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Popular Culture Review
who are miserable and even suffering on a show: “Well, I agreed to be a part of
this; 1 can’t leave.”
It is not that we should think that this constructed world is less real than our
world. We cannot criticize reality TV for not being real, for being staged, for
being some sort of fictionalized and scripted version of reality, because all of
this relies on a somewhat naive notion of The Real that assumes that there is
something that is unscripted, objective, separate from human interpretation and
subjectivity, and thus more genuine than what is put before us to experience. All
critical analysis of reality TV should take place on an ethical and social-political
front, not an ontological one. Perhaps reality TV stars are necessarily exploited
labor. Perhaps the construction of the self on such shows is somehow politically
damaging. Or perhaps there is room for reality TV to be transformative and
liberating. Let us, for now, be content with making a case for why there should
be no metaphysical or ontological disparagement.
From its inception, Western thought has vilified the appearance. Perspective
has been something to overcome and get around; subjectivity has been seen as
leading us further from truth. Take Plato’s Republic. Here we find Socrates
pitching a reality show to Glaucon in which several prisoners are chained inside
a cave so that they can’t move to look from side-to-side or behind them. “And
get this,” says Socrates. “There is a fire pit behind them and a ledge where men
walk carrying objects, the shadows of which are cast on the cave wall in front of
the contestants. For these contestants, their whole life consists of looking at
shadows, only they don’t know these are just shadows. These people think that
these are real things because that’s all that they know. Each episode will have
the prisoners learning things about their world even though we all know that
they are learning nothing real; and then during sweeps we will let the citizens of
Athens vote one prisoner out of the cave. Imagine the big reveal! The prisoner is
allowed to leave the cave, see the true nature of things, and then he can return to
see how many prisoners he can convince, simply by shouting at them from the
mouth of the cave, that he has a better take on what is real than they do.”
“Let’s greenlight it!” says Glaucon. Or something like that.
From its start, Western thought has asked us to turn away from what we
experience if we want to get at the truth. But not only is it the case that there is
no actual distinction between appearance and reality, it is also true that looking
at the way in which appearance takes place can teach us a lot about truth.
Is it any surprise that most incarnations of the television show “Survivor”
have taken place in postcolonial locations? Is it any surprise that this show
reenacts colonial ideology as the civilized Euro-American leams to conquer and
win in a hostile new land inhabited only by strange creatures and even stranger
people? And all the while there is the assumed understanding that this is good
for the locals, too. On one episode of “Survivor: Africa,” one challenge had as
its reward that the winner would receive not only a new Chevy Avalanche, but
also the honor of getting to pack it full of AIDS supplies and drive it to the
Wamba African AIDS hospital, the white burden of saving these diseased and