Men and women eating Madagascar hissing cockroaches is wildly funny, especially during the gag-reflex slo-mo replay. Washed-up celebrities living together for 10 days in a California mansion once owned by Glen Campbell is pointless and sad, especially after they’ve had too many glasses of white wine. Twenty-five women competing to marry some guy they don’t even know is just plain puzzling.
No judgments, just some observations from someone who was, until recently, a reality TV virgin.
On the other hand, a game in which 20 women vie for the “love” of a multimillionaire is morally reprehensible at worst, stupid at best, and when the finale of the show features the revelation that Mr. Moneybags is really a construction worker with an annual salary of $19,000, just a wee bit misogynistic. Also, isn’t that false advertising? Or do those who participate in TV reality have no rights? Perhaps it’s like the untamed West, subject to a certain amount of lawlessness.
Now, I’m not a TV critic, nor am I a cultural anthropologist, a sociologist or an entomologist.
I’m also not a television snob: I’ve watched plenty of tube, including hours of the exact same news over and over again on CNN, and two of the made-for-TV movies about Amy Fisher, the Long Island Lolita. I’d watch them again if I got bored enough.
Actually, I did sit through a few minutes of “Survivor” (before attempting to tear the flesh from my own face) and last year watched the season finale of “The Bachelor,” engrossed and horrified at the same time. I couldn’t look away, yet I vowed never to watch again.
But I’d begun to feel very, very alone in the world. (I have a nightmare in which everyone in the world is on TV except me, and I, the sole viewing audience member, have to use the remote whenever I wish to communicate with another human being.) So, I recently took a somewhat scattershot tour through the world of reality TV.
I watched old episodes of “The Bachelor,” “Survivor,” “Fear Factor” (the cockroach show), and episodes of the new shows “High School Reunion” (in which alumni of Oak Park-River Forest High School were brought together for their 10th reunion, in Hawaii), “The Surreal Life” (the B celebrities) and “Celebrity Mole Hawaii.” I’m here to tell you that God gave us private houses without hidden cameras for a reason.
Public obligation
In public, we have an obligation to assert our better selves and leave the boring and cruel and cheesy and shallow and lewd rest at home.
While that sounds pretentious, all I mean to say is that when I am forced by circumstance to watch anyone necking in a hot tub, I’d like them to be doing it for larger reasons than an overabundance of free margaritas from television producers. I’m not asking for them to be Romeo and Juliet, but I’d like them to make me feel something other than pity or embarrassment. Is that so wrong?
In “The Surreal Life,” for instance. While the vision of the down-on-his-luck rapper MC Hammer, who seems to be a good man, bunking with the tiny, helium voiced actor Emmanuel Lewis (from the show “Webster”) may well be worthy of my pity, it’s important to note that had the show never been created, that pity could have been directed toward a more worthy subject. “But these shows reveal human nature,” a colleague countered, when I expressed dismay over the unsavory spectacle of “Joe Millionaire.”
My response to that is: Oh, no, they don’t.
They don’t reveal the true nature of the participants, at least.
I realize that I’m probably not the first person to invoke the nuclear physicist Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal in this context.
In simplest terms, it says that merely observing a thing changes its path. Put a bunch of civilians who are dying to be famous in front of a camera, and they are going to act the way they think we want them to act. They’re going to try to please us.
Labeling participants
Which is why on “High School Reunion,” the producers just went ahead and labeled each of the participants, “the nerd,” “the flirt,” “the loner,” for example. At one point, “the bully” turns and speaks directly to the camera and asks, “Are my horns showing?”
It’s hard to value actions revealed under the duress of such fake-reality circumstances — especially when those circumstances are supposed to be a game — as human nature.
Someone posted the following note about “Joe Millionaire” on an Internet message board:
“might find this to be farely amusing by exposing golddiggers. Lol.”
But it’s “farely” obvious from the title of this new low in reality TV that the women are not averse to being seen as golddiggers, so Rather than human nature, it’s the manipulation of human nature that’s exposed here.
First “Joe Millionaire” appeals to the baser instincts of its participants, then it appeals to the baser instincts of the audience, who get to enjoy watching as the women are tricked by a TV fantasy and then punished for it with — you guessed it — a super strong dose of reality. Or some version thereof.
The only nature that’s truly being revealed is that of the reality-television producers who dream up this stuff, but they don’t come off as very human. They’re like medieval kings, who trotted out poor jesters as entertainment for the court, and we’re all lining up to be one of their buffoons. That, or lining up to derive strange pleasure from the shame and despair implicit in all the shameless buffoonery.
While a lot of reality TV seems very cynical, to say the least, it also leaves a record of the world for future generations, if there are any, that makes it seem as though we live in some sad little soap opera. Which is not the case at all, and that’s what bothers me.
Strangely, it was just more reality television that gave me back my faith in humankind. “Fear Factor” and “Celebrity Mole Hawaii” are exempt from my scorn, partly because they made me laugh so hard I got dizzy. They’re ridiculously silly shows.
Everyday folks (a bouncer from Brooklyn, a housewife from Del Mar, Calif.) lined up to compete in a contest that required them to eat multiple servings of the fattest live cockroaches I’ve ever seen (apparently, the key is to eat with your mouth wide open, like a dog, and keep your eyes tightly closed), parade naked in front of a crowd of strangers and be dragged to the bottom of a swimming pool with a weight shackled to their ankles.
Same with “Celebrity Mole Hawaii,” a reality game show whose actual purpose I could not discern. All you need to know is that Stephen Baldwin, who always looks like a drunk cartoon cat anyway, allows himself to be strapped into a harness with no protection but a bike helmet and knee pads, then dangled precariously and haphazardly from a cliff in a contraption operated by Kim Coles, Corbin Bernsen and Erik von Dretten.
At one point, they get him stuck in the waterfall, flipping head over heels like a pinwheel while suspended in mid air.
“When you’ve got water running up your nose, you can’t see the rocks coming at you,” he told his competitors when he was retrieved from nature’s clutches, or something like that.
But somehow they all did it with dignity. The participants in “Fear Factor” could walk away if things got to be too much (as one woman did after biting a bug in half, and realizing the other half was alive in her hand), and the participants in “Celebrity Mole Hawaii,” being actors, were often just acting. Most of the time, everyone seemed to be having fun, with a certain amount of genuine camaraderie.
But the frozen, pained looks on the faces of the stiff-tressed, slinkily dressed women who were rejected in the first round of “The Bachelor” during its debut season were real, and the cameras lingered on them way too long.
That’s just plain mean, no matter how silly the women were to be there in the first place.
Fun is only fun until somebody gets hurt, after all.
Both ABC series “The Bachelorette” and “Celebrity Mole Hawaii” begin their six episode run tonight in back-to-back, one-hour shows beginning at 8 p.m. on WLS-Ch 7.
