“Reality television” seems like an oxymoron (emphasis on moron). But if you think about it carefully, reality may not be all that different from television after all, except perhaps in the quality of production.
So to get this, you have to think about it seriously. Imagine you have been given a unlimited budget by some network to produce a ‘real’ reality television show. How would you go about it? How would you avoid the pitfalls and ‘fakeness’ of current ‘reality’ shows?
The first question leads to the first problem: what would you film? There’s a lot of reality out there. You can’t film everything. To simplify things, we’ll focus on love and relationships. We’re going to peer uncensored into a relationship. But there’s still a lot of reality out there. Who do we choose? For example, we could select a sadomasochistic couple where Daddy keeps his Boy chained in the spare bedroom with a chastity device letting him out only to go to work (let’s say Starbucks), but otherwise keeps him strictly (and lovingly) disciplined. Though fascinating, this is a bit removed from most people’s reality and tantamount to fiction. Reality, it seems, is relative. We could put a camera on Prince William, and although what we capture on film is real, for most of us it is no different from a fairy tale.
This problem is insoluble. To get around it, we will use statistical probability. Gaussian distributions being what they are, we are likely to draw someone pretty average in most respects, with ‘realities’ fairly similar to the equally average viewer. We’re unlikely to draw an S&M couple, a perfect couple or a prince. We’ve sidestepped the problem, though it’s worth remembering, we have already, even randomly, constrained reality.
The next problem is how the camera changes people. Being observed, people perform. This isn’t unique to cameras. A person’s behavior is always shaped by who is around them observing. But the point is, we want to see them performing for other people, not for the camera. Though mildly unethical, we will solve this problem by filming them without their knowledge.
The next problem is how many cameras and where? If you place only one camera in one place, you obtain only fragments. In the bedroom, we observe the couple making love and whispering sweet I-love-you’s before drifting to sleep in each other’s arms. But in the kitchen we might witness an argument over breakfast. If we film only one of those, our picture is incomplete. Are they a happy couple or is their relationship fraying? A fragment of reality does not speak for itself. So we place cameras in the bedroom, and the kitchen, and the living room and the bathroom to capture as many fragments as possible.
But these cameras still leave an incomplete picture. In their home, our couple expresses love toward each other. What do they do when away? Does one of them, with friends, constantly mention his lover and behave very much like one half of the couple, while the other one behaves as if he is single? Does one of them have an affair? That is, how ‘real’ is what we observe in the home? So we have to devise clever ways of following our protagonists out into the world to place what we see in the home in the larger context of their lives.
The next problem is how long to film. One of the lovers says he loves the other and is committed for life, but later tells a friend he thinks he needs to end the relationship. Which is real? The only way to know would be to follow the relationship over time. But how long? Our lovers may separate and never reunite, or they may separate and eventually come back together, which could happen in a week, a year or 10 years. Conversely, our lovers may stay together. For now. But will the one eventually leave the relationship a month from now? A year? Five years? When they are retired? Or maybe they will stay together, a happy couple, occasionally arguing at breakfast. To solve this, we will film both for the remainder of their lives, whether they are together or not, just to see. You never know what will happen, and each turn of events changes the interpretation of the past events. We have to watch until the proverbial fat lady sings.
As we film, the crew gets pretty involved in the story and starts to form different opinions. One of the lovers spent a year in therapy, where he discusses issues of the relationship in depth. He concludes he should leave his boyfriend. Some of the crew thinks this makes good sense and shows insight and growth. But then, unaccountably, he decides therapy is bullshit, fires his therapist and remains with his lover. The crew argues bitterly over why he would do such a thing. Is he crazy or is it true love? They also argue about the other lover, who is sometimes a little mean, even emotionally abusive. Some of the crew thinks this arises from insecurity and fear of being abandoned while others think he simply wants to leave the relationship (because he’s emotionally insecure, according to some, but a romantic dreamer unwilling to settle, according to others) and is too cowardly, and so just becomes miserable and mean.
In frustration, the crew connives to get a psychologist into the picture ‘by chance’ to resolve their dispute with a professional opinion. This doesn’t help. In fact, things get worse. The more the psychologist drudges up the past, the more confusing things become and the arguments among crew grow more heated. Some question the competence of the psychologist, sparking an entirely new avenue of argument.
Capturing reality requires a lot of film. And lots of film requires lots of editing. What gets selected, what deleted? In this footage, each character provides multiple, conflicting accounts of his feelings and the relationship to different people at different times. And all the opinions of friends, family, co-workers, professionals float in and out of the cameras in disharmony like some disorganized, cacophonous Greek chorus reading multiple, conflicting scripts. And the crew continues to be bitterly divided.
There is no way around this. In the end, we just randomly select segments from each year and string them together. As one camera operator notes, “we end up with a confused mess.”
Though we take it for granted daily, reality is slippery. Any fragment captured on film amounts to a question mark. And the more film you accumulate, the greater your cue of question marks becomes. At some point, you have to produce a coherent story. So you take these fragments, arrange them and insert periods, but punctuation does not constrain reality. Your film amounts to a provisional hypothesis; reality continues to shift, grow, and change generating question marks at a faster rate than you can ever insert periods. The human eye does not have any advantages over the camera, except perhaps in its ready mobility. We face this very challenge daily but without the magical ability for omnipresent, invisible observation. Though there is a ‘real world’ out there, it remains available to us only through observation, which will always and forever be partial. And will always and forever require us to overwrite question marks with periods. And so through punctuation, we produce reality. Though as individuals we may produce higher quality reality than the hacks at the networks, fundamentally, the process is the same.
