A culture of such concentrated celebrity—of martyrs and monsters—is a culture that values the self and its cultivation above all else, which doesn’t seem so surprising in the United States, where our neighbors are suspicious and our coworkers are competitors. This can mean something like freedom, and in this country has carried freedom’s destructive connotation. “The romantic movement,” Russell writes, “aimed at liberating human personality from the fetters of social convention and social morality.” In our celebrities, we place everything we either can’t bring ourselves to be (the martyrs) or can’t bear to acknowledge in ourselves (the monsters).
You should’ve seen the ratings that day: They are to television what click counters and impressions are to online content. If you are a writer, these clicks quantify your worth in the eyes of those who decide to pay you, be it in cash or exclamation marks. Both are measures of how many eyes have seen the frame of advertisements that surrounds your editorial, artistic, or journalistic content. When ratings and clicks begin to influence the editorial direction of that which is placed in this frame, it becomes sensationalism.
Manson himself, whose entire career was built out of “shock,” controversy, and art direction, is no stranger to this concept. With the 1996 release of Antichrist Superstar, Manson became a household name and media darling. All these years later, it’s hard to intimate to someone who wasn’t there just how ubiquitous Marilyn Manson really was, and how, at that time, the band brought mainstream music into a new theatrics of gruesome images, scandalous costumes, and music videos thenceforth unimagined by most American viewers and listeners. And this is exactly what made him a scapegoat (and not, of course, his horrific, ultimately abusive treatment of women) after the Columbine massacre: “America loves to find an icon to hang its guilt on,” he wrote in Rolling Stone. “Admittedly, I have assumed the role of Antichrist . . . In my work I examine the America we live in, and I’ve always tried to show people that the devil we blame our atrocities on is really just each one of us.” For Manson, sensationalism was an artful indulgence. Even the band’s name, a compound of Marilyn Monroe and Charles Manson, reflects this critique of “the sad fact that America puts killers on the cover of Time Magazine, giving them as much notoriety as our favorite movie stars.” His legacy, or what’s left of it, only makes sense in a country that embraces the theater of atrocity, which inevitably comes to rely on atrocity itself: the content required by the form of being horrifically entertained.
In the sensationalist newsroom, truth is subservient to profit. This is not a new or controversial argument; any reader or viewer with half a conscience knows that news is calibrated toward clicks, views, retweets, shares, and any other buzz it can generate. Even the arrangement of articles in a newspaper or on a web page reveals that publication’s allegiance to revenue. This is a key part of Noam Chomsky and Edward Herman’s “propaganda model,” wherein large media organizations find it advantageous to reduce and restrict news coverage to a relatively small, easy-to-follow mainstream narrative. This is borne of a variety of factors, including “ownership and control, dependence on other major funding sources (notably, advertisers), and mutual interests and relationships between the media and those who make the news.” These work in concert to deprive the majority of Americans (as well as citizens of other capitalist nations) of the facts necessary to make informed political judgments. As Chomsky observed in a 1976 interview with Mitsou Ronat, disseminating an official version of events is more effective
when its doctrines are insinuated rather than asserted, when it sets the bounds for possible thought rather than simply imposing a clear and easily identifiable doctrine that one must parrot . . . Hence the elaborate pretense that the press is a critical dissenting force . . . when in fact it is almost entirely subservient to the basic principles of the ideological system: in this case, the principle right of the United States to serve as global judge and executioner.
Through the lens of the propaganda model, one sees how the media repeatedly frames its coverage—not consciously, but through constraints put in place by factors mentioned above—to flatter the financial interests of those in power. Meanwhile, people who read the news—especially news that seems critical of the government—feel as if they can independently form intelligent, rational opinions about events taking place in their country and communities. This is most clear in matters of war, which is largely unfavorable in the eyes of most Americans, yet a longtime favorite of mainstream media. Even Donald Trump only has to bomb a faraway, nonwhite nation to become “presidential” in the eyes of New York Times reporters. Though small in number, many powerful Americans earn their billions from ongoing conflict, and rely on media to portray that conflict as just, no matter how many lives are lost.
It’s not radical, either, to say that this prioritization of profit by major media organizations—including The New York Times, CNN, MSNBC, and others labeled as liberal—is what skewed the discourse leading up to the 2016 election, as well as how each candidate was perceived. The majority of coverage Clinton received cast her as untrustworthy and unlikeable, a professional candidate who would do little to change American politics. Trump, on the other hand, was portrayed as a dangerous and inexperienced wild card; nearly every article was written in sensational disbelief. Most front-page, top-circulated stories centered on Trump and his outlandish, “anti-establishment” behavior. Indeed, for a while it was hard to gauge Clinton’s policies at all, despite knowing from the beginning each and every lie Trump fed his fan base. Morally and politically, the choice was clear as soon as each was nominated, but media organizations inflated one candidate’s untrustworthiness to match it against her fascinating opponent; otherwise, there would have been no conflict to beckon buying eyes to the ads.
Once elected, Trump and his fascist administration became the dominant news story every single day. While polling lower than any president in history, his performance seems irrelevant—or perhaps adversely correlative—to journalists’ collective refusal to look away. If presidencies had ratings rather than performance polls, his would be the most-watched, most-consumed, and highest-rated administration in world history. Which, despite a dearth of successful policy implementation, might explain this reality TV star’s insistence that his presidency was the most successful of any president before him. Before The Apprentice, Trump was a creature of the tabloids who gossiped about his marriages, his divorces, where he was seen in Manhattan, and what he’d done that week. Most of these stories were called into magazines directly, supposedly by Trump’s publicist—either a “John Miller” or a “John Barron”—but in reality by Trump himself, trying to disguise his voice. His entire life is an affair with publicity, sensationalism, and attention: Why should anyone expect him to feel as though he’s failed? The American public, though thoroughly terrified, has never been as enthralled, as engaged, or as entertained with its president. The spectacle of Donald Trump gives each of us a clear, definable stake, and we—no matter our political alignment—are made to feel we can defend it simply by watching.
While the premise of reality TV is new, it’s the soap opera—narratives in serial even in the heyday of episodic television—from which “reality” borrows its tropes: natural enemies; long-standing grudges; the elimination of beloved characters; characters who reappear, seasons later, with fanfare and surprise; and constant cliff-hangers. And it’s these tropes that have dispensed with traditional episodic TV. America’s most talked-about shows for the last twenty years have been narratives in serial, including Lost, Battlestar Galactica, Game of Thrones, Orange Is the New Black, and many more.
In David Shields’s Reality Hunger, readers are invited to believe that, over the centuries, what Western critics call fact and what they call fiction have gradually borrowed from one another, and that, in the twenty-first century, there is little need to separate them: “The techniques of fiction infected history; the materials of history were fed to the novelist’s greed.” In part, Shields defends his s
elf-described manifesto—which extends little beyond his personal boredom with the novel as an art form—with the rise of “reality” in entertainment, especially television, which does away with the pretense of scripts, scenery, character, and plot, though in fact relies upon all of these elements in a subversive way. Reality TV, as we’ve come to know it, is a far cry from the first seasons of The Real World, in which participants spent most of their time sleeping or eating in front of a closed-circuit network of grainy surveillance cameras.
Almost three decades later, reality TV is more formulaic than the prime-time sitcom ever was, and far more predictable than whatever iteration of Law & Order is currently on the air. Characters (selected by producers to form a matrix of opposing personalities) fight, scheme, gossip, cry, throw drinks, form allegiances, and, in general, get quite comfortable under their network of surveillance, performing yet never acting. That one never need know the exact circumstances behind a garden-variety reality show, yet still be drawn into it, speaks to the producers’ innate talent to find a character whom every viewer can relate to, whether through adoration, hatred, jealousy, or schadenfreude. It succeeds as a genre entirely on the basis of personality. With Survivor in the late nineties, the introduction of elimination only galvanized this character-driven narrative: with each episode, your favorite personality was at risk of being voted off the show. In the early 2000s, this suspenseful model propagated itself with competition-based shows like American Idol, The Bachelor, America’s Next Top Model, Top Chef, and of course The Apprentice. All are contests to be the most noticeable, the most celebrity-like, of contestants.
Here are a handful of sign-offs the former president of the United States used on his former Twitter account: “Big changes are happening!” “We will deliver!” “Did Hillary know?” “The real story.” “Find the leakers.” “Much higher ratings at Fox.” “We will see what happens!” He may as well tweet, Stay tuned! With unconstitutional executive orders, surprise bombings, revolving door White House staff, and relentless antagonism of everyone who doesn’t adore him, it should surprise no one that Trump ran his administration as a reality show. His stupidity and the banality of his language reduces him to a catalogue of catchphrases—“We’ll see,” “Fake news,” “Witch hunt”—which are magnetic for his fans and repellent for those who rightfully despise him. But few can look away. This interest—this fascination—in Trump seems compulsory, a need to reassure oneself that the unbelievable is really happening, that such a sensational satire of cruelty and incompetence is becoming reality. Meanwhile, by the time he was inaugurated, the news cycle had accelerated to a continuous narrative, related in real time. No breaks, no seasons, no episodes: just one unending cliffhanger, with all of us wondering whether or not we’d die in a nuclear war before he left office.
And of course, like other criminals, he fit neatly on the cover of Time.
With Trump, reality TV and reality itself have melded. Unsurprisingly, this serial abuser has found a way to remove consent from viewership. He is the character who’s forced his way into each of our lives, and it’s impossible to tune him out. In this way, he has achieved through the manipulation of media what Manson could not. While Manson’s reflection of hypocrisy draws a line between artifice and reality (or at least it did until very serious allegations of abuse, even torture, came out against him), Trump has blurred that line; it’s no longer possible to tell whether or not Trump believes a single thing he says, or if a life of inhabiting an image has erased whatever personhood was once underneath. If Marilyn Manson played America’s antichrist, Trump seems to be it—the American monster par excellence.
This explains the temptation to dissect his psychology, or to propose that he’s playing some sort of political chess. From the perspective of American citizens, there is nothing beyond this performance. Despite all the articles, essays, and books that try to delve into his personality, there is nothing that indicates a human being behind this spectacle. In all grippingly operatic television, the character sincerely believes in the drama in which he is living. He believes in the righteousness of his actions. As Mark Doten put it in his novel Trump Sky Alpha: “If I have to die, shouldn’t everyone?” To pretend otherwise—to not take him at his word—is not just disingenuous and irresponsible; in trying to read a subtext that isn’t there—in looking beyond an image that’s lost its real-world referent—journalists and pundits risk, more than ever, getting someone, maybe everyone, killed.
Donald Trump is not an anomaly. He is merely a breakthrough in a business model reliant upon terror. Fear has long served profit and power at the expense of society. Deployed by politicians and amplified by strategic media programming, fear increasingly came to influence the American citizen’s consumption of news throughout the twentieth century, but it wasn’t until the U.S. War on Terror that fear attained unprecedented currency.
In the United States, terror is profitable. On the morning that Trump became president-elect, we spent money: flags, T-shirts, newspapers, magazines, political organizations, support to Planned Parenthood, passport applications, and Xanax. Prescriptions and subscriptions went up; the DOW and NASDAQ climbed with them. But this had all happened before. One need look no further than 9/11 to see terror’s value in selling not just flags and stickers but ideology.
Two decades later, reading or thinking about those early days after 9/11 is as painful as seeing the towers appear in films, on album covers, or in photographs. The lingering terror—at least for me—is no longer the image of lives lost, though that’s certainly a disturbing part of our history. Instead, the lingering terror is the conditional past, what we could have done in response to 9/11. Juxtaposed with liberties lost under the Patriot Act, the DHS, the TSA, Guantánamo and its siblings, the NSA, the practice of torture, on and on—not to mention the cost, human and otherwise, of ongoing war—the image of our country that could have been, had we chosen to grieve responsibly, is almost too great to bear. Already, there are young people who have no memory of what it was like to live in, ostensibly, a non-surveillance state where a person could travel without a government employee openly violating their constitutional rights.
Eerily, 11/9 is now another demarcation in time, redolent with its own irretrievable conditions and could-have-beens. But given the enthusiasm of many Trump supporters, who seem to believe that securing an already-militarized border is worth surrendering what remains of our rights, this country has, so far, learned nothing from 9/11 but the euphoria of submission. This neutering of the will has always been fascism’s appeal, as Hannah Arendt writes in The Origins of Totalitarianism: “Both the early apathy and the later demand for monopolistic dictatorial direction of the nation’s foreign affairs had their roots in a way and philosophy of life so insistently and exclusively centered on the individual’s success or failure in ruthless competition that a citizen’s duties and responsibilities could only be felt to be a needless drain on his limited time and energy.” With Trump, it’s increasingly obvious that authoritarian control is the last hope of an exhausted, impoverished, unhealthy electorate that no longer wishes to exercise its citizenship. As a nation, we no longer want to lead, to think, to vote, or even to believe that things can change; we only want to be told what to do, and for those orders to be as entertaining as possible.
In his analysis of image technology and military engagement, War and Cinema, Paul Virilio posits that war itself is waged by sight: “From the original watch-tower through the anchored balloon to the reconnaissance aircraft and remote-sensing satellites, one and the same function has been indefinitely repeated, the eye’s function being the function of a weapon.”
With the exception of soldiers who’ve been there and civilians who’ve lived under fire, the public understanding of war is an understanding of images. Our image vocabulary of war is a lexicon of photographs, video clips, cinematic narratives, and journalistic snapshots of what it was like. In our apocalyptic daydreams, we can even picture—thanks to fifty years of Hollyw
ood blockbusters—what it might be like to lose our flesh in a nuclear instant, to witness our cities burned off the earth. But that, Virilio notes, wasn’t always the case:
There is no war, then, without representation, no sophisticated weaponry without psychological mystification . . . In this respect the first atomic bombs, dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the 6th and 9th of August 1945, presented the ideal conditions: great mechanical effectiveness, complete technical surprise, but, above all, the moral shock that suddenly banished to the prop-room the earlier strategic carpet-bombing of large Asian and European cities, with all its logistical sluggishness. By demonstrating that they would not recoil from a civilian holocaust, the Americans triggered in the minds of the enemy that information explosion which Einstein, towards the end of his life, thought to be as formidable as the atomic blast itself.
To this day, the United States is the only nation to deploy nuclear weaponry against another. Those two hundred thousand civilians remain the only civilians deliberately murdered in an atomic blast. The scale of this image has lodged itself deeply in the contemporary imagination. Like the outlines of bodies burned onto Hiroshima’s sidewalks and buildings (the same principle as photography), this is a shadow this light has cast. Often I wonder what the latter half of the twentieth century would have been like without the bomb. Its image informs our art and literature, our cinema and advertising and publicity. For those who live in that shadow, it’s not hard to conclude that the United States, in August of 1945, committed the greatest, most heinous act of terrorism in human history. Even today, we have yet to reckon with this, or officially acknowledge it.
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