Baudrillard – Reality TV – morphine for the masses!

Mrs C

Consumer Culture / Hyperreality / Simulacra / Hegemony – but also self-reflexivity/pastiche/parody/loss of historical reality.

TOWIE (THE ONLY WAY IS ESSEX)

You either love reality TV or you hate it. Mr Gregson loathes it – Mrs Cobb loves it! But why?

Mrs Cobb would argue she is a pluralist viewer, who watches it with a critical academic mind whilst Mr Gregson doesn’t even afford it the time, saying it is vacuous, boring, skin thinned and pointless.

Whether you love it though or hate it, reality TV is part of our media landscape and a great example for postmodern media.

So take some time to consider Reality TV in all its varying forms as it could give you some really good, up to date and pertinent examples to mention in your exam.

MADE IN CHELSEA

 

https://musingsbymaria.wordpress.com/tag/hyperreality/

In case TOWIE turns your stomach….you could choose to talk about MiC instead. Just a posher version of TOWIE – that’s all.

Above is a really good blog post on hypereality and Made in Chelsea.

Made in Chelsea paints a very vivid picture of the rich and elite in London. From an outsider looking in, it suggests to a large extent that all ‘English’ people live this way. I have friends from different countries who have said to me ‘Is that what England is like?’ (referring to the show) …well quite simply no. London is very diverse and has many different cultures, yet Made in Chelsea does not have one ethnic person in the show. Whilst it is true that Chelsea is very elite, not everyone who lives there is white (believe it or not). Yet the programme tells another story.

This show definitely blurs the distinction between fiction and documentary and soap opera. The cast are exposed by producers in a certain way to show them off as distinct characters that the audience can relate to for entertainment purposes. Spencer is shown as the ‘villain’ of the show, Jamie, Proudlock and Francis are shown as the ‘laddish’ bachelors and the girls Lucy, Rosie and Louise etc. are the upper class women, who are obsessed with material possessions and their taste in fashion is nothing less than a six figure digit. The whole aesthetic of the programme is to exude wealth, high society members and their lavish lifestyles, which is somewhat a fantasy for many of the viewers.

Consumer Culture – features all the right brands: Harrods, Dorchester Hotel, Sloane Square etc. The programme is even sponsored by Rimmel – Get the London Look. You too could be this gorgeous!

Hegemony – capitalist, bourgeois, conservative view on life. Work hard and you too could be like this. The fact that most of the characters are wealthy by inheritance and none of them seem to do a day’s work between them is irrelevant. Capitalism pays off and MiC is evidence of this (the fact that it is completely constructed and contrived should not deter you from aspiring to this lifestyle). This is quite a good powerpoint on examples of ‘hegemony’ in action – it is very USA based but you will get the idea of how the messages of what is right, expected and wrong are constantly reinforced from ‘up above’ or ‘elsewhere’ although there are some steps to counteract this mindset, as you will see at the end of the presentation.

Hyperreality – the blurring between the real people and their on screen characters is blurred. This is endorsed by them tweeting when it is unclear as to whether they are ‘in character’ or as themselves.  We talk about them as though they are real.

Simulacra – the original becomes irrelevant.  We believe the simulated world. This is how it is. We value the simulated world more than we do the ‘real’ world.

Watch any of the other ‘scripted reality’ TV shows – The Real (really? come on!) Housewives series, Teen Mom etc and you will see exactly the same elements that indicate they are part of this type of postmodern phenomena.

GOGGLEBOX

Gogglebox is a ‘reality’ TV show (although in my opinion no reality TV is actually proper reality, but that’s another blog post altogether!) in which participants sit at home and watch TV, commenting on it all the while for our entertainment. Gogglebox celebrates the world of television and invites us to critically watch what’s on TV through the eyes of other people, so in a sense we are analysing TV through a TV show.

We are being invited to watch a TV show about TV shows, it’s a TV show about its own medium that invites people, both participants and the viewers at home, to mock, laugh at and celebrate everything that comes to our screens at home. Gogglebox sounds like a bizarre TV show, watching people watch TV, but is actually strangely entertaining!

And what is perhaps most ironic is that the armchair critics that participate in the show have gone on to become minor celebrities and the show itself is winning Television awards.  Totally, self-referential – self-reflexivity at its very best!

Link to article in Media Magazine

Notes from the article

Postmodern TV Shows

CELEBRITY BIG BROTHER

Competitive – social experiment games created a ‘preferred reality’ as it has more drama, tension and clashes. When Big Brother started out, they made the fatal mistake of not choosing characters that were interesting enough to sustain an audience. Now, they deliberately choose participants who will create drama and increase viewing figures.

But what is it about our voyeuristic tendencies?  Even in Roman times we loved seeing people fight to the death in the arena, Have we really not come that far from that kind of barbarity? Think of all the ‘pranked’ videos you watch online – enjoying laughing at people’s misfortune.

Perhaps we have not evolved as far as we had hoped in terms of being civilised.  It makes an uncomfortable thought.

Scopophilia – voyeurism.  We are all guilty of this. Looking but not looking. Enjoying the downfall of others? The tragic story of Jade Goody who rose to fame in Big Brother to become the first ‘reality TV celebrity’ on the back of the show, is a brilliant example of how we, the postmodern audience enjoy watching what shouldn’t be aired.

This is the interview when she was evicted in the Celebrity Big Brother she appeared in. She had been evicted on the back of ‘racist’ behaviour towards an Indian bollywood star in the house.

The ‘tragic reality’ of the story is one that ended where it began. On and through Reality TV. Jade then went on to appear in the Indian version of the show and whilst there was diagnosed with Cervical Cancer – live on air. She returned to the UK and from then on her journey to ‘recovery’ was followed in graphic detail on TV. The real tragedy is that she died from the disease.  And We Watched This!  We built her up and then shot her down.  This is when the lines of the constructed reality cross catastrophically with what is actually real.

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