The Film Roots of Reality TV

Reality TV: America’s Social Realism?

No one would consider watching reality TV an intellectual experience, people would likely laugh at the suggestion. It is an experience that turns your brain turn off so that you can escape your problems and the ones at large in the news- it’s exactly what television is for. Reality TV differs from scripted television in that it secures audiences through sensationalism and outlandish situations, or so it may seem on the surface. There are other drives that keep audiences tuned in to reality TV which could reveal some interesting things about our culture at large.

Reality TV may give us insight about ourselves and those around us, since reality TV stars often resemble their audiences. One of my favorite reality TV programs is Bravo’s The Real Housewives franchise. It is not that I identify with these women, except for maybe having a friend that is more a “frenemy”. It is fair to say that these women are less than real, from their fake breasts and botox to their interactions with one another. However, Bravo is offering us the chance to see “real” housewives. They have given us an opportunity to witness the struggles of  being a housewife or a working professional mother, along with the ups and downs of marriage and children. These women’s “real” lives, however fake and shallow that it appears to be onscreen, allows us to get a glimpse of how women behave in each others company and what values and pressures have endured in American society regarding gender roles, friendship, family and status. (Watch funny youtube video below “How to Spot a Frenemy”)

The Real Housewives depict the microcosm of the modern housewife. The competition for status and power within the group of women is the core of the show determined by who throws the most lavish parties or who has the largest at-home staff. Alliances are either formed with the queen bee and her minions or the dissidents. For the most part the women in The Real Housewives of Orange County measure their worth by the position they hold within their social group. However for Orange County (house)wife, Vicki, she redeems her feeling of power and status by measuring the successes in her professional life. Vicki’s disparaging remarks about the other women not going to work reflects her views on their status in society. Any full time mother, especially of small children, would likely consider working in an office, easy work. (See clip below from youtube at around six minutes in to see this dynamic unfold and to see where you stand in this issue.) The theme of status within the shared lives of these women are constantly brought up across The Real Housewives franchise. What is interesting is how the audience becomes the thermometer for who is justified in their actions and feelings, often determined by what camp you fit in: the stay at home mom or the working professional. Reality TV has as much to do with its audiences as it does with its characters.

Reality TV’s Filmic Roots

Reality TV owes its form to the early documentary mode cinéma vérité, the 1960s french documentary movement which sought to produce an unmediated nonfiction film. Jean Rouch, the founder of cinéma vérité (translated “film truth” in french), was a filmmaker and anthropologist who was interested in whether a subject could act exactly as themselves in front of a film camera. Edgar Morin, a sociologist and filmmaker whom collaborated with Jean Rouch in the groundbreaking, 1960  Chronicles of Summer (Chronique d’un ete) wrote: “There are two ways to conceive of the cinema of the Real: the first is to pretend that you can present reality to be seen; the second is to pose the problem of reality. In the same way, there were two ways to conceive cinéma vérité. The first was to pretend that you brought truth. The second was to pose the problem of truth.” (Watch youtube clip about Chronicles of Summer below for details on Rouch and Morin’s experiments)

Reality TV, particularly the docusoap form of the Real Housewives, is not interested in revealing the problems of delivering truth, but there is something that is depicted in the show The Real Housewives and in Chronicles of  a Summer that Rouch and Morin proved: there is no such thing as unmediated reality. They proved that the very existence of the film camera altered the way subjects acted. Surveillance is a simple example that proves that being watched alters ones behavior. For instance in England law enforcement have remedied limited man power on the streets by setting up a complicated circuit of video surveillance, called CCTV on their streets. The installation of these cameras have inhibited criminal behavior. Rouch and Morin deliberately asked their subjects to respond to politically charged ideas. In the youtube clip below, the subject of civil unrest of Africans in the Congo is brought up, specifically because there are two men of African decent in attendance. All speak with candor, except one may get the impression that there is a degree of forethought in the subjects’ motivations and the result is an edited and idealistic response. One may argue that this is the everyday posturing that people perform, especially in the company of those with diverse backgrounds.

The American/Canadian version of cinéma vérité called direct cinema adopted a “fly on the wall” approach in order to find the authentic in their subjects, which relied on the subjects getting so used to the camera that they would forget it was there. The well known Maysles brothers’ film Grey Gardens (1975) was a film that adopted the direct cinema style. Today no filmmaker would naively say that there is such a thing as an objective truth that can be obtained from the documentary filmmaking process, because there will always be a critical interpretation embedded into it (think leftist politics within Michael Moore’s films). The Maysles brothers’ affection for the Beale women are palpable making Grey Gardens a charming portrait of mother Edith and daughter, Little Edie. One almost forgets these women are recluses in danger of loosing their home due to it being deemed a public health hazard and that their psychological stability is in question. Grey Gardens definitely plays into ones voyeuristic drives, especially being a fly on the wall in the home to women who are related to Jackie Onasis. (Watch Grey Gardens trailer below)

Reality TV: Why Can’t You Look Away?

The question remains, what drives us to watch reality TV in its many forms and hybrids? Why is it taking over television programming? It is certain that reality TV hits a nerve that people respond to with intensity, if it be with fascination or compulsion. The Real Housewives and other docudramas like the Jersey Shore have elements of the direct cinema mode of filming events where the characters pretend the camera does not exist. The cinéma vérité form is also utilized where the characters are aware of the camera, often addressing it directly, and consequentially, grant authority to its viewers. The tensions between these modes is where the entertainment lies. Audiences find themselves dwelling in a moral high ground, positioned to judge truth and measure a reality star’s best intentions or otherwise. These documentary modes aforementioned have turned into signifiers of “realism,” however it is a common assumption that most reality TV is contrived and that the camera, but most importantly the practice of editing has the power to bias audience responses.

An Ohio State study in media psychology researched the motivations for Why People Watch Reality TV. The study relied on The Reiss Profile which, “is a new kind of personality instrument, however, based on motivational constructs rather than on traditional personality constructs.” The conclusion of the study of Why People Watch Reality TV was that “the largest significant effect was for the motive of status. The more reality TV shows a person liked, the more status-oriented was the person.” (Reiss and Wiltz, 11).  Another interesting insight in the study was its claim that the people who watched reality TV had above-average trait motivation to feel self-important and, to a lesser extent, vindicated, friendly, free of morality, secure, and romantic, as compared with large normative samples.” (Reiss and Wiltz, 1).

Reality TV: A Voyeur’s Moral Compass

At the end of every Real Housewives season, in an end of the season reunion special,  the characters have an opportunity to comment and attempt to vindicate their behaviors and testimonials in a end of the season reunion. The characters are now existing outside the frame of the show and there is an assumption that any falsehoods that were depicted will be debunked with either corroborations or oppositions amongst the characters. Most reality TV shows have a reunion show, even at the end of the 1960 film Chronicles of Summer, its characters are sitting in a dim movie theatre, presumptuously after screening the film. As an addendum to the film, Rouch and Morin have given their characters a chance to respond to what was depicted of themselves, and the other characters. Another addendum, or more so, a disclaimer is added with just Rouch and Morin commenting on the film. Another layer of reflexivity exists in Chronicles of Summer: there was the film itself, the space outside the film, and a space outside “outside of the film”.  Rouch and Morin understood that not only was the integrity of their subjects in question, but the integrity of their own motivations. Today in relation to reality TV, I have often questioned the integrity of producers, who create circumstances that push its stars to their emotional limits.

We are in the Youtube age that urges one to “Broadcast Yourself”. It seems like cameras are constantly aimed if it be by mobile phones, i-pods, flip cameras, laptops and video surveillance. Could this desensitization of being recorded lead to more truths being conveyed based on the direct cinema’s assumption that we will forget the cameras are there. The current  digital age has enabled anyone to record, edit and upload at lightening speed creating media producers that quickly become aware of the cultural value of their images, based upon the number of uploads, views and “thumbs ups” received. The internet is saturated by spectacle, definitely the pornographic and the plain idiotic.

I believe there is potential to use the internet and reality TV programs like The Real Housewives as indicators to where culture is headed, even with their less than scholarly motivations like filmmakers, Rouch and Morin. What is certain is the role of audiences and populous opinion are becoming all the more powerful, with its ability to instantly comment on youtube and the like, as well as it continual power to shape television programming for better or worse.

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