My takeaway from our readings this week on the existence and nature of reality TV has been that it is very hard to narrow the subject to any particular generalizing statement or belief. All of the readings make good points, Chad Raphael being especially credible in his recounting of the historical context of “Reali-TV”, Anna McCarthy being perhaps the most excessively alarmist in her disgust toward what is in the end televised exploitation of pedestrian suffering. Ouellette and Hay bring up an exhausting conversation around the concepts of hegemony, politics, and democratic practice for television viewers. Personally I found Strings and Bui’s breakdown of RuPaul’s Drag Race’s navigation (or lack thereof) of racial and gender-identity especially compelling.
It might honestly be too generalizing to attempt a study of reality TV on the whole outside of Raphael’s financial historical overview. Realistically, television has always had a relationship with “actuality”. Its earliest shows usually combined real-world interactions with fictions, such as Faye Emerson’s early shopping channel show, or Dragnet’s “true stories” – itself a successor of similar true-crime radio programming. As such it is interesting to note that “News” is never counted as reality despite its often sensational nature (FOX), or the blurring lines of talk show/news show’s like Good Morning America, and where is the line for The View, Wendy Williams versus Dr. Phil? When does it stop being “news” and start being “reality?”
I find myself leaning more into McCarthy’s “suffering” conception, Raphael’s reference to “trash TV”: there is a certain socioeconomic assumption being made not only about the content of the “reality” show in question, but also the audience that consumes it. The respectable watch the news, the incorrigible watch Maury.
But how much of that assumption is reality? It would be dangerous to believe, if that is indeed the implication with any of our authors this week (not to say that it is), that reality audiences watch reality to relate. In my personal experience reality television has often been escapist drama, akin to indulging in water-cooler gossip, closer to soap interactiveness, but with a more superior tint to it, a window into “otherness” that audiences can raptly gaze at without fear of contamination. People love a train wreck when they don’t have to be in it. True crime, drag competition, and the ever-increasing stakes of Bachelor-style dating elimination shows all bank on alien sensationalism. The Bachelor I feel may be especially interesting to examine in this sense, as while it does seem to sell a “universal dream” in the idea of “finding love” its actual screen-time has becoming increasingly invested in raising the participatory stakes of the “game” rather than focusing down on boring interpersonal bonding. “Calm” is not a quality of good TV.
As such I posit that reality TV plays an interesting line of ‘uncanny othering’ that attracts viewers. There is enough familiarity in the premise to connect to the audience, but enough difference to maintain fascination. This too plays out in the success of RuPaul’s Drag Race, as described in the Strings and Bui reading. Indeed there are meta-levels of “exoticization” contained in the show, with audiences at one level of approval, and the show’s judges at another. The reported encouragement of playing up “personality” in the drag challenged (re: racial stereotypes) seemingly oblivious to the problematic implications of anybody embodying harmful depictions of racial groups – let alone ones the actor is not a member of - is quite revealing.
RuPaul repeatedly seemed enthralled with foreign elements of subculture, delighting in the spectacle that outlandish performances of these stereotypes bring before him. And indeed, these very outlandish depictions of subculture is what brings in the show’s high viewership, drag in itself being a niche which most audience members have little experience of. It’s a bit ironic.
It does however bring to the forefront an increasingly present social conversation around identity and constructs. Strings and Bui observe that there is a kind of policing social force to the depiction and performance of race on the show, with various levels of response from positive to negative recorded based on a sliding plane of ‘level of spectacle’ to ‘level of negative stereotype’ with sometimes surprising outcomes.
Strings and Bui acknowledge that gender politics are the easy hurdle of Drag Race, as its very origin implies the acceptance of the social construction of gender. Yet they don’t seem to posit much beyond a commentary that while gender is fluid and malleable to the queens, race is reinforced as “real” or immutable, despite being as false a construct as gender.
Fundamentally, while both subjects are manmade constructions with an irreducible intersectionality, they both contain different values at their cores, most clear depicted in their detractors.
Feminism seeks to redefine womanhood and reevaluate what women are capable of. It denies the preconceived notion of what a woman is in favor of a revelation of her actual reality. Meanwhile anti-racism does not wish to change definitions, but rather perceptions of racial identity as being in any way negative, lifting up the figure at the center as a being valuable for exactly who they are, no more and no less.
As such it is easy for a drag queen to embody womanhood, because it was always a mask without any reality behind it. Anyone can be a woman, because it does not require anything but performance to pull off. However the same cannot be said for the performance of race. Women exist in every ethnic identity in the world, however each ethnic identity has its own unique cultural background. One cannot present a “character” as a “Black American from Detroit” without the unspoken systems of historical and institutional racism playing their part. Racial identity in America is sadly inextricable from the tragedies of our recent ancestors, and any member therein would be hard-pressed to forget that – or want to.
So yes, the depiction or performance of race on RuPaul’s show must necessarily become a fraught one. However, that a discourse is then founded may have its own benefit. While no one swallows reality TV anymore as being actually representative of reality, it nonetheless remains a popular vehicle to present audiences with controversy. Taking a page from Ouellette and Hay, perhaps this can be a kind of democracy of the screen: a filtration of perspective delivered as a digestible water cooler spectacle, an innocuous entry into critical social change.
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