Les Rolystes

Voila ce que j'ai fait pour un devoir d'anglais. Comme je suis méga fort et que je roxe, je vous fait part du résultat : un magnifique pamphlet contre la télé réalité.

About reality television possible excesses, or what’s so wrong about all that ?

There are three figures in the modern dance that is real tv and we’re going to take a quick look at each of them.

First of all, the widest and still in growing part, the spectator, the viewer. And viewer is a good word to describe his position as he watches real people’s actions and reactions in different kinds of situations : surrounded by twenty handsome women, asked to do an unchallenging but unexpected challenge, pursued by the police or faced with his worst fear. This viewer can watch the program literally or with a little detachment and there are some pits one must avoid in both cases.

Indeed, watching a reality show literally means getting emotionally involved, and feeling empathy with the people evolving in it. The problem is that this so called reality one is watching is far from being realistic : the situations are fake, the presence of cameras distorts reactions and last but not least, a lot of things are not transcribed and are filtered by the production. The result is a dream - or a nightmare - designed to appeal to the client, to make him react. One could look at these shows and believe them and have one’s standards of reality dangerously twisted : some psychiatrists from Montreal discovered a new kind of mental illness they called The Truman Show Delusion, which consists in believing your life has ceased being genuine and is being scripted and broadcasted to the world. A good friend of mine actually lives his life as if being watched at all time, making jokes to imaginary cameras even when he’s alone. Another one is trying to create a religion based on watching your whole life through a «death cam» after you die. That idea is old : Seneque advise people to (written in his Letters to Lucilius) live your life as if it is a play, it’s not important if you play only one act or the whole show, as long as you play it good. This point of view may become more and more common as real tv is spreading to the world.
Another interesting point is the spirit of paranoia and competition present in almost all the reality shows : it emphasizes the feeling that one must be wary of the other, one must be better than the other, which goes against any harmony principle that should ideally rule our society.

On the other hand, if you - and when I say you, it could also be your 8 years old kid - watch such a show with detachment, for entertainment, it’s probably only to tickle your worst human tendencies : sadism - the shows are getting more and more cruel and twisted, lately Jade Goody, a real tv UK star, offered her death to the british cameras ; voyeurism - just type naked Big Brother in Youtube ; sarcasm and cynicism - real tv participants don’t seem to be recruited for their brain power. The detached spectator enjoys seeing real people humiliated, hurt, showing stupidity and ignorance. The exact word for that is Schadenfreude : it means taking joy in harm, it’s the opposite of sympathy or compassion. Cognitive studies show that this emotion is happening to raise one’s opinion of oneself, and the more you envy the hurt person, the stronger it grows : replace the mirror in your bathroom by a flat screen and you’ll see other people’s ugly faces instead of yours. This leads to intellectual stagnation, as seeing you’re already so much superior than this bunch of people could prevent any willingness to improve.

The other involved figure is the participant, who may or may not survive his trip towards celebrity and media overwhelming presence, his life exposed, his emotions and actions carefully studied, doing all the «Masters Who Can Bring Him Fame/Fortune/Love/Life» want him to perform, getting paranoiac, revealing secrets, and finally either fails and disappears, despised by all, or succeeds and be doomed to be That Guy From Big Brother Season 2. One may or may not enjoy all of that, but they probably signed some sort of contract and knew what to expect. Hell, most of them probably love being lab rats, eating, sleeping, dancing, reproducing, playing in front of cameras : they want to be someone in this western society of anonymity and nobodies.

Last but not least, the producers are the one who had the idea and the means to create the real tv shows. They found a gold mine, people love it and one hour of reality show costs substantially less than one hour of fiction show, as you don’t have any actor or writer fees. The art of making money out of the public by getting the public to provide the content. They must not be blamed for the risks of their show, as they merely put the money in it and take back their dividend.

In conclusion, reality television offers something that answers our society needs, otherwise it wouldn’t have spread in the whole world the way it did. But what do we need so badly we’re ready to face all the potential excesses it brings ? The philosopher Slavoj Zizek has a beginning of answer : «The authentic XXth century passion to penetrate the Real Thing (ultimately, the destructive Void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitute our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate "effect," sought after from digitalized special effects through reality TV and amateur pornography up to snuff movies. [...] The late capitalist consumerist paradise is, in its hyper-reality, in a way IRREAL, substanceless, deprived of the material inertia.». In the Matrix and the Truman Show movies, in the Philip K Dick novel Time Out Of Joint and many other similar fictions, the hero gradually awakes from the «fake world» and discovers the truth beneath it. We live in a world so filled with screens, with fake smiles and cameras, where hypocrisy and lies have become so natural, that we doubt its sheer reality. It’s the latest version of the Plato cave. And paradoxically, the answer to that need of reality, and, should I add, to that haunting sensation of life’s emptiness, is a set of artificial realities designed to make the western civilization's human being actually FEEL something.

Feanor