On
June 29th, 2012, the film Magic
Mike, directed by Steven Soderbergh, released to a warm reception from
critics, trending a 72 out of 100 on the aggregate review site Metacritic.[i]
However, Peter Travis of Rolling Stone
was somewhat critical of the film, awarding it a two out of a possible five
stars. In the last sentence of his review, Travis wrote “I didn’t see this
coming from a sharp observer like Soderbergh.”[ii]
Yet, while Travis’ review of the film may have had some valid points, this
notion of director as prime observer came across as out of date and irrelevant,
especially given the growth of reality television over the past two
decades.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in his work Human, All Too Human states that “A good
writer possesses not only his own spirit but also the spirit of his friends.[iii]
And for eons, this was the widely accepted mentality: that the power of
observance lay with artists, writers, and philosophers. However, reality
television and other innovations have rendered this cultural phenomena mute and
ushered in a new era where the power of observation has been wrestled from the
hands of the few and given to the many. Now everyone is a journalist, a
filmmaker, a star, and the advent of constant surveillance has given
individuals a near infinite audience of their peers. The use of the word
surveillance carries a negative connotation, but the proliferation of voyeurism
could have proved to be positive development—a development that could have
allowed individuals a window into other cultures, ideas, and beliefs. In A Heartbreaking Work of Stagger Genius by
Dave Eggers, a young, anxious Dave auditions for a role on The Real World: San Francisco. His interview with one of the
producers proves disastrous, but near the end he is asked, “Why do you want to
be on The Real World?” and he responded with “Because I want everyone to
witness my youth.”[iv]
The use of surveillance technology, and specifically reality television, could
have been used to build a more tolerant world, one where difficult and honest
interactions are broadcast on national television. Instead, the medium of
reality television turned its back on providing a new forum for expression and
open dialogue and as an alternative delivered content that perpetuated and
reinforced certain cultural norms and practices in regard to issues of family,
sex, and economics.
As reported by the New York
Times, the premiere episode of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” on TLC drew more
viewers than the Republican National Convention. Not to be proven as an
isolated incident, the show returned a week later to have around the same
amount of viewers as the Democratic National Convention.[v] On
first glance, this statistic may come across as sad and depressing, implying that
Americans care more about Alana Thompson (Honey Boo Boo’s actual name) than
their next president. Yet, these three programs, the national conventions and
“Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”, are really about the same thing: trying to get you
to like a semi-fictional character. Honey Boo Boo serves as an ambassador for
redneck culture, similarly to how Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, during the 2012
election, campaigned and advocated for their respective party’s platforms. Week
after week, throughout the fall, Honey Boo Boo appeared on national television,
all too excited to promote “Go-Go Juice” and the “Red Neck Games,” along with
other aspects of the culture that she and her family hold so dear. In all
aspects but responsibility and power, the roles of presidential candidate and
reality show star were similar in the fall of 2012, and this was no accident on
the part of TLC.
Annette Hill, in
her book Reality TV: Factual
Entertainment and Television Audiences states, “Factual entertainment is a
category commonly used within the television industry for popular factual
television, and the category indicates the marriage of factual programming,
such as news or documentary, with fictional programming, such as game shows or
soap opera.[vi]
Throughout the production and marketing of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo”, TLC embraced the concept of factual
entertainment. On a typical episode, the Thompson family engages in some kind
of activity that plays to the strengths of their humor, be it attending the
“Rock Star Divas Pageant” or engaging in a summer weight loss challenges. Yet
TLC, in a stroke of either genius or fiendishness, extends the characters of
the Thompson family beyond the television show and into reality. On October 15th,
2012, Alana and her mother, June, appeared on “Jimmy Kimmel Live.” Early on in the
interview, Alana kept her person intact, as the first words out of her mouth
were “This is Mama and I’m Honey Boo Boo!”[vii]
June also answered Jimmy’s questions with the same gusto and unabashed manner
that she carries on the show. Yet, when asked about the family’s future plans,
June slid the character away for a moment and adopted a milder accent. She
stated, “It’s all about my kids. That’s why I chose to put money in the trust
fund.”[viii]
Yet, the moment passes away and Alana and her mother move onto the topic of
family nicknames, bewildered when Kimmel doesn’t believe that Alana’s sister,
Jessica, likes the nickname “Chubs.”
This shock, and
the resulting moment of silence between mother and daughter, demonstrates the
sales aspect of “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo.” Education, nutrition, and the
general reality of the Thompson family’s socio-economic status are never really
addressed on the show. Instead, the audience watches activities that range from
shopping for dresses to a half-hearted weight loss program that ends in the
entire family eating cheese puffs. In this light, the moral of “Here Comes
Honey Boo Boo” comes across as anti-education and anti-upward mobility and
perpetuates a belief that as long as you have family and simple pleasures, all
will be fine. As illustrated through the Kimmel interview, June seems to
understand what is at play and has a plan for the day the cameras stop rolling.
She has even gone as far as to never mention on that show that each of the
Thompson children has a different father, preserving the illusion of a happy
and unbroken family.[ix] However
Alana, when asked by Kimmel if she prefers her birth name or Honey Boo Boo,
hesitated, later stating that she doesn’t know. A little girl caught between a
character and a life.
“The Bachelor”,
ABC’s long running dating show, is about to enter its seventeenth season,
clearly a cause of celebration among ABC executives, for most television shows
fail to make it past their first season.[x] For those unfamiliar with the premise of “The
Bachelor”, the show revolves one man, usually in his mid to late 20s who is
already wealthy or is poised to inherit an ungodly amount of money. For the
duration of the show, this bachelor lives in a house with twenty-five other
woman and at the end of each episode must give roses to the women he wants to
stay. The rejects, the ones who fail to receive a rose, are all seemingly
contractually obligated to cry on camera as they pack their suitcases. The show
does its hardest to convince us that this is a difficult, tremulous decision
for the bachelor, as everyone on the show is supposedly “looking for love”[xi]
and a potential soul mate. Yet, despite this claim of love, none of the final
couples featured in the previous sixteen seasons of The Bachelor have stayed together.[xii]
In this light, “The Bachelor” is not
a show about love, but a show about spectacle. The show asks its audience to
tune in on the promise of witnessing the birth of true love. Yet, with it’s
industry-standard six-week shooting schedule, “The Bachelor” values flash, sex,
and fleeting stardom over the development of a legitimate relationship.[xiii]
In 2001, Steven
Reiss, a professor at Ohio State University (OSU) conducted a study in
collaboration with James Witlz, at the time a Ph.D candidate at OSU. The two
men found that one of the main factors that separated a casual viewer of
reality television from a regular viewer was the idea of status, identifying
with phrases such as “Prestige is important to me.”[xiv]
And this prestige conveys itself under the belief that when you watch “The
Batchelor,” you watch someone similar to yourself rise to fame and potentially
fortune. This is evident during the opening episode of Season 16 of “The
Bachelor”, especially when new bachelor Ben Flajnik, gets to meet his women.
One of the women, Lindzi Cox, rode in on a horse and pronounced that she was
here “to find love.”[xv]
While Courtney Robertson, another contestant on the show, stated in her introduction
video “I think wedding rings look pretty amazing on me” and “I know what I
want. I think two carets is, you know, I deserve it.”[xvi]
All of the contestants on “The Bachelor” are clearly familiar with the show.
Therefore, it is absurd to believe that Courtney and Lindzi’s actions were
fueled by anything but a desire for fame and wealth, an urge that was only
encouraged by being, at one point or another, viewers. Even Ben Flajnik, the
bachelor himself, may be conflicted in his motivations. The start of episode
frames him as a wounded soul, one who was wronged by his time on “The Bachelorette”,
a spinoff show whose premise is identical with the exception that the ratios
are flipped, twenty-five men to a single woman. Before the episode cuts to the
bachelor house, Flajnik engages in a montage of presumably attractive
activities such as kayaking and playing “This Year’s Love” by David Gray on the
piano (lowered head and all), all the while his voice narrates the performance,
“One would like to hope that you can find the love of your life at any point in
time, and if I could find it while being the bachelor, I’m all for it.”[xvii]
Yet, Flajnik undercuts this manufactured sympathy when he finishes the
monologue with, “I’ve never juggled twenty-five woman.”[xviii]
Reiss writes,
“Reality TV allows Americans to fantasize about gaining status through
automatic fame. Ordinary people can watch the shows, see people like themselves
and imagine that they too could become celebrities by being on television.”[xix]
And this is exactly what “The Bachelor” does; it attracts people who want to be
celebrities, want to be on television and uses them to proliferate a distorted
form of love, one which cares more about spectacle and material possession than
portraying an honest relationship. In A
Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare wrote, “The course of true love never
did run smooth,” conveying that love is at times painful.[xx] “The
Bachelor” serves as the antithesis to this ideal, having what will soon be
seventeen seasons to promote excess and fame over commitment and companionship,
a love of spectacle over love of person.
On May 8th,
2012, my roommate and I munched on cheese puffs while we watched the season
finale of “The Voice”, NBC’s self-described “interactive singing competition.”[xxi] We
had both watched this season from its inception and labeled Jermaine Paul, an
R&B/soul singer who has a voice that could convince any racist grandma to
let him into her house, as our personal favorite. We sat through two hours of
forced monologues, half-hearted compliments, and seemingly profound life
lessons that could somehow be boiled down into thirty seconds and a plug for Starbucks
Coffee. We waited for the moment that we, and presumably the rest of the
country, knew was imminent. And around eleven that night our patience was
rewarded, Jermaine was crowned the winner, cheese puffs flew through the air,
and for a moment, as steamers and balloons rained down from the ceiling of a
studio somewhere east of the 405, I felt that the world was okay, that I was
apart of something bigger than myself and that through hard work and
dedication, both Jermaine and I had succeeded in our shared cause.
Yet this optimism, this moment of faith
renewed, was undercut the moment I opened my laptop and realized that I owned
all of Jermaine’s songs. For how “The Voice” works is that week in and week out
audience members vote to see who stays on the show. However, as opposed to “American
Idol” or “Dancing With The Stars” where
the voting is conducted over the phone, on “The Voice” you cast a vote for a
contestant by purchasing their song on iTunes. Yet, despite my minuscule
financial investment in Jermaine’s future, I know almost nothing about the man.
For everything I have learned about Jermaine has been spoon-fed to me,
carefully cut and scored in order for me to observe exactly what had been intended.
I know that Jermaine is the son of a preacher, one of ten children and spent
some time signed to Shaquille O’Neal’s Twism Records, and with this sliver of
information I should feel no empathy for him, for I am not relating to a person,
but a character. A character who’s history had been presented to me in the form
of carefully constructed thirty-second video clips.
“We can only
murder strangers if we cannot imagine what it is like to be them,”[xxii]
contemporary philosopher Richard Kearney argues. Yet, if this is the case, then
I shouldn’t be throwing cheese balls into the air upon Jermaine’s victory, I
should feel ambivalent toward his cause; for my only real interaction with him
is that he sings to me for about two minutes each week. But I don’t feel this
way; I cheer for him, I buy his songs on iTunes, I tune in every week just to
know I supported him and his dream. But, I’m not supporting him; I’m supporting
the version of him that has been sold to me, the version that some producers
have crafted in order to get me to buy more 99¢
songs. And I can acknowledge this, or at least I have the power to acknowledge
this, but am seemingly reluctant too.
Nietzsche believed
that the weak person clung to God, even in the presence of overwhelming
evidence that he doesn’t exist. And in a sense, this is how I feel about
Jermaine. I want to imagine him as this perfect soul singer whose career I can
directly support. This vision is appealing, inviting, but at the end of the
day, my capability for imagination is not being used to get me to love, but to
purchase. In a piece for the New
Yorker, Kelefa Sanneh by way of Jennifer L. Ponzer writes, “that reality
shows have a tendency to blur together into a single orgy of joy and
disappointment and recrimination.” And it is this disappointment, this moment
of dissatisfaction that corrals us into opening our wallets. The role of
observer is transformed into an economic exchange, one where currency is
exchanged for a potentially good feeling. In this sense, the economics of “The Voice” more closely
resemble the illicit drug market than the music industry. We are taught that
yes, one needs hard work and have a bit of talent to achieve their dreams and
all the positive feelings that come along with that, but if you want a little
bump, a little more of a guarantee, some consumption is involved.
Alan Ginsberg
opened his infamous poem “Howl” with the phrase “I saw the best minds of my
generation destroyed by madness.”[xxiii]
And earlier this year, ex-Facebook employee Jeff Hammerbacher offered a
humorous update with “The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to
make people clicks ads.”[xxiv]
However, as illustrated by the growth of reality television, it is not just
online advertisements that try to distract us, manipulate us, and alter our
views towards things such as family and love. Yet, to some extent we tolerate
this control; we, for the most part, don’t move out to the desert, drop our
cell phones into toilets, and usually prefer to spend our off hours watching
Netflix as opposed to rioting in the streets. Now, I don’t advocate on behalf
of anarchy or nihilism, but instead I have a hope. A hope that with a greater
cultural emphasize on thoughtful action, we can tiptoe towards a future where
we are aware and honest about our impulses, desires, and behaviors.
[i] "Magic
Mike." Metacritic n.pag. Metacritic, CBS
Interactive. Web. 5 Dec 2012.
[ii] Travers,
Peter. "Magic Mike." Rolling Stone. Wenner Media, 28
2012. Web. 5 Dec 2012.
[iii] Nietzsche,
Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Cambridge University Press, 92.
Print.
[iv] Eggers,
Dave. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Vintage, 2000.
Print.
[v] Kepler,
Adam. "‘Honey Boo Boo’ Has the Ratings, if Not the Critics." New
York Times. 28 2012: n. page. Print.
[vi] Hill,
Annette. Reality TV: Factual Entertainment and Television Audiences.
New York, NY: Routledge, 2004. Print.
[vii] Honey Boo Boo and Mama on Jimmy Kimmel Live PART 1. 2012. Web. 7 Dec 2012
[viii] Honey Boo Boo and Mama on Jimmy Kimmel Live PART 2. 2012. Web. 7 Dec 2012.
[ix] Hickman,
Matt. "Honey Boo Boo's guide to thrifty living."Mother Nature
Network. 27 2012: n. page. Web. 7 Dec. 2012.
[x] "About
the Show." The Bachelor. ABC. Web. 8 Dec 2012.
[xi] "About
the Show." The Bachelor. ABC. Web. 8 Dec 2012.
[xii] "The
Bachelor." Wikipedia. Wikipedia. Web. 8 Dec 2012.
[xiii] Burnett,
Daynah. "Are the Bachelor Roses Real? 5 Weird Fan Questions
Answered." Wet Paint. 27 2012: n. page. Web. 8 Dec. 2012.
[xiv] Reiss,
Steven, and James Wiltz. "Why America Loves Reality
Television." Psychology Today. (2001): n. page. Web. 8 Dec.
2012.
[xv] "1601." The
Bachelor. ABC: 02 2012. Television.
[xvi] "1601." The
Bachelor. ABC: 02 2012. Television.
[xvii] "1601." The
Bachelor. ABC: 02 2012. Television
[xviii] "1601." The
Bachelor. ABC: 02 2012. Television
[xix] Reiss,
Steven, and James Wiltz. "Why America Loves Reality
Television." Psychology Today. (2001): n. page. Web. 8 Dec.
2012.
[xx] Shakespeare,
William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Washington Sqaure Press, 1993. Print.
[xxi]"The Voice." The
Voice. NBC. Web. 20 Nov 2012.
[xxii] Kearney,
Richard. Anatheism: Returning To God After God. New York
Chichester, West Sussex: Columbia University Press, 2010. 42. Print.
[xxiii] Ginsberg,
Allen. "Howl." Poets.org. N.p.. Web. 8 Dec 2012.
[xxiv] Vance,
Ashlee. "This Tech Bubble Is Different."Bloomberg Businessweek
Magazine. Bloomberg, 14 2011. Web. 8 Dec 2012.
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