My introduction to the vagaries of "reality TV" came at a tender age. My parents and I were in Manhattan, where we took in a taping of The Dick Cavett Show. This was a sop to the family twerp, me, who thought Cavett's talk show was the equivalent of a Rembrandt etching in a room full of Al Capp cartoons. I can't remember Cavett's chat-up guest that day—it certainly wasn't anyone as memorable as John Lennon or Groucho Marx. But I recall the musical guest, Freda Payne, then sailing on her one big hit, "Band of Gold." As the song's campy strains boomed through the studio, I was struck by the lavish production sound, with nary a musician, save poor Freda, in sight. Even then, I did not want to believe that my hero, Cavett, would condone such cunning; surely the band was hidden behind the curtain for some reason. But no. I was close enough to follow Freda's lips and soon succumbed to that synching feeling.
This has been on my mind a bit lately, as the old qualm about authenticity in art and entertainment has raised its reproving voice with some frequency lately—and with regard to doings in this most sincere of towns. The producers of Last Comic Standing, the talent-scouts reality show that recently filmed here, found themselves fending off accusations that their celebrity-comic judges' choices were neglected so that a producers' pick could advance. And a producer of the upcoming Fox "reality" series, The Casino, steadfastly insisted the show depicts reality—while defending the decision to arrange a spectacular St. Patrick's Day pool party for the ultimate taping.
This variation on a reality show, pioneered by its creator, Mark Burnett, in the NBC series The Restaurant, and by A&E's The Airline, a Brit-hit makeover, might be the type that most clearly deserves the name. Booting people from islands, suitor pools and bug-munching contests actually amount to little more than a game show, which also uses "real" people. And elevating new histrionic pop stars simply updates the venerable Original Amateur Hour, albeit with a snarky devil's advocate on set. But to take cameras behind the scenes of a commercial operation points to a genre most TV viewers would shudder to think they enjoy: documentary.
And documentaries have endured doubts about fidelity to truth all the way back to Nanouk of the North. The principal issue is the same one that earlier attached itself to photography, once people began to understand that an image etched by light on chemicals, seemingly so unmediated and direct, was as intensively subjective as a painted canvas. Photographers and documentarians choose subjects, angles and lighting conditions, and they edit away blurs, blemishes and bad shots. They betray points of view despite themselves.
That we have come to understand this and allow for it as an audience is hardly novel. What is relatively new is that the pop-culture consumer has been conditioned to expect artifice. The New York Times noted last month that most Britney Spears fans know she lip-syncs songs during live performances—in fact, they demand it. They buy tickets to a spectacle, not a recital. Increasingly, fans do not value vocal skill or lyrical expression, but a performer's well-packaged persona. Poor Milli Vanilli, so tragically ahead of its time.
This is the product of several generations of media bombardment and commercial manipulation: We know it's all a lie, but here we are now.
Lip-synched production number or stage-managed documentary, the punchy final product and not the integrity of its production is all that matters. Whether it is sentimental or controversial, a payoff is required, and if reality does not provide one, you simply impose a new reality. Who's going to watch people worming their ways through banks of slot machines to cash in buckets of nickels? No, you copter-bomb casino chips into a pool foaming with lunatics.
Which illustrates that we not only accept lies, we eagerly participate in them. To many journalists, the horror of the Jayson Blair affair was that so many of his victim-sources anticipated that a reporter for The Times would make up lies about them. That so many talked to him anyway, and thought nothing of his errors when they read them, points up a willingness to lend oneself to the process of artifice, to bask in its garish glow. Or to bobble for cash.
So ask not if it's still reality when it's been shaped into spectacle. It used to be a commonplace that the very presence of a camera distorted reality, because its subjects couldn't help addressing themselves to it. But this is beside the point. Of course we do that. The camera knows it can count on us to seek its probing eye, and to offer it a version of ourselves that we will enjoy seeing transformed into "reality." We expect nothing less. Or more.
Chuck Twardy has written about art and architecture for several daily newspapers and for magazines such as Metropolis.