02 introduction

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Oct 29, 2004 - historical trajectories of documentary film practice. This is ... earlier agendas, manifestos and political commitments of documentary filmmakers.
Introduction

This book takes reality TV to be a significant development within contemporary programming and one worthy of close study. It presents a series of case studies that examine each reality TV form closely in order to delineate its distinctiveness and to highlight key issues around ethics, politics, truth-telling and realist representation. It will also seek to make connections between different forms: to track generic evolutions, to trace formal relationships, collisions and disparities among and between different kinds of non-fiction programming. Television in particular, its popular critics and its audiences, seem to have a short memory and where lineage is pertinent to the discussion we will highlight the impact of earlier forms of non-fiction film and television and filmmaking philosophies on current forms. However, the variety of formal conventions employed by this range of programming, the complexity of political or aesthetic agenda adopted by filmmakers and the employment of hybrid filmic techniques all point to the difficulty of establishing clear genealogies and unassailable antecedents. But antecedents do exist; undermining the claims so frequently made that recent reality formats are wholly ‘new’ or that they have clearly definable and ‘unique’ characteristics. Consequently, the book argues that within British television culture especially it makes most sense to understand reality TV within the context of the different but related historical trajectories of documentary film practice. This is not to say that reality TV is in any simple way a commercialised or adulterated or mutant offshoot of documentary but rather that many of its forms owe something to or operate in dialogue with varieties of documentary in particular. And so too, that many of the debates within media and cultural introduction

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studies about the value, aesthetics, politics and futures of reality TV also owe much to the earlier agendas, manifestos and political commitments of documentary filmmakers. Reality TV is culturally significant in the sense that, until its arrival, factual programming had never succeeded as a consistently top-rated TV genre on British television. From its outset reality TV addressed huge audiences in innovative ways and it has maintained its hold on the attention of viewers, academics and those in the media industries over a significant period of time. Reality TV altered the terrain of factual programming, drawing on and contributing to changes in television working practices, importing a newlyinflected televisual grammar, establishing new priorities for programme makers and different expectations in viewers. As a resoundingly popular form it has situated itself firmly within what John Corner (2002) has called ‘post-documentary’ culture. We take this to be a radically altered cultural and economic setting which includes an imperative for playfulness and diversion and the erosion of the distinctions between the public and the private sphere, between the private citizen and the celebrity and between media and social space. The popularity of reality TV is crucial here. The highly visible presence of ordinary people in ‘unscripted’ situations is both the watermark of reality TV and arguably an explanation of its success with audiences. The visibility of ordinary people, the increasing audibility of their voices and the possibility of social mobility promised by their appearance on television raise important questions about the provision of space in broadcasting for the representation of ordinary people and their lives. For those critics of reality TV, these new-style celebrities’ often voluble, unschooled presence is emblematic of the vulgarity and increasingly shallow values of the newer formats. For its supporters, reality TV may be championed as the vanguard heralding a new, more democratic era of television within a multi-channel environment. Of course, cultural politics is rarely as simple as these positions would suggest and the debates within documentary history studies are a good resource in reminding ourselves of the complex difficulties associated with attempts to represent the ‘reality’ of real lives. There are already many overviews of the political and cultural agendas of movements such as Free Cinema or cinéma vérité or of innovative television forms such as the observational documentary to which the reader might turn. We provide an account of the generic relationship of reality TV with British, American and French documentary, not simply to map formations of film and then television practice but also to contextualise our discussion of the cultural politics of realist representation of ordinary subjects in factual television. We undertake this here with the explicit intention of complicating any notion that these early forms were either the political bedrock of reality TV or, alternatively, that they were the gold standard of politicised filmmaking to which factual programming should return. Essentially, this book contends that the new forms of reality TV are no less embedded in thorny debates about representing ordinary people, no less politically loaded than their documentary antecedents and no less complex and conflicted as social texts. For these reasons alone it would be wise to treat them with respect. If a ‘politics’ exists in reality TV, and we aim to show that it does, it will be differently articulated from the traditional forms of politicised documentary and it often requires different conceptual tools than those employed to unpack the politics of classic 2

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documentary genres. The politics of reality TV is a cultural politics. It is usually implicit rather than explicit, concerned with ‘social difference’ rather than with the ‘working class’, concerned with the politics of identity rather than with the politics of collective action or group solidarity. Reality TV is more often concerned with parent power or consumer power or girl power than with electoral power or labour power. Sometimes, too, the politics of reality TV will be conservative, retributive and judgemental and this should not go unnoticed. Even where the politics of reality TV is an ostensibly simple one of providing a supposedly non-judgemental, apolitical forum for ordinary people there is more to say. The playing out of social difference, for example in Wife Swap or You Are What You Eat or Neighbours from Hell, is no less incendiary and no less valuable as a social document of classed identity, social hierarchy and status anxiety than, for example, the acclaimed television drama documentary Cathy Come Home. This book’s subtitle, ‘Realism and Revelation’, signals the twin interconnected issues which we take to be key to the success of reality TV and which we consider to be useful points of entry into any evaluation of the development, appeal and futures of reality formats. The book breaks new ground in the analysis of non-fiction forms by linking together the realist enterprise of reality TV and its relationship to the production of knowledges (revelation) in mainstream television. It is a commonplace that the expectations generated by a story are frequently allied to the conventions of realism. In narrative, conventions of realism constrain the ways in which subject matter can be presented and the ways in which ideology can be manufactured and the ways in which messages are received and understood. These conventions, together with the technologies that sustain them, alter over time. Despite these longer-term mutations in realist representation, there is a perception among some viewers that television, especially non-fiction television, should ‘tell it like it is’. There is an assumption that television produces a ‘realistic’, ‘common sense’ and therefore recognisable and familiar view of the social world; of the family, relationships, personal trauma, class, ethnicity and gender. Reality TV inevitably raises the ante on the expectations made of realist representation. With new scopic technologies that convey a sense of immediacy and intimacy and ‘unscripted’ material featuring ‘real‘ people, reality TV lays claim to reveal social, psychological, political and historical truths and to depict the rhythms and structures of everyday life with the least recourse possible to dramatisation and artifice. Reality programming is especially loaded, since by definition, it should occupy a more privileged position in relation to the representation of the ‘real’ than overtly fictional forms. Its various forms tend to be measured by viewers and television critics against an ideal (and vaguely formulated) conception of the ‘realistic’. Programmes are judged to be ‘good’ – i.e. well-constructed and entertaining – if they offer convincing ‘pictures of reality’. It has been said that ‘It is hard to define Reality TV other than to say that it has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with TV.’1 In fact, the production of reality programming and its documentary and factual TV forebears has everything to do with ‘reality’, although we always have to adopt a posture of scepticism towards any claims that they have fully represented reality and real life. Their formats, technologies, manifestos and professional values frequently strive towards goals of either realist or realistic representation; of showing the ‘real’, revealing the ‘truth’ and so on and these goals are too easily dismissed introduction

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as either naïve or disingenuous. These genres, even in their most radically experimental forms, are always in dialogue with reality as it is commonly understood and in doing so they help to produce current knowledges about what that reality might consist of. In other words, factual programming takes on the burden of making sense of reality. This book addresses the changing technologies and practices of realist representation as necessary but it also attends, more extensively, to the political dimensions of the real: to the changing representation of ordinary people, to the production of knowledges about the real. The impetus to depict ordinary people has been linked by practitioners and critics, both implicitly and explicitly, to often-politicised debates about the real, reality and about the relative value of realist, naturalistic or anti-realist representational strategies deployed to convey real life. Problematically, ‘ordinary people’ (what used to be called the ‘working classes’) have been taken in themselves as signs of the real and only quite recently with the advent of reality TV have white-collar workers, professionals in the city, in the arts or in medicine, educationalists, socialites and so on been included in this ever-broadening category. This extension of representation needs to be understood within the context of the changing social and political climate of the post-Thatcherite/Reaganite era in which social mobility and media visibility have become the touchstones of individual achievement. As we indicate later on, it is this climate that has helped to foster the rise of the ordinary person as celebrity and which has licensed the rendering of the celebrity as an ordinary, supposedly knowable person. Its democratising ethos is radically different from the one in which notions of the public sphere supported a conviction that participation in party politics and public debate was the only real avenue for the expression of public opinion. In contemporary late capitalist cultures such as Britain and the United States cultural pluralism, life-style diversity and niche marketing arguably produce fragmented and self-reflexive selves. Here, older forms of authority and security – the law, democratic government, judiciary, medical experts and so forth – have been critiqued and displaced by an increasing public political cynicism and a turn to the self as the only possible marker of integrity (Frosch 1991). So too, new discursive technological forms such as the mobile phone, the video camera and the internet signal the convergence of different media and the increasing emphasis on the individual subject as the guarantor of knowledge and producer of new economies of realism (Dovey 2001). Cultural critics have noted mass forms of popular culture may provide ways of confronting and managing the basic psychic tensions of contemporary urban life (Richards 1994; Elliott 1996). Furthermore, that negotiation of the self within contemporary collective living is arguably infused with therapeutic discourse (Parker 1997). This brings us to the counterpart of ‘realism’ in this book, that is reality TV’s production of knowledges through tropes of ‘revelation’, truth-telling and exposure. Histories of documentary practice and current affairs film and television often address the ways in which the politics of filmmaking, at its most radical, could be discerned in the investigative and representational strategies with which social injustices were exposed. The documentaries frequently cited as ‘groundbreaking’ did not just make the argument for social change but rather they showed viewers what was going wrong. In a sense, they helped to bring new knowledges about welfare, racial prejudice, poverty-related crime and so on into the 4

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public arena and make them comprehensible. Consequently, their revelations could be read as an often politicised call-to-arms, shock tactics that demanded political change and a modification in social attitudes to support it. The success of established and newer television formats such as talk shows, docusoaps, reality game shows and so on is predicated on a quite different agenda which may well be about a political or more often commercial commitment to providing platforms for ordinary people but is also, much more strongly, about the exhibition of the self and of the psyche. Here the production of knowledges inform and instruct audiences in how to manage the self and one’s immediate environment rather than the social. Audiences often gauge the authenticity or truthfulness of reality TV on a scale of emotional realism and personal revelation. The reality TV subject is enjoined to share their pain, their surprise or their joy in a realm of mediated sociality and the most successful contestants of series such as Big Brother are often those who have allegedly remained ‘true’ to themselves and who have been frank with their audience. Reality TV had done much to further popularise psychoanalytic discourses in many formats including the ‘ego psychology’ aired in American-style confessional chat shows and the ‘vulgar Freudianism’ of Totem and Taboo displayed on the survival shows in which combatants overcome personal inhibition and physical limitation to gain enhanced status. Here, the immediacy of the ‘real event’ is established through images of determination, failure, personal strength and inner conflict. In Survivor, for example, the group is presented as a case study in both group membership and individual neurosis. Individual to-camera confessions are edited next to and contrasted with couple and group alliances and conspiracies. In this and other series the clash between individual aside or revelation to camera and group dynamics places the viewer as a ‘panoptic’ figure able to monitor, judge and punish the participants by banishing them from the television screen. Also, the structuring of these programmes draws on a certain sadistic pleasure in witnessing distress and failure as well as success. Programme makers are arguably very knowing about sociological, anthropological and psychoanalytic discourses in their construction of social bonding as fraught with tribalism, testing of group alliances and the symbolic ‘murder’ of sacrificial outcasts (Freud 1912/13 and 1921). The use of video diaries, tocamera monologues, shock-tactic interviewing and so on further opens up current critical debates about the shifting parameters of the public and private world. Here, for the reality TV viewer, amateur ‘pop psychological’ self-analysis and/or amateur or unscripted footage meld the pleasures of voyeurism with the pseudo intimacy of the therapeutic consulting room and a sense of ‘democracy of feeling’ (Richards 1994) which underpins emotional realism. In this book we have chosen to focus on the production of certain types of knowledge, certain modalities of revelation and the different ways in which they are articulated in reality TV. We examine, in particular, documentary and reality TV’s attentiveness to trauma, personal pain, injury and loss and to its modes of expression through confession, video diary, interview, observational techniques and so on. We point to the embedding of the revelation of trauma and psychological damage in post-documentary formats and its relationship to the broader psycho-social realm of an established therapeutic culture. As the scope of this book suggests, the kinds of issues raised here in relation to reality TV require not only the harnessing of the conceptual tools of documentary theory but introduction

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also the deployment of concepts and modes of analysis more commonly used within cultural studies. We aim to show, in particular, through both wide-ranging discussion and more detailed case studies, the value of the strategic use of psychoanalytic and discourse theory in unpacking the cultural politics of reality programming and the relationship between reality genres and the production of knowledges about the self and the social. Post-structuralist psychoanalytic theory has questioned the unity of the subject as depicted within the ‘pop’ psychoanalytic forums of confessional television. As noted above, the new dynamics of late-capitalist cultures has foregrounded the increasingly visible fragmentation of the self. Instead of examining the ‘self’ as an integral and essential element, post-structuralist psychoanalysis prefers to analyse the subject-in-process or the subject-in-crisis and to expose the precariousness of the position(s) occupied by the subject. Michel Foucault and other discourse theorists go further still by seeking to understand not the subject itself but rather how processes produce subjectivity and subject positions. Much of what we do here is to think through the ways in which reality TV negotiates the subject-in-crisis or else attempts to produce knowable and manageable subject positions including, for example, the criminal subject, the sexual subject, the classed subject and so forth. The book begins by exploring the ways in which reality TV has sparked popular, academic and media industry debates about the role and impact of popular television in the context of a post-documentary culture. Chapter 1 establishes some of the parameters of current debates, addressing the development of the most recent reality formats and exploring questions of media ethics, democratisation and access, quality and ‘dumbing down’, truthfulness, trust and responsibility. Chapters 2 and 3 review documentary practice to establish a historical perspective on the non-fiction filmic representation of ordinary people and everyday life. They seek to identify the lines of connection, affiliation and sometimes disjunction between older and newer forms of non-fiction representation and to highlight the historical commitment exhibited by filmmakers to the representation of the everyday. Chapter 2 aims to foreground the complex and often contradictory political and aesthetic considerations which informed documentarists’ depiction of the ordinary and the everyday through examples from British Free Cinema, American Direct Cinema and the French cinéma vérité movements. A number of these filmmakers expressed a suspicious scepticism towards the growing popularity and mass consumerism of television, together with a reluctant admiration for its potential audience reach. But the political radicalism of these movements, their diverse filmmaking philosophies and their technological innovations found their way on to the small screen. Hence the chapter ends by addressing the appearance on television of politically radical docudrama and documentary, looking at notable television programmes such as Ken Loach’s Cathy Come Home and less discussed programmes such as Denis Mitchell’s The Dream Machine and A Soho Story. Chapter 3 focuses on one aspect of the documentary approaches already mentioned – the observational documentary of working-class and family life. It tracks its mutations from the campaigning films exemplified by Cathy Come Home and later Hillsborough through the less overtly politicised poetic realism of Penny Woolcock’s work and the prototypical ‘docusoap’ observational documentaries pioneered in the UK by Paul Watson. 6

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In chapter 4 the focus shifts from documentary history and its developments to art-house video projects, video diaries and new-style observational and auteur-driven documentary. In doing so it seeks to illustrate how the intimate terrain of the subjective, the autobiographical and the personal has not only been colonised by popular culture but also by new hybrid forms of documentary and factual film practice. Examining a diverse range of mainstream and alternative documentaries it argues that far from distancing itself from the aesthetics and subject matter of popular forms and narratives, much of the most interesting new work has discovered fresh ways to incorporate them into their own practice, forming fascinating points of intersection. Here too the work of John Edginton, Jane Treays and Errol Morris, whose films include disturbing and controversial material mediated through popular conventions and storytelling techniques, is examined to explore the limits of the representation of personal trauma, revelation and of the ‘real’ within mainstream television. Chapters 5 and 6 address the ways in which new economies of realism require confession, exhibitionism and emotional revelation to be the conspicuous watermarks of authenticity and ethical commitment to audiences. They explore how these modes of expressive authenticity have come to the fore in a range of reality forms such as Big Brother, observational documentary, chat shows and lifestyle programming. Chapter 5 begins by situating confessional television and its emphasis on traumatic revelation within a broader context of a ‘therapeutic culture’ in which the self is encouraged to speak, to disclose and to narrativise one’s life in order to consolidate a publicly recognised and authenticated persona. Examining notions of performance, self-hood and transformation it argues that reality TV lays bare the ways in which subjectivity and subject formation is performative, always in process and inextricably bound up with structures of observation and confession. Talk shows acted as one of the precursors of reality TV, familiarising audiences with a popularised therapeutic discourse and valorising the display of raw emotion within a public forum. Consequently, chapter 6 chooses to address one crucial aspect of emotional revelation, the revelation of trauma, and examines its role as popular cultural script in talk shows and lifestyle programming. Chapter 7 also examines disturbing and controversial material in its extensive discussion of true crime and law and order reality programming. Whereas the documentaries addressed in the previous chapter constitute intimate portraits of people under pressure who have consented to be filmed, crime reality programming, through its use of CCTV footage, turns every subject into a potential film subject, with or without their consent. This chapter addresses the ethics of displaying violence, lawlessness and victimhood within a popular entertainment-led format. Thinking through the politics of the new formations of media/social space inaugurated by new technologies and popularised by reality TV it explores the pleasures of witnessing crime and anti-social behaviour and the social fears and anxieties that may be imbricated with these pleasures. Chapter 8 looks at one of the newest forms of reality hybrid – the performance piece as media event. As noted above, the exposure and, more particularly, self-exposure of psychological and bodily trauma has become the central feature of our ‘post-documentary’ culture. Generally speaking, this showcasing of personal trauma is a gendered one; with many of the established and newer formats dismissed as feminised media culture; with few, introduction

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if any, intellectual pretensions. This is partly because the domain of emotional suffering, at least, has been conventionally designated a ‘feminine’ one, with women especially, licensed to speak about bodily or psychological insecurity, vulnerability or damage. When ‘masculine’ damage or trauma is at stake, its presentation and articulation in media culture takes on quite different forms and meanings. This chapter examines the David Blaine event entitled ‘Above the Below’, exploring the meanings, symbolics and ethics of the current specularisation of bodily trauma and revealing the multiple ways in which an ethics of the self and of becoming is articulated in a popular form. ‘Above the Below’ is a rare example of a reality TV media event that showcases an established celebrity and does so in order to enhance his special status rather than render him more ‘ordinary’, accessible or knowable. Overall, reality programming has provided access and platforms for ordinary people via a plethora of talk shows, reality game shows, video diaries and docusoaps. These now comprise a significant part of the daily viewing of many audiences and their protagonists (‘guests’, ‘contestants’, ‘housemates’, ‘characters’) have, in turn, become the new celebrities of our age. We conclude by considering the ways in which ordinary people, formerly the sympathetic subjects of social-conscience documentaries, have now been transformed into the ‘especially remarkable’ celebrity through their new-found media visibility. And also, contrarily, the ways in which celebrities are being encouraged to reveal that they too are only ordinary people. We consider the increasing premium placed on social mobility achieved not through merit, trained talent or the traditional accumulation of cultural and economic capital but through media visibility alone. We also look to the future, identifying new hybrid forms of programming such as The Club and The Salon. These retain the reality TV emphasis on the intimate and the interpersonal while further eroding the distinction between celebrities and ordinary people, constructing filmed spaces – clubs, bars and beauty salons – where ordinary customers appear to mingle democratically with working celebrities and manqué reality TV stars. Many of the forms of programming examined in this book share one characteristic. They exhibit a commitment, sometimes overtly politicised although frequently not, to the representation of ordinary people and to the provision of a space in which they are made visible and of a platform from which they might speak. As such, reality TV has raised the stakes on television’s frequent populist and/or political assertions that it is a central component of common culture and that its main gift is its ability to function as a virtual public sphere. It also frequently claims to offer its audience reality rather than realism, revelation rather than fantasy, authenticity rather than artifice, access to real experience, joy or suffering rather than dramatised emotion. With this promise comes responsibility and the prominence and ubiquity of reality TV continues to inspire serious ethical questions about exploitation, voyeurism and the limits of the representation of the real.

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