by Lucas Mann
—from www.castingcallhub.com
From the beginning, there has been controversy about how to think of and what to call the collision of real people and TV-ratings grabs. “Documentary” was originally the catchall term for anything nonscripted on TV, but that grew to annoy some people—why should a term so loaded (and also, producers whined, so boring) be allowed to encompass everything? In 1962 in Television Quarterly, Burton Benjamin, the legendary head of CBS News, was already sick of the conversation:
Bosley Crowther suggested “Think Films.” Jean Benoit-Levy plumped for “Films of Life.” The semantic argument exists. Not long ago, a quite prominent documentary producer was complaining to a New York television critic that the label had to be changed. It frightened viewers, inhibited sponsors, and made network executives see red ink. His recommendation: Non-Fiction Programming…Other producers have suggested “telementaries,” “docudramas,” “factdramas” and “actuality dramas with a hard spine.” All of these are a bit Orwellian, but understandable in a medium where an hour show is an hour show and an hour-and-a-half show is a spectacular.
Benjamin went on to say that instead of arguing about what to call the alluring display of lived drama on small screens in millions of homes, networks should think of what these displays could be used for. He advocated for the “little” film about man himself. It may be said that the issues of our times are too cataclysmic for us to deal with the life of an Eskimo in Canada. We are dealing with war and peace, life and death—with survival….The problems are so large and the people seem so small. But are the people ever small?
I think that last question of his is still being asked, or at least some spiraling version of it. Over half a century, the people have grown ever larger, in one way—they’re famous, they’re always present, sometimes they spawn a lasting personal brand. Yet we worry about those blown-up lives becoming smaller in meaning: petty, inconsequential, further from the power of any actual truth. So the question shifts: If we see so many small people turned spectacularly large, do we end up shrinking the value of each individual life? Then the nastier subquestion: Do we maybe prefer to see people as small when we watch them, so long as we don’t have to think about anything big?
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It’s hard not to want any piece of art or media that calls itself nonfictional, or even implies it, to be useful. When the power of nonfictionality is present, it should be used to promote a good force in the world, or expose an injustice. And if you film or describe an injustice, it should be to make people…well, something. It should make people something. It should make people feel something, sure, but those feelings should be specifically the kind of feelings that might incite action—anger at what is being done to the subject, anger at what the subject is doing, fear of the danger shown, and then inspiration to change or help another or spread the good word, whatever that particular word is. It’s validating to be involved in the potentially useful, even if your only involvement is watching, which isn’t really involvement at all.
We watched that movie about the Japanese fishing industry killing dolphins and cried when the activists played the sound of their death shrieks, told us we were listening to murder. We watched that string of factory-farm documentaries on Netflix and then you stopped eating meat, and then I admired that so I did, too, and now we’re those people that mention how smart pigs are at dinner parties. We watched the coverage of the Ferguson protests for hours, then went to our local protests, then returned to the coverage for more. Whenever one of us looked antsy, the other would say, “We could switch the channel now,” but always the antsy-looking one would answer with real gravitas: “No, no, we must keep watching,” and I’d carry on monologuing about the terrorism of the state.
I’m not trying to be glib here, just honest. Or maybe not even honest, just open—an unburdening, another little confession.
In their book, Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV, Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen trace the documentary traditions leading up to the form. They start with John Grierson, the man who first used the word “documentary” in 1926 (when describing Robert Flaherty’s work), who himself heralded an age of serious forays into the serious issues of the time, and whose own soundman said that his chosen term “smelt of dust and boredom.” These were propaganda films, celebrating labor: Song of Ceylon, bankrolled by a tea company, showing the noble lives of Sri Lankan tea growers as they adjusted to industrial modernity while also holding on to valuable traditions; Night Mail, funded by the British postal service, showing the hardworking patriots who transported a nation’s letters. Grierson described these first documentary techniques as the creative treatment of actuality, and he peddled that trade in the service of a particular kind of morality: sponsored jingoism.
Next was cinema verité, which found a different angle of moral responsibility within the act of filming stories about real people. Vérité was messageless—no somber narration over carefully selected shots to tell the viewer where her sympathies should lie. As Brenton and Cohen put it, the move marked the abandonment of argument. Or at least claimed to. Because, of course, that’s an impossibility—the camera argues simply by what it chooses to see, the editing argues by what it deems expendable. Instead, the form took up a new, silent argument: What you are seeing is pure truth, the accurate everything of another life; we are letting you make up your own mind.
Finally, there came moral responsibility to oneself, a generation of nineties filmmakers who claimed that the only truth that mattered was the personal connection: Michael Moore telling us about the auto industry, but really telling us that he grew up in Flint, Michigan. Or Tracey Emin challenging giant patriarchal institutions by very specifically chronicling her sex life. The claim to truth was replaced with the claim to authenticity. The person had lived the story they told, and there was no greater purity than that of the first-person address.
It’s either heartening or the opposite to think that the conversation about reality shows picks up, in some way or another, all the threads that have been around since the beginning of filmed actuality. Maybe it’s the perfect coevolution of these traditions into one beast. Maybe it’s the mutant child of every bad instinct—beholden to the messages of financial interests, claiming truth speciously, stopping to pray at every slapdash church of the self.
The term abandonment of argument keeps sticking out to me, the implied purity of it, how you can choose to see it as the closest thing to truth or the ultimate lie. The shows we love are, if anything, about the act of argumentation, in that the subjects of the shows are all actively arguing with one another. And even just by their sheer presence on-screen, they’re arguing that they deserve screen time, as well as making more specific arguments about and through their own lives—Wealth is desirable! Being fat is dangerous! I really love Jesus! Looking good can lead to feeling good! True love is real!
But I don’t think those add up to arguments in any grander sense. They’re not trying to convince us of anything, other than to hold still, to come back for more. So the abandonment of argument here is more the abandonment of purpose. This is antiaspirational watching. Sometimes, as we watch, I feel hopeless. Sometimes turned on. Sometimes weepy, sometimes benevolent, sometimes cruel. Sometimes I feel like the most honest version of myself, festering, which brings its own strange sense of accomplishment. With no argument, we’re left to our own worst devices.
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A couple of years ago a study was shared around the literary Internet, where I feel compelled to spend much of my non-TV-related time. The headline: “Reading Literary Fiction Improves Empathy.” The study split subjects into sample reading groups: some got nonfiction, some got “popular” fiction, some got literary fiction, and some read nothing at all. Then the researchers asked questions that somehow tested the readers’ abilities to understand the thoughts and emotions of others. Apparently, on
ly those who read literary novels got better at understanding perspectives outside their own. Literary fiction, the study reasoned, paid more attention than other genres to the inner workings of the mind, requiring the readers to imagine themselves in those thoughts on the page for a sustained period of time, encouraging nuance, curiosity, care.
Of course, I have a lot invested in quibbling with these findings. I’m pretty confident that they are, at least in some way, bullshit—such studies exist only to stock tenure files and provide ammunition for Facebook fights, another manufactured battleground on which people can weaponize the claim of who gets to be a good person. But I’m also a bit nervous that I don’t fully understand empathy, or that it’s tempting to willfully misunderstand it.
I like feeling emotions, and often I’m tempted to equate the mere act of feeling with empathy. I think again of the pity with which I misread Richard Wright—the warm swell of connectivity I felt when crying at the pain of characters that I made no real attempt to understand, even as they moved me. Which isn’t to say that the feelings were insincere—I loved those books; I was moved, but then what else? What knowledge of anything beyond my own inflamed emotion?
I’m not trying to imply that Wright isn’t literary fiction, only that I didn’t seem capable of reading him for those qualities. That’s part of the deal, I think; not just the creator’s intent to reveal the whispered intricacies of human psychology but the interpreter’s willingness to look for them. Perhaps that’s the better question, or at least the tougher one to confront—not what the material is providing us but how hard we’re willing to try to understand, how content we are to stay at the surface of another life and wallow in the emotion it can provide. It’s much easier to feel than to understand. It’s also easy to equate feeling with understanding, and that leads to satisfaction, and what feels better than satisfaction?
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I remember watching Cops with my uncle Chris. Chris was a heroin addict, and for much of my childhood he lived, off and on, in my grandparents’ basement on the couch. During the day, he would tell his mother he was going to Dunkin’ Donuts or to meet a guy about a potential IT job. I’d watch his van pull out, and then four or five hours later he’d return with shuffling feet and huge pupils. He’d head back to the basement, where I slept on a mattress at the foot of his couch when we visited. It was usually a Friday or Saturday, so Cops was on prime time, and Chris had gotten to the point where he could name various officers and discuss at length the merits of their personalities before their names even appeared on-screen and they reintroduced themselves to the cameras in their squad cars.
He watched to laugh at the criminals. When they ran, he laughed and pointed at the screen; when they invariably got caught, thrown to the ground screaming or crying or both, he would sit back satisfied and chuckle the chuckle of someone whose expectations were limited and had just been met. I didn’t particularly like Chris, so I watched to hate the cops, and then watching became about anger for both of us, the distinct satisfaction of being certain that some man on-screen was a bad man who deserved whatever humiliation he got.
One of the last times I slept in that basement, Cops wasn’t on, but Fox News was playing clips of the first U.S. air raids on Afghanistan. I think it was night-vision shots from the perspective of the bombers. Most of what we saw on-screen were flashes of light coming from below, and we could hear voices explaining, rather gleefully, that the old Soviet antiaircraft guns that the Afghan fighters on the ground were using couldn’t reach the height of a modern jet.
“Look at those fucking losers,” Chris said. “Look at those fucking cavemen. Shooting at airplanes they can’t even hit.”
He was older at this point, maybe sober but physically falling apart—swollen ankles, a distended belly like an infomercial child’s, a dying man’s face. He was quieter and gentler than I’d ever known him, ruefully self-deprecating, just beaten, really, but he was still vicious and clear-eyed as he watched.
The conceit that there were real people being filmed—real cops shoving nightsticks into the smalls of the backs of real crack-addicted petty thieves, or real fresh-faced American fighter boys winning shadow-war victories—seemed to allow him to feel less, to engage in less reflection. This was a man who nodded out in the back of his van until mall security rapped on the window. Who must have, at points in his life, felt as neutered and rageful and doomed as any makeshift soldier shooting defunct missiles up into the sky. Yet when he watched criminals get beaten for public amusement, young men dying defenselessly in a war that technically hadn’t begun, he couldn’t feel, or didn’t want to feel, anything approximating connection. He seemed to feel only righteous joy.
Sometimes this is my worry for me, for us. That we see real lives, framed just so, and are invited to assess their merits, and that assessment becomes a way to perform our own morality, to double down on how we like to feel. We’re the opposite kind of watchers from Chris—we’re doe-eyed bleeding hearts, not callous believers in bootstrap myths—but we still watch to judge. Saying Awww isn’t that different from saying Ewww.
In front of Dance Moms, when Kendall tumbles midsolo and her mother clucks and averts her eyes in the crowd, I say, “Awww, Jesus Christ, these poor kids.”
In front of My Big Fat Fabulous Life, when Whitney is called Shamu by a bunch of shitkicker dudes in a parking lot: “Awww, nobody should have to hear that.”
Then you grin at me, and maybe rub your fingertips on my scalp. Maybe we hold hands there on the couch, and what a lovely feeling that is, briefly: soft skin like we just remembered it was there, fingers intertwined easily—not routine but definitely accustomed. We discuss our own aversion to cruelty, our own ability to care, say that’s the quality that makes us who we are, and the screen flickers neon, and the music plays us into the next commercial break.
8
[REQUEST FOR AUDITION]:
Hey our name is _________ and _________ im 23 and he’s 26 we’ve been going through a lot we argue way too much and we just want to be successful in life its just that me and are really struggling and want to show the world what we go through and still love each other he’s working and im working but we don’t live with each other but we want so bad just don’t have the money so us being on this show we’ll show everyvody what we go through and how we make ends meet with each other so can we please be on this show we would really appreciate this.
—from www.castingcallhub.com
When I was sixteen, I watched Joe Millionaire every Thursday. The conceit of the show was that women competed to marry a handsome man who was not actually named Joe, who they were told was a millionaire but was in fact a construction worker. On one of the last episodes, Joe had narrowed it down to two women, and one of the women took him for a walk into the woods around the house set. They were offscreen but miked up, and the shot lingered on a bare, boring tree, with subtitles at the bottom of the screen. There was a final, key sound with a corresponding triumphant subtitle: (Slurp).
It’s hard to express how thrilling this moment was for me. To not see anything sordid but instead to hear it and read it over the most benign possible background. It felt like encountering the monsters drawn at the edges of an ancient map, the unknowable, beautiful danger that was always waiting just outside the available frame. I longed for what the show was selling—the kind of impropriety that wasn’t flaunted but also (obviously) was, a place where secrets were massaged into the realm of the nearly hidden: whispered intentions, covert sucks, sordid mysteries that I’d begun to imagine happening in every dark corner, just out of my grasp.
(Slurp) became the first big moment of moral indignation at not just the reductive, antifeminist premise of such a reality show but the execution of it. The slurper, Sarah, came out after the show premiered and said it never happened. Or that the sound happened, the image happened, but the blending of the two was fiction. The s
lurp was spliced in from an earlier bit of audio when she was eating some soup in the communal kitchen, or something equally lame. They’d just been talking out there in the woods, kissing a little, whatever—PG-13 stuff. A common noise was mixed into a common situation to produce the desirable effect of scandal. This became its own scandal.
This technique has since been given the rather dramatic title of “Frankenbite”—mad scientists meddling with the order of lives, monsters made, et cetera. It’s a term ever ripe for attack. One of the most thorough attacks comes from Jennifer Pozner, in her book, Reality Bites Back: The Troubling Truth About Guilty Pleasure TV. Pozner takes on the role of the investigative reporter, probing through the lies. She quotes an anonymous producer from The Bachelor saying, “It’s misleading to the viewer and unfair to the cast member, but they sign up for this.”
The “they sign up for this” part of the quote seems to refer specifically to cast members, but Pozner uses the Frankenbite example to reinforce the fact that viewers are being lied to as well, manipulated into seeing a reality that was never really there and buying into whatever moral judgment is neatly manufactured by that contrivance.
“Though this technique is commonplace,” she continues, “most reality show runners want us to believe that, as Laguna Beach executive producer Tony DiSanto claims, ‘We never make up something that hasn’t happened.’ Actually, they do.”
Yes, they do. Or maybe they do. Maybe it’s somewhere in the middle existing on a sliding scale between document and deceit. Either way, what I want to know is who was ever really fooled?
The most irritating thing about telling people that I’m “working on this new project about reality TV” is that the first response it invokes is, without fail, reactionary disbelief.
