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NEW BEER SELECTION
friday:
THE PARADOX OF REALITY TV FAME
"After the break, how to get on a reality tele
vision show! team the ins and outs of..."
I turned off the news program right there. I
understand why this would interest a subset of
people—they want to be famous. Reality televi
sion, supposedly, holds that golden promise that
our culture has yearned for eternally; a system
where any common person can become famous for
doing nothing extraordinary. The promise, how
ever, is flawed.
'Fame' may be the single-most enigmatic
entity in modem culture. It may very well be the
most important entity—a scale in which we judge
the worth of most everything. At the same time, it
is an entity that is completely impossible to
define or predict—from a cause-and-efFect stand
point—by any mathematical means.
Okay, an important caveat: there has always
been a camp of observers and critics who obsess
over the coloration between the fame and the
talent of an individual—the presumption being
that the two should somehow match. We argue
that certain individuals 'really should not be
famous' because they have little talent Or, the
other side retorts that indeed all famous people
are talented, it's just not a talent respected by
critics, and that the market defines talent thus
fame and talent are truly synchronized.
Talent/ Fame Paradox
This whole angle of attempting to compare
talent and fame, however, misses the real point
The two have nothing to do with each other.
Talent is measurable; fame is not This is because
it's not the single individual who is actually
'famous.' Rather, our culture has fame archetypes
which single individuals merely filL For example,
who is Madonna? She's an Italian-American girl
from Detroit who happens to enjoy singing and
dancing. Everything about her famed persoixi,
however, has nothing to do with her. If Madonna
Louise Veronica Ciccone had never been bom,
'Madonna,' as a concept, would still exist
Arguably, whatever 'Madonna" is to popular cul
ture has existed well before this individual was
bom, and will exist well after she has faded
away—merely filled by different individuals.
Thus, fame really is just an attempt to com
moditize all of the archetypes we encounter in
people. This is all well and good in a conceptual
sense—psychologically, humans have always cate
gorized things using sample models. Sparing you,
the reader, of a lengthy Advanced Psychology of
Human Interaction dissertation (which I'd be
making up anyway)—let's put it simply: one
cannot possibly know the ins-and-outs of every
person encountered. We need archetypes, and
fame is an offshoot of this need.
Idealism and Exclusion
The increasing popularity and scope of televi
sion over the past 50-plus years has created an
interesting predicament Television, you see, is
really a completely different animal than any
other medium through which feme—and its indi
vidual archetypes of people—can be channeled.
Television allows us to access these archetypes
using the two senses which we use predominantly
to experience, categorize, and judge others: visual
and auditory.
As well television was able to package these
things in quick and easy-to-digest pieces, while
evolving in a nearly infinitely expansive arena.
Unlike movies, plays, music and every other
media—television can be everything.
Thus, the predicament that television (or,
really, the way society insists on television con
tent being structured) creates is that it becomes
the center of our archetypes for all people and
injects idealism and exclusion into the same mi*.
We don't archetype certain 'types' of people; cer
tain flaws don't make good television—or, more
generally, don't make good "fame.'
Real Revolution
Reality television supposedly 'changes every
thing.' Or, so I've been told in all of the special
features sections of the variety of reality televi
sion DVDs I own. Most of the talk of this supposed
revolution in reality television essentially revolves
around the breaking down of this very fame arche
type I'm discussing. Where fame used to be
reserved for idealized personas, it is quickty
moving down to the proverbial 'normal people-'
for better or worse.
All of this may be somewhat true, but I believe
this is a flawed premise in terms of the real trans
formation that has been brought about Reality
television has very little to do with individual per
sonas. Reality television exploits situations. So,
while it may be somewhat interesting how Indi
viduals are positioned in this new format it is
now far less relevant in terms of how viewers
intermingle the structure of television with the
structure of their own lives—which still occurs at
the same accelerated degree as always.
It is as if we've run out of new archetypes of
people to fashion within famed individuals. We
have a model for everything we care about in that
arena, and thus are now fixated—in the same
fashion—on situations. Furthermore, like the
famed individuals previously the center of popular
culture, these situations are quickly being bas
tardized by idealization and exclusion.
Reality, Edited
Anyone who has even a cursory knowledge of
how business is run knows that the situations in
"The Apprentice," while founded somewhat in
reality, are at best laughably irrelevant and at
worst precariously erroneous. The same goes for,
say, the therapeutic processes used in 'Starting
Over."
While there are certainly many subtle ways a
therapist goes about helping abused and psycho
logically damaged women, something tells me
exhibiting said problems on national television is
not generally taught in medical school
Interestingly enough, the individuals in these
shows are often acting a lot more pragmatically
than their fictional 'fame archetype" counterparts.
This is a lot of the reason why, excepting for a
very rare few examples, these individuals are rarely
famous—using the definition of being inserted
into a pre-existing, idealized archetype—for very
long. One could actually argue, they are never at
alL The circumstance, however, is famous.
Will this more realistic model of people benefit
society? Maybe. What becomes dangerous,
though, is that the trade-off remains a completely
unrealistic image of situations. Will future busi
nesspeople assume that foolishly inappropriate
characteristics-such as the ability to best chew
out and expose the flaws of your presumed adver
sary—prove the worth of associates? Will those
with psychological problems assume that the only
way to heal is to expose said problems nearly to
the point of becoming nothing more than a poster
child for that problem? Will it be possible to find
true love without being locked in an opulent
apartment together, attempting to complete fool
ishly embarrassing tasks?
The issue becomes even more perilous in
reverse. Will we, as a culture, place less value on
situations that would not make great television?
Maybe this seems extreme, but it is already
common in general interactions amongst people
to use much of the time discussing situations on
reality television as if we interacted with these
situations ourselves. What, then, is being edited
out? Most likety, and ironically enough, reality.
GmlSiOpnBf J. 1 liny
Christopher J. Fahey is the editor of the on-tine
magazine THE VN/VO where this artidi also
appears. He con be contacted at wwenvttvo.com.
I FLAGPOLE.COM • JUNE 1,2005