20
Popular Culture Review
From “American Idol” to “So You Think You Can Dance,” remember, America:
only your votes can save your favorites.
How does it conclude, then? Perhaps, for now, with the end of one episode
that merely points to the start of the next.
The historical crime of the theft of reality will not be solved until the advent
of phenomenology—with the rise of Husserl, Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and
the like, each of whom turns to celebrate appearance rather than fear it. It is with
the phenomenological move that we return to the things themselves and realize
that what a thing is is all of the ways in which the thing can appear. Perspective
and appearance do not mask the truth, but rather allow us access to it. The things
of the world offer themselves up to us subjectively, and thus to know what a
thing truly is is to experience that thing from as many different perspectives as
possible. To know what a rectangle is is to see it from an angle when it looks
like a trapezoid, to see if from the side when it looks like a flat line, to see if
from a distance when it looks like a point. To know what Spanish colonialism is
is to visit the places it has affected—but it is also to read Shakespeare’s The
Tempest, Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years o f Solitude, and to watch Don
Francisco on “Sdbado Gigante.” And to know what love and dating and eating
and talent and beauty and crime and all the rest are, we must not think that their
appearance on reality TV is anything less than simulation and interpretation, but
so, too, is their appearance every place else in the world.
The postmodern era, far from making everything up for grabs, founds a
deeper responsibility than we ever imagined. We are no longer able simply to
dismiss something as fake and therefore bad. We must, instead, deconstruct the
way in which it appears, its ideological underpinnings, its social-economicethical modes of production, the relationship between the simulation and the
simulated, and also investigate what remains at the margins of the text, what is
concealed through the act of revealing. If, as Baudrillard suggests, simulation is
always based on nostalgia, we must think critically about the conservative
dangers of a longing for “the good old days.” If, as Slavoj Zizek puts it, “reality
TV caters to our own skepticism by showing us how mediated appearances are
constructed by the apparatus of the culture industry—if it enacts what it displays
by simultaneously debunking celebrity and creating new stars—we can concede
th at.. . [this] savvy attitude becomes [merely] a strategy for protecting artifice
by exposing it.”16 If self-reference becomes the newest way to sell the product to
a jaded audience, and reality TV slyly participates in maintaining the division
between reality and performance even as it claims to break it down, then we
have the makings of a legitimate critique. Let us, though, refrain from saying
that reality TV is an oxymoron, especially in an era when TV is reality.
So America’s next Top Model is edited to look like a dimwit. So the people
au ditioning for “American Idol” are not half as good as you are, but they are