(A Blog Essay Thing, with no pictures, and some harsh language)

When I was attending university, in the summer of my intellectual arrogance (I sometimes consider doing a second degree in order to find it again) I wrote an essay examining the very first season of Big Brother (The one with Nasty Nick, 2000 I think) via Freud’s theory of fetishism. In short, Freud, god-bless him, decides that a fetish is any sexual act that doesn’t result procreation – as such it is given all the meaning and importance of procreation, but is essentially a false interaction, one with no chance of a meaningful result. My theory was that this was essentially the function of Big Brother, but with social interactions substituted for sexual ones. Big Brother gives the viewer the feeling of engaging in conversation, having friends, reacting emotionally to social situations with no risk of any real interaction, of having to develop or display real feelings or opinions. Everyone thought it was quite clever and I got a good mark for it.

This was a long time ago; Big Brother season 1 was essentially the ground zero of a terrorist attack that almost killed television, or at least televised fiction. Suddenly, that fucking boring uncle you had who as a kid told you that he hated stories because they ‘weren’t real’ had suddenly ‘won the television’ in the same way that posting a particular lol-worthy image to a message board might win one the internet.

The most public casualty of the realitypocalypse was poor old MTV. Do me a favour; go watch some 80′s MTV on Youtube – go on, I’ll wait. Right, did you notice how not only were there music videos, but there may have been several in a row, and the handsome young person that spoke between the videos may have said something interesting or at least cogent about the artists involved. This all seems a lot more like the remit of ‘music television’, for sure, but that well-worn point is not what I’m going for here. Back then, the face, the voice of MTV was an equal, our partner in consuming the rockin’ – sure, a ‘VJ’, but essentially just a hip young thing who loves music, just like us. Now, the faces of MTV have shifted along with the majority of its programming into the reality-show wasteland that is modern MTV. Flavor Flav, Brett Michaels, Reverend Run, the Osbournes, Hulk and Brooke Hogan, Paris Hilton, Tila Motherfucking Tequila. Three of those people are musicians? A similar number are the same age as the target demographic (maybe), or came from a similar economic background.

The weird thing is, these shows have reached a kind of critical mass of artificiality where, like the spaceship in Asteroids, they go off one side of the screen and re-emerge on the other (or like how Gears of War is so straight it is in fact really gay), and the real becomes the unreal, the common, uncommon and so on. To appear on a reality show, I think it’s fair to say a person must have a certain hyperreal quality about them (in this sense, a terrifying epiphany for comics fans – Tila Motherfucking Tequila is the real life Jenny Sparks), or to be more modern, a certain ‘truthiness’, a desire to project their own personal reality onto those around them, and through the TV, into the reality of the viewers living room. This is why Nasty Nick was so compelling in BB1 – unlike the others he didn’t submit to Endemol’s artificial reality, he gamed the system, usurped reality as his own (in BB1 you can see the guy working out where the cameras are, and repositioning himself for dramatic effect). These people, these crazy, fucked-up people, are now all over the television, which rather than portraying reality, is now a scrying pool into their own divergent reality that bares only a cursory resemblance to the parents that spawned it. For a particularly traumatic glimpse at this, try one of the MTV reality shows that don’t feature a celebrity, like Exposed for instance, where two whores of gender (a) attempt to woo a self-obssesed uber-prick of gender (b), while being spied on with complex and probably fictional lie detecting equipment. The ensuing reality battle is pretty explicitly there on screen: Uber Prick presents a task, let’s say it’s ‘paint a picture’. Whores paint pictures, and then Uber Prick makes some kind of arbitary judgement as to which attempt confers more sexiness on the winning Whore. Cut then to the losing Whore re-establishing her reality with some soundbite that, regardless of the task, suggests that she is in fact the sexier; usually it’s like ‘So, Brad didn’t like my painting – pity in wasn’t a cum guzzling competition, or I’d have cleaned up, if you know what I mean’.

When we look in on this hyperreality, inhabited by these beautiful terrible deviant quasi-men, we have a new viewpoint character to guide us, to look into this world through the eyes of somewhere there, at ground-zero. This person is no longer ‘one-of-us’ (we don’t remember what that is really), but the only figure in the narrative that is not ‘one-of-them’ – the rockstar, the faded celebrity, the hieress, whoever sits presiding over the whole thing with the Jeweled Crown of Aquilonia on their troubled brow. Compared to the strange menagerie presented to them, Paris, Brett or Flav is now an easier point of identification for the viewer than any of the ‘real people’ in this world. It’s easy to sit back after watching Brett Michael’s closing statement on Rock of Love 3: The Bus and think “Man, it is difficult for him to choose which one of these 20 strippers to fuck more than 5 times after only fucking them less than five times. It must be rough, I feel for him” because his dilemma is so much closer to the average person’s experience than the bizarre vision-quest being undertaken by the girls – he’s from our world, he only works in outer space, to misquote the warrior poet Kirk.

The flipside to this is that TV now has an insatiable appetite for ‘real people’ that can only be satiated by celebrities; we can see this reflected in the fact that the internet acts as if Linsey Lohan’s Twitter, and by extension her extremely interesting meta-porn relationship with Samantha Ronson is a reality show itself, not just a person utilising an internet site the way it was intended. I also think we’re going to see more shows like Top Gear in the coming years as this style burns itself out. Top Gear is essentially professional wrestling with automobile appreciation substituted for ritualised combat. It’s real, in the sense that we follow the adventures of three guys using there real names, essentially not playing characters, doing real-things, recorded as if live or semi-live. There is however an obvious narrative, and the situations they encounter are obviously unreal, a deception the audience is deliciously complicit in (This also makes Hulk Hogan’s Celebrity Championship Wrestling possibly the most post-modern TV show ever made). The funny thing is, this format is not massively unlike MTVs The Real World, which though many credit as being the first reality show in the Big Brother mold, it eschewed a game-like, task orientated narrative and a microcosm style environment in favour of a reality-documentary feel that simultaneously made it ahead of and behind its time, and without the constraints of this format allowed for greater narrative control via editing. It’s almost like the fiction is coming back. Until then, I need to engage with someone who feels my pain. Like Brett Michaels.