Raiders of the Real

The great thing about Reality TV is that we all think we’re in on the scam. We know there are cameras and a crew of TV types following every reality contestant. We know the people chosen for Survivor are chosen both for their strong personalities and for their looks, at least to some extent. We know that the various Idol shows put a premium on a very narrow range of pop music – the kind that is palatable to many people and incredibly safe. And we know when Donald Trump fires a failed apprentice it will be in the closing moments of a show that is edited and shaped to constrain to the format of stories we have heard since we are born.

And yet many people still watch these shows because there is some semblance of reality – the contestants are not playing characters – or at lest not playing them in a way that seems contrived. At the same time, after all, many viewers are attracted to the various C.S.I. shows which, despite a number of experts who have pointed out the factual errors in these series, are seen as being gritty and real, even though the bad guys are always recognizably bad and are always clearly caught – a stretch for any reality I’m aware of.

What these two types of shows appeal to is our need to recreate reality. And what’s happening in pop culture is not unlike what has been going on in literary culture for decades. Most award winning and critically recognized novels are strongly realistic, as is most mainstream poetry. It’s as if the human species has been moving towards this plateau across the arts and, if you believe many critics, realism is the pinnacle of human aesthetics.

There are, of course, numerous exceptions. Dime novels and comic books may make occasional nods to realism, but the emphasis is on stories of myth and legend. The highest grossing films of all time are hardly monuments of realism and instead most often rely on action, magic, future technology and superpowers to pull in the money. These films – from E.T. to Raiders of the Lost Ark to The Sixth Sense offer not simply escapes but alternate routes of perception for those people interested in human nature.

Besides, this dividing line between the real and the fantastic is somewhat arbitrary. After all, how many people believe that Michael Moore hasn’t shaped the facts to fit an ideological template? Not that he shouldn’t either. He is involved in the act of creation, as is every filmmaker or artist who has to make choices about what to include or exclude. It would be pretty tedious reading about every single trip to the bathroom made by the characters of The English Patient, for example. So let’s leave those bits out. And nix the long picking of the nose scene. And do we really need those Hemingwayesque musings on who in the bullfight arena just let go of a fart that will become legendary in retellings of that day? No. Realism is not an exact mirror held up to life. There is always someone moving the camera to frame one part of reality and not another part.

I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. It’s just the way art works. It’s when we hold these works up as models of reason and telling it like it is that I worry. A realistic work is someone’s opinion about what’s real. If you like it, it’s because it is probably reasonably well made and it reflects your opinion about what’s real. Nothing more.

As for realism being the pinnacle of artistic achievement, time will tell. But if realism were a person, I would find it sanctimonious and without a sense of fun. (Here again, you can see how Reality TV is one step further removed from realism.) And until this gritty cop/crime/legal drama thing has passed, you can find me watching my Buffy DVDs.