In this review of the 1977 collection Aesthetics and Politics, which gathers texts by Adorno, Lukács, Benjamin, Block, and Brecht from the 1930s, Terry Eagleton points out how the appeal of “realism” can be taken for granted:
The question which [Lukács’s] work leaves in suspension — a question so enormous and banal as to be effectively invisible — is simply: why should accurate cognition and representation of the real afford aesthetic gratification? What is the unargued nexus here between description and evaluation? It is no doubt possible for us to supply some answer to this question — along the lines, perhaps, of the regressive pleasure to be afforded by that fixing of the object which is the ‘imaginary’. But it is surely revealing that Lukács himself feels on the whole no need to confront this issue, just as the Romantic poet feels no need to argue why living among mountains should make you morally purer. It just is the case that art which gives us the ‘real’ is superior art.
I don’t think that question is “banal” (and I’m guessing Eagleton didn’t either or else he wouldn’t have mentioned it):“Realism” is offered as a justification for a lot of dubious practices, aesthetic or otherwise; “accuracy” is taken as a moral end in itself, regardless of the elisions and biases that must be overlooked and the invasive or transgressive means that are often adopted to appear to achieve it. What sort of gratification do people get from realism, and how is it differentiated (if at all) from voyeurism? Or from the desire to feel like a transcendent observer, watching a “reality” that applies to others but not to ourselves? Would anyone, for instance, seriously claim that reality television either “gives us the ‘real’” or exemplifies “superior art”? What then is it doing? Why has there been so much of it?
Apparently, as Meagan Masterman notes here, none of those kinds of questions are addressed in Emily Nussbaum’s book about reality TV, Cue the Sun!, which as Masterman’s review and A.S. Hamrah’s in Bookforum make clear, is the sort of noncritical, stenographic business journalism that recounts management’s view of itself as definitive, as if they have privileged insights and are not blinded by their own incentives, successes, and culpabilities. Every big tech company has an interchangeable book like this written about it that credulously treats its founders as world-historical geniuses and obfuscates most of the relevant issues raised by its practices.
Perhaps jaundiced by those reviews, I flipped through Cue the Sun! and found it mostly made of summaries of past shows that contributed elements to the contemporary reality TV repertoire along with a series of unnecessary mini-profiles and snippets of biographical research, with some dubious generalizations about our collective complicity in the proliferation of reality TV occasionally stewed in. Beyond that there isn’t really a theory of or even so much as an argument about reality or reality TV or audiences and their aesthetic gratification or anything like that. It’s just a chronologically arranged litany of details with mostly unilluminating quotes from the television producers who were there. I guess it’s useful in that it tees up reviewers who can then make their own arguments on what should be an extremely rich subject.
Here’s how Nussbaum explains her mission: “to describe the reality genre through the voices of the people who built it, step by step, experiment by experiment, a series of failures that alternated with (and sometimes doubled as) breakthroughs. It’s an attempt to see it as they saw it, as well as seeing it from the audience’s point of view.” It seems especially pointless to write a book about reality television that rejects media theory and takes the producers’ accounts of their practices at face value. And as for the people on camera, Nussbaum essentially takes a statement made by Chuck Barris about the participants in his various gong shows as her guiding ethos: “It’s not a big sociological thing. They just want to have some fun.” It’s typical of the book as a whole that when Nussbaum describes some negotiations on the first The Real World set, the people in the cast are referred to by first names and the studio executives and producers by last names. The people in the shows don’t quite escape being treated like fictional characters.
Who is such a book for? Who besides media theorists wants to read about reality TV rather than just watch it (or make it)? If you don’t care about theory, talking about reality TV will just dump you in a mise en abyme, going behind the scenes of reality shows, and then behind the scenes behind those scenes, and on and on in an infinite regression to nowhere.
Nussbaum’s introduction makes the truly banal claim that viewers have been attracted to reality television because it promises authenticity, or because it democratizes fame, or because it reflects viewers’ baser aspirations, and makes no real attempt to synthesize these disparate ideas. The authentic is buried in a mirror that is also a solvent:
To audiences, however, these programs had always had an obvious allure: They offered something authentic, buried inside something fake. They stripped away the barrier between the star and the viewer. More than any other cultural product, they functioned as a mirror of the people who watched them—and if that reflection was sometimes cruel, it was also funny, riveting, outrageous, and affecting, even if—maybe especially if—you found it disturbing.
Why write or read about “the audience’s point of view” if you are not interested in disentangling those things and thinking about them in terms other than the self-serving ones the entertainment industry lays out for itself? It echoes Eagleton’s point about Lukács, albeit in a far different register, taking for granted the connections between reality and reflection and authenticity and the supposed satisfactions these provide when that is precisely what should be at issue. How could anyone enjoy the representations of the real offered by reality TV? What makes that possible?
Cue the Sun! is grounded in the idea that it is too “convenient” to criticize something as blatantly antisocial as reality television, so those critiques must be irrelevant. Hamrah notes how Nussbaum mostly takes the “poptimist” line that an audience’s self-reported “fun” is a legitimate reason to marginalize critical assessments of the culture industry’s practices and the consequences of its products, as though it were worse to be a spoil-sport than to be the sort of person who systematically exploits, humiliates, and traumatizes people for a living. Reality TV is, Hamrah correctly points out, a “rancid genre that has given us countless hours of stupid garbage,” churning through contestants and participants only to maroon them on the desert isle of depleted notoriety, while giving audiences object lessons in narcissistic delusion, amoral ruthlessness, victim blaming, grasping covetousness, and other ordinary feelings. If there’s a camera present, that means anyone and anything is fair game. The overriding truth that emerges is that it doesn’t matter how you treat other people; it only matters how you come out in the edit.
Nussbaum claims that “reality shows offered up a powerful glimpse of human vulnerability, breaking taboos about what you were allowed to say or see.” In other words, reality shows produced and exploited human vulnerability, desensitizing viewers to the odiousness of such practice while manifesting its economic feasibility. No one who watched reality shows could fail to get that essential message of business theory that vulnerability equals opportunity. To be transformed into a spectacle, vulnerability often must take the form of a “raw” reaction that a show’s producers devise various means of eliciting: “Reactions that felt too potent and complex to be faked,” Nussbaum writes, “were the ultimate prize for the audience participation viewer, a precious substance produced under pressure” — precious enough that it warranted extraction from those who were not among “the willing.”
Nussbaum describes the sadistic breaching experiments of Candid Camera’s Allen Funt as “letting you see a burst of authentic emotion,” as though composed and considered social behavior was intrinsically inauthentic as opposed to polite or rational.
Later, reality show participants would become more aware of how they would be manipulated. Nussbaum describes this as a peculiar tradeoff:
The first season of The Real World was a uniquely innocent experience, for both its cast and crew. From then on, the young people who signed up to appear on MTV might get hurt, but they understood what the show was. That was the catch-22 of the reality genre: The savvier its subjects became, the more self-aware about their roles, the less authentic the footage was—but, arguably, the more ethical.
If you want “authenticity,” you have to do away with being “ethical.” And if audiences demand authenticity, then ethics are obviously superfluous. When participants try to protect themselves, they are being “savvy,” a word that suggests something illegitimate and conniving about it, as if they were the ones with false pretenses and not the producers who ultimately viewed them as a kind of cannon fodder.
Most of the TV people Nussbaum profiles treat “authenticity” as an all-purpose rationalization for what they do, a kind of unrefined ore that redeems all sorts of strip-mining processes. When Survivor contestants washed up exhausted on the beach in Borneo, she reports the excitement of a cameraman, for whom “it was all real and uncontrived, with raw emotions that couldn’t be faked.” But what is so important and valuable about “the unfaked” — and how is the entire situation of being flown out to the South Seas to be on a tropical-island game show not fake in a much larger sense? Why are the reactions considered “raw” when they are elaborately instigated? I know these are not super-original questions, but that’s part of what is annoying about them being left unexamined by the book. Nussbaum merely notes that from “an elaborate-enough false reality … captivating drama had emerged, authentically …” Authentic to whom? And in relation to what? When reality-TV editors work with footage the way that generative models work with data, making plausible realities out of lots of recombined fragments, it is presumably “authentic” if the audience buys it and has a “genuine” reaction to it. The better the ratings are, the more authentic it must be.
Nussbaum finds it “oddly funny” that the first Survivor cast had ethical qualms about the game they were playing and the exploitive circumstances under which it was being filmed and approvingly quotes one of the contestants who now see his reluctance to play it as “adolescent.” The implication is that mature people understand that Survivor is more “fun” when people embrace the show’s “tricky ethical challenge” by renegotiating with themselves over just how ethically they really need to behave toward other people. The crew too needs to be “adult” in coming to terms with “their own ethical guidelines.” Only an adolescent would feel any qualms about lying to people in a game, even when norms about consent have been discarded and the game has no clear boundaries and is being filmed and edited as a set of pseudo-character studies. Mature people tell themselves that they can be “co-creators” of shows, deluding themselves into seeing some sort of equal partnership.
Hamrah has a good description this aspect of the book’s tone, that everyone now is somehow too sophisticated to be hung up on reality television’s ethical boundary blurring:
Today it is almost gauche to point out that things were not as real as they were meant to be seen. The fakeness of reality TV is a truism that supposedly only bothers the unsophisticated. Nussbaum’s book works hard to make distinctions between the naive viewers of yore and the wised-up reality-TV gluttons of today, enlightened superfans who know what’s what and revel in artifice.
The book notes that distinction but doesn’t really explain it: how and why did the “naive viewers of yore” become sophisticated cynics with respect to media manipulation? How does reality TV indoctrinate viewers with the attitudes necessary to enjoy it rather than or while being repulsed by it? Why didn’t this happen sooner with earlier forms of mass media, assuming it didn’t? Most of reality TV’s attributes are anticipated, for instance, by the “sensibility” fad of the late 18th century, which taught readers how to consume representations of human suffering. Literary historian J.M.S Tompkins says of Henry Mackenzie’s Man of Feeling that “one can imagine that the perusal of it was often undertaken as a sort of drill to keep the sensible heart in training.” One would be able to practice how to react and enjoy commodified people and their commodified emotionality, which in turn commodified one’s own feelings.
But in the 18th century this kind of emotional delectation was perceived as part of a civilizing process. “Exposed to the roughening contact of daily life” the reading public “felt it necessary to constantly test its own reactions, to make sure that it was still humane,” Tompkins surmises. Reality television aids us in a kind of reverse project, a decivilizing process in which we learn to derive joy from callousness and the dismantling of solidarity in the name of profitable and dependably amusing spectacle.
One returns to repeatedly watch reality TV to confirm that one hasn’t become too humane, too soft, unfit for the rigors of capitalist competition and too easily taken in by various forms of “deep acting” and other emotional simulations. This is what it means to grow up — you take the amoral economic terms governing reality television to reflect the eternal conditions of social reality. Not that one accepts what is on the shows as “real depictions” of “real life” but that one accepts that the way those shows are made are also the way personal lives must be built. Everything can be edited in postproduction.
It feels like almost every segment of Nussbaum’s book ends with some participant in a reality show, a cast or crew member or a producer, coming to terms with their experience in a soundbite, just like the contestants do after they are voted off. A few maintain a clear sense of how they were used, and I am guessing most of them are deeply ambivalent. But often the book tries to frame them as older and wiser by highlighting their refusal to blame the show, or the network executives, or television itself for whatever shame, trauma, or regret they felt; they instead blame themselves for ever having felt bad. “It was just life lessons I’d have to learn one way or the other.”
This passage, about someone who worked on The Bachelor, is characteristic of the industry’s attitude toward labor issues that Nussbaum feels obliged to report:
Hatta admired the early episodes of UnREAL, which struck him as near-documentary flashbacks to their production room. He admired Shapiro’s drive. But he didn’t share her interest in industry reform, because the way Hatta saw it, reality TV was inseparable from — and, in fact, defined by — its brutal labor conditions. He considered it “a badge of honor” to have handled those awful hours, the low pay, and the pressure. Hatta, through his own production company, now works on HGTV shows, in “lighthearted” areas, like design and food, avoiding what he described as ‘headache and heartache shows.’ In his view, the only sensible way to survive reality TV is to climb upward. “All the money is at the top. All the power’s at the top. So I don’t care about what’s happening here: I’m going there.”
Nussbaum maintains a studied neutrality toward this remarkably frank revelation of moral corruption, which conveys the pedagogical effects of exposure to reality television pretty well: You accept unfair and “brutal” labor conditions, you learn to reject solidarity, you accept the given power structure as a fixed fact, and you set about trying to get to the top while refusing to care about “what’s happening here” — where most people are compelled to live. Reality TV is defined aptly here as “brutal labor conditions” — labor’s structural lack of power is made into a spectacle intended to render it palatable, normal.
So while it’s very annoying when a Survivor producer describes the show as “situationism,” as if it were a term he were inventing and didn’t have a prior referent, of course reality TV can be understood through a properly situationist lens. This quote from The Society of the Spectacle seems apropos:
Spectacular power, which is absolute within the unchallengeable internal logic of the spectacle's language, corrupts its specialists absolutely. They are corrupted by their experience of contempt, and by the success of that contempt, for the contempt they feel is confirmed by their acquaintanceship with that genuinely contemptible individual — the spectator.
This analysis remains a bit tautological — what makes for the power of the spectacle other than the traceable effects it has on audiences? — but the cycle of corruption and contempt it points toward seems right. Reality shows find a cheap and relatively easy kind of success in appealing to an audience’s biases, frustrations, and suspicions nurtured by an unfair, unequal, deeply stratified world, and the audiences’ quickened response to this pandering confirms their contemptibility, that they want and need to be fed trash because anything better would be wasted on them.
Viewers themselves have to cultivate a sense that there is something savvy about eating garbage and tasting foie gras. “You also have to pretend to enjoy it, and you have to celebrate your enjoyment, which may or may not be real, just as you have to acknowledge that what you’re watching (‘watch what happens live’) isn’t quite real.” Hamrah writes. “Liking something you know is bad becomes smart if you think you know how it works.” Then self-delusion and vicarious emotional predation become “fun.”
Hamrah argues that in order for Nussbaum to celebrate reality TV, she “has to put down people with higher ambitions,” and characterize idealism as weakness, foolishness, “Gen X shame about celebrity.” This is the most dismal kind of realism. Reality TV recodes ambition to be a mediocre matter of achieving publicity, reinforcing the systems you think you are gaming. This has become the governing spirit of much of social media, a bottomless abyss of poseurs, scams, and main characters of the week competing for fleeting attention that is more often destructive than lucrative. (Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online, a very similar book, celebrates some of the heirs of reality TV’s Weltanschauung.)
In Eagleton’s review of the 1930s realism debates, he claims that “texts are no more than the enabling or disabling occasions for realist effectivity.” That is, they are not realistic in what they are (by being representationally accurate), but realist in what they do (by shaping audiences in particular ways). Quoting Brecht, he writes
If you want to know whether your play was realist, why not ask the audience? Did it, in their estimation, ‘discover the causal complexes of society / unmask the prevailing view of things as the view of those who are in power / write from the standpoint of the class which offers the broadest solutions for the pressing difficulties in which human society is caught up / emphasize the element of development / make possible the concrete, and make possible abstraction from it?’ And if not, is it audience or text which needs to be rewritten?
I can imagine someone making a strong case that reality TV is “realistic” in some of these ways — that it tells us about “causal complexes in society” and reveal strategies of power and how they are tied to libidinal appeals and media programming. It would be harder to assert that it is produced from “the standpoint of the class that offers the the broadest solutions” for social problems, but I could see someone trying. Nussbaum’s book, obviously, doesn’t have any interest in such things. But inadvertently or not, it answers Eagleton’s question about whether the audience or the text needs to be rewritten. At this point, clearly it’s both.
This is excellent! (I'm a big fan of Hamrah, great to see him in this)
There are so many good questions you ask in this piece, which makes me really want to read the hypothetical book that actually digs deeply into them. I also wonder if the WWF makes an appearance in the ancestry of reality TV, since despite being 'truly fake' it seems like it has a lot of the same 'savviness' ideas behind it (it's not fake! -> it's boring to complain it's fake -> everyone knows it's fake but that's part of the fun)