viewer sympathy), which invariably culminates in a coronation of the narrative's winner.

Likewise, the mood of the coronation is always "happily ever after" -- the winner and its judging apparatus might claim that the victory is just the beginning of a journey, but considering the long history of prizes failing to live up to expectations (ANTM, Project Runway, etc.), if the shows admit the stark, tenuous reality (and I mean meat-world reality, not reality tv reality) that awaits their winners after the show, then the producers would undercut the triumphalism of their finales. Consequently, the reality program is inwardly directed, an end in itself, a self-sustaining world (at least for the viewer of the competitive series), one in which the second point I highlighted from the passage -- that the Before and After are inextricably linked -- becomes relevant. After all, when the winner is crowned, the show tacitly (or in some cases explicitly) asks of the winner (and of us viewers) to Look How Far The Winner Has Come! The victorious glow and edification of the winner is generated by its distance from the starting point -- in other words, "no post-made-over body can ever be considered separate from its pre-made-over form."

I want to add that viewers do still project themselves into competitive series in a moral context, though in such instances, they're more likely casting judgment on the contestants than reflecting on themselves, though maybe that's what Sanneh means with his remarks about the liminality of the place where "no one fully belongs there." In any event, the first point he makes -- about how revelation (no matter how mundane) is the raison d'etre of the reality genre -- is spot-on.

Sanneh brings up another provocative theorist, Mark Andrejevic, whom I'm disposed to liking because he recognizes that "there isn’t any one definition [of reality television] that would both capture all the existing genres and exclude other forms of programming such as the nightly news or daytime game shows" -- an observation that can't be emphasized enough. The more interesting bit comes here, though:

Although reality television is often mocked for its frivolity, Andrejevic argues that its success is symptomatic of an age in which labor and leisure are growing ever harder to separate. He tells the tale of DotComGuy, a briefly popular Internet celebrity, who planned to live his life online, funded by corporate sponsors. “To the extent that his life is the show, he is working all the time,” Andrejevic writes, and the same could be said of anyone who appears on any reality show. Pozner asserts that “on series from the ‘Real Housewives’ franchise to MTV’s ‘Paris Hilton’s My New BFF,’ ‘real life’ is all about leisure.” In fact, Hilton’s show, in which she claimed to be searching for a B.F.F. (best friend forever), was an example of how reality television turns social activities into professional ones. Similarly, the “Real Housewives” shows, despite the name, feature very few actual housewives and lots of working women (not all wives or mothers), every one of them eager to sacrifice time, not to mention privacy, for a small payment and a less small portion of notoriety. This is the opposite of leisure, and it may also be a sign of the end of leisure—the end, that is, of our ability to spend long stretches happily engaged in non-work. If this possibility makes us anxious, we’re not alone: judging from their frequent and intricate disagreements, the various “real housewives” are feeling a little anxious, too.

As is my wont, viewing this conflation of leisure and work through the lens of the professional reality sub-genre is fruitful, since, after all, such shows present the interview process maximalized over the course of 13 weeks. First, leisure gets squeezed out by work in a literal sense on Project Runway, which sets out tasks that consume the majority of time (both onscreen and in the lives of the competitors) on the show. (On occasion, designers who don't work -- either through laziness or sleep deprivation or preternatural speed -- have caused minor scandals, because a show that brandishes an unofficial motto of make it work doesn't take kindly to idleness.) Beyond the demands of its various challenges, I figure that part of the reason Runway contestants are worked so hard is to wear down their inhibitions in the hopes of provoking extravagant fights. Of course, in this way Runway is an extreme example, because on other hand, we get plenty of fights on ANTM despite the comparative paucity of work, and in fact, the girls fight probably out of an overabundance of leisure. Either way, both shows are stylized by their unnecessary blow-ups, and Sanneh would argue then that leisure is getting exchanged (Project Runway) or transformed (ANTM) into the work of reality television.

Work of Art: The Next Great Artist - 1x01 "Self-Reflexive", 1x02 "The Shape of Things to Come"

It was bound to happen, sooner or later: high art gets its own reality tv show. Or maybe more accurately: I've been waiting for just such as a show as Work of Art. The program is brought to you/me by the ex-producers of Project Runway, so you know it's going to be well-executed reality tv and thus fairly familiar in terms of the art-product reality genre (the one glaringly poor production aspect is the editing during the critiques that makes the judges' comments seem haphazard and discontinuous -- but then again, if there's a category of people that would tend to talk at exorbitant length and which would necessitate harsh editing, Art Critic would be the one).

Although having conceptual and performance artists on a show as artists (as opposed to, say, ironic saboteurs or self-promoters) amuses me to no end, the immediate familiarity of Work of Art as just-another-reality-show demonstrates how potent the genre is. That is, the genre can take a medium as rarefied and abstruse as modern art and transform it into an exercise in tv commodification; the program manages to fit its contestants into the roles that are imminently familiar to the student of reality television. Nao the performance artist is the arrogant villain that isn't in the competition to make friends; Erik is the rank amateur who's clearly outclassed and whose lack of skill mark him as the One Who Doesn't Deserve To Be in the Competition; Jaclyn is the high-maintenance sexpot, if one can go by her large bust/thin frame disproportions and her proclivity for using herself as the subject of nude studies (but she's worked with Jeff Koons, so I'm confused); so on, so forth. In short: Reality television -- is there nothing it can't reduce to pat types? (Nb. I'm not complaining, actually!)

That's the theorizing. As for content, I wouldn't call most of the cast artists; instead, they generally strike me as craftsmen for their lack of vision and point of view. Nao, Trong, and Miles seem to be the only ones who have actual theoretical muscle backing up their pieces (maybe John, too, based on the two episodes I've seen; Bravo haven't been terribly interested in giving me ways to watch their show), while everyone else is hardly groundbreaking or thought-provoking. That's a round-about way of saying that I don't think most of the cast are terribly smart (which probably is informed by the reality self-selection bias). (And I suppose it's called irony that my cultural snobbery suddenly comes out in this particular context.)

I should note, though, that even some of the capital-A artists can fall into the glib obviousness that I'd expect from the dilettante contestants, Trong being the gravest example for his commentary on modern culture: a "family" of television sets watching tv, with each family member bearing a "pithy" remark on its screen along the lines of "I Hate Reality TV!" Irony really is dead if this is what passes for it in the art world these days.

I like Abdi, who has a more subdued Bill Sienkiewicz vibe to him, even if I number him among the contestants practicing craft and not necessarily creating art. Nonetheless, Abdi produces stuff with energy and visual inventiveness. Meanwhile, OCD Miles has the look of the prohibitive favorite/wunderkind, even if I consider some of his strategies, such as mining obscure, idiosyncratic genres from the past as a basis for his work, to be aesthetic gimmickry.

Random Thoughts on Reality

I've been asked about an emergent critical split between so-called "high" reality tv (Project Runway, SYTYCD, Top Chef) and "low" reality tv (Rock of Love, The Hills, Real Housewives). Notwithstanding the fact that I don't watch any such programs as the latter, my standard response falls broadly along the competitive/documentary axis -- that the more a show tests its contestant for specific artistic/professional skills, the better it is, generally. However, I've come to think lately my standard response is a little too easy and pat; at the very least it glides over some more interesting (moral) dimensions underneath the surface of reality tv.

For starters, competition elevates reality programs for two principal reasons. First, it gives a show's contestants something to do or drive towards, so even if the producers ply them with alcohol and deprive them of sleep for the express purposes of fostering interpersonal drama, they'll eventually be distracted with trying to reach the principal goal. On the other hand, for documentary programs -- in which contestants aren't preoccupied with surviving eliminations -- they are more prone to outrageous or inane behavior, because where else is the drama going to come from? Whereas on competitive shows, competition itself can cook up drama.

Another way to approach this distinction between reality genres is to think about what each show produces, in a way. So-called high reality tv creates recognizable products -- the more specific or the more artistic, the better -- while low reality tv produces itself (though this distinction doesn't adhere strictly to the competition/non-competition divide). I'm using "product" loosely in the sense that shows like SYTYCD, Runway, Top Chef, and American Idol produce art objects (dance, fashion, food, pop music), which critics evaluate and appreciate on familiar artistic grounds. (From the perspective of the contestants, these shows amount to protracted, televised job auditions, since the prize at the end is almost always employment.) (Personally, I prefer what SYTYCD produces because compared to other shows, it's more purely artistic; Runway, for all of its talk about aesthetics and vision and such, is caught up inextricably in commerce.)

Meanwhile, the other type of show merely produces celebrity for their participants (The Hills, Jersey Shore), the self-awareness or cynicism of which only appeals to observers with a debased taste for postmodernity, which is still a niche demographic no matter what doomsayers say about the fall of culture. (Like, if that were the case, when is certain hit show America's Next Post-Modern Provocateur coming in the Fall?) (Actually, such a characterization is overly glib; The Hills, Jersey Shore, and The Real Housewives are explicitly postmodern, since they construct a world of pure surface and decadence which exists in between reality (i.e. the real, actual world) and Reality (the television genre); in this liminal space, real and Real become so enmeshed that they essentially become a simulacrum, in which the entirety of the lives of these reality celebrities is lived in the public spotlight and barely exist outside of cameras recording their movements. To be sure, it's an extension of classical celebrity (i.e. of music stars, movie stars, etc.), but with the qualifying difference that the reality stars are promoting their own Reality as opposed to an art object.)

Of course, competitive reality shows themselves can be divided by what they produce, as a large number of competitive shows don't measure artistic worth or professional skills at all but instead involve what I call social navigation and strategy, for which the exemplar (and template) is Survivor. In this type of reality program, contestants compete in a variety of challenges (usually physical or puzzle-solving) before they vote each other out of the game, a modus operandi that we English majors refer to as "transferable skills" (though "back-stabbing" is hardly something you'd put on the typical resume).

Whatever the style of reality program, however, I think that moral judgment is implicitly involved, which makes some viewers uncomfortable since we're often judging people in situations that either promote their worst qualities to come out or have creepy voyeuristic undercurrents, or both. But build the show around a contest that measures, say, dancing ability, or fashion sense, and viewer unease is then pacified and we feel we have moral license to judge. "So-and-so deserves to win, because their skills are worthy"; however, there's more than a small element of contestants appealing to us on a variety of moral grounds -- not just the pure skill being measured -- in such advocacy. In other words, these reality programs are dressed up as competitions of skill, yet they subtly invite us to pronounce upon the moral rectitude of their contestants.

Though we may try to abide by the ideals of judging specifically on the product, it's incredibly easy to conflate the the product with the person, i.e. the product is great, so we think that they must be a great person as well, or we dislike their work on the show and thus impute more deficiency to their character. In terms of product/character conflation, Project Runway is the ne plus ultra of competitive shows since it measures taste as much as anything else: in every other episode, a designer talks about their "aesthetic," while the most damning criticism that can be leveled against a designer is to have their taste level questioned. If a designer's taste fails them, they risk being eliminated.

Meanwhile, SYTYCD anticipates this conflation when its official voices constantly remind the audience that the purpose of the show is not to find America's best dancer, but its favorite dancer, in which case personality can carry a dancer farther than their talent can. In distinguishing best and favorite and opting for the latter, SYTYCD directly recognizes how audiences tend to conflate product and character and encourages them to embrace this very conflation.

Product/personality conflation plays a part in bonding audiences to morally attractive contestants -- I've said on a number of occasions that contestants whom audiences can actively and wholeheartedly root for are utterly necessary for a reality show to maintain widespread and long-lasting appeal -- precisely because viewers merge morality and worth. Audiences of competitive shows identify their favorites and invest them with moral authority until the favorites become moral heroes by virtue of their very success in an admittedly circular, nearly Calvinistic bit of reasoning. Without these moral centers that allow viewers to sympathize with, reality programs would descend into cynicism and instead of the variety of mainstream phenomena that they are, they'd be relegated to clawing for cable-sized audiences.

Random Thoughts on Reality

Watching reality television and following contemporary politics are of a kind: us observers identify the participants who signify views and opinions that they share with us, those who don't share our opinions are vilified, and thus, the (zero-sum) competition between the two "sides" takes on moral urgency.

Indie rating: Autechre – "pt2ph8"

Models of the Runway - 2x06 "Role Models"

Models of the Runway may be the most useless show I watch because the usual competitive reality tropes hardly apply to it; although the designers clearly aim to pick models whom they consider strong, the ultimate winner of MOTR depends far more on the designer she's attached to than on her own modeling skills. If a designer throws gank up on the runway at Bryant Park, the model won't win no matter her fierceness. (Admittedly, the models do progress through the regular, pre-Bryant Park portion of the show based on their perceived skills, though Sophia was eliminated in the third episode -- despite being deemed one of the strongest walkers -- because of her reputation for being difficult to work with.)

All that said, in the relative competitive vacuum, MOTR demonstrates the impulses that are almost pathological to reality programs, especially with how MOTR is compelled to construct an internal moral system. In this episode, Brandise, my favorite contestant in the season (because she is kind of punk, and she is actually older than I am), talks about how another model, Brittany, is in danger of going home because Brittany seems to be ok with being eliminated from the show, which in reality tv speak means that she doesn't want it enough. Brittany does have a close call -- she's the last person picked by a designer, just barely avoiding elimination -- but the way the episode foreshadowed her ouster actually foregrounds the reality preoccupation with telegraphing how badly they want to be on the show, which in a way tries to reinforce and/or justify the program's own importance, and at the same time tries to convince us viewers of the show's relevance to the industry it represents.

I should note that Brandise probably isn't familiar with reality tv conventions -- she had never seen Project Runway before becoming a part of it -- which I can read in one of two ways. First, reality competitions "naturally" pull out the "prove your worth by showing how much you want to be on the show" desperation from its contestants so much that it can take someone who might not even be familiar with reality tv and turn her into an unmistakable reality talking head. Second, the modeling industry itself promotes this same impulse, and Brandise is just transferring her instincts from one field to another.

Indie rating: Fever Ray - "Coconut"