[Reader-list] Reality TV

[Shuddhabrata Sengupta]

Salman Rushdie Gets Real. Enjoy.
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Reality TV: a dearth of talent and the death of morality
Salman Rushdie on the perils of voyeurism

Saturday June 9, 2001
The Guardian

I've managed to miss out on reality TV until now. In spite of all the talk 
in Britain about nasty Nick and flighty Mel, and in America about the fat, 
naked bastard Richard manipulating his way to desert-island victory, I have 
somehow preserved my purity. I wouldn't recognise Nick or Mel if I passed 
them in the street, or Richard if he was standing in front of me unclothed.
Ask me where the Big Brother house is, or how to reach Temptation Island, 
and I have no answer. I do remember the American Survivor contestant who 
managed to fry his own hand so that the skin peeled away until his fingers 
looked like burst sausages, but that's because he got on to the main 
evening news. Otherwise, search me. Who won? Who lost? Who cares?
The subject of reality TV shows, however, has been impossible to avoid. 
Their success is the media story of the (new) century, along with the 
ratings triumph of the big-money game shows such as Who Wants to Be a 
Millionaire? Success on this scale insists on being examined, because it 
tells us things about ourselves; or ought to.
And what tawdry narcissism is here revealed! The television set, once so 
idealistically thought of as our window on the world, has become a 
dime-store mirror instead. Who needs images of the world's rich otherness, 
when you can watch these half-familiar avatars of yourself - these 
half-attractive half-persons - enacting ordinary life under weird 
conditions? Who needs talent, when the unashamed self-display of the 
talentless is constantly on offer?
I've been watching Big Brother 2, which has achieved the improbable feat of 
taking over the tabloid front pages in the final stages of a general 
election campaign. This, according to the conventional wisdom, is because 
the show is more interesting than the election. The "reality" may be even 
stranger. It may be that Big Brother is so popular because it's even more 
boring than the election. Because it is the most boring, and therefore most 
"normal", way of becoming famous, and, if you're lucky or smart, of getting 
rich as well.
"Famous" and "rich" are now the two most important concepts in western 
society, and ethical questions are simply obliterated by the potency of 
their appeal. In order to be famous and rich, it's OK - it's actually 
"good" - to be devious. It's "good" to be exhibitionistic. It's "good" to 
be bad. And what dulls the moral edge is boredom. It's impossible to 
maintain a sense of outrage about people being so trivially self-serving 
for so long.
Oh, the dullness! Here are people becoming famous for being asleep, for 
keeping a fire alight, for letting a fire go out, for videotaping their 
cliched thoughts, for flashing their breasts, for lounging around, for 
quarrelling, for bitching, for being unpopular, and (this is too 
interesting to happen often) for kissing! Here, in short, are people 
becoming famous for doing nothing much at all, but doing it where everyone 
can see them.
Add the contestants' exhibitionism to the viewers' voyeurism and you get a 
picture of a society sickly in thrall to what Saul Bellow called "event 
glamour". Such is the glamour of these banal but brilliantly spotlit events 
that anything resembling a real value - modesty, decency, intelligence, 
humour, selflessness; you can write your own list - is rendered redundant. 
In this inverted ethical universe, worse is better. The show presents 
"reality" as a prize fight, and suggests that in life, as on TV, anything 
goes, and the more deliciously contemptible it is, the more we'll like it. 
Winning isn't everything, as Charlie Brown once said, but losing isn't 
anything.
The problem with this kind of engineered realism is that, like all fads, 
it's likely to have a short shelf-life, unless it finds ways of renewing 
itself. The probability is that our voyeurism will become more demanding. 
It won't be enough to watch somebody being catty, or weeping when evicted 
from the house of hell, or "revealing everything" on subsequent talk shows, 
as if they had anything left to reveal.
What is gradually being reinvented is the gladiatorial combat. The TV set 
is the Colosseum and the contestants are both gladiators and lions; their 
job is to eat one another until only one remains alive. But how long, in 
our jaded culture, before "real" lions, actual dangers, are introduced to 
these various forms of fantasy island, to feed our hunger for more action, 
more pain, more vicarious thrills?
Here's a thought, prompted by the news that the redoubtable Gore Vidal has 
agreed to witness the execution by lethal injection of the Oklahoma bomber 
Timothy McVeigh. The witnesses at an execution watch the macabre 
proceedings through a glass window: a screen. This, too, is a kind of 
reality TV, and - to make a modest proposal - it may represent the future 
of such programmes. If we are willing to watch people stab one another in 
the back, might we not also be willing to actually watch them die?
In the world outside TV, our numbed senses already require increasing doses 
of titillation. One murder is barely enough; only the mass murderers make 
the front pages. You have to blow up a building full of people or 
machine-gun a whole royal family to get our attention. Soon, perhaps, 
you'll have to kill off a whole species of wildlife or unleash a virus that 
wipes out people by the thousand, or else you'll be small potatoes. You'll 
be on an inside page.
And as in reality, so on "reality TV". How long until the first TV death? 
How long until the second? By the end of Orwell's great novel 1984, Winston 
Smith has been brainwashed. "He loved Big Brother." As, now, do we. We are 
the Winstons now.



Shuddhabrata Sengupta
SARAI: The New Media Initiative
Centre for the Study of Developing Societies
29, Rajpur Road, Delhi 110 052, India
www.sarai.net