Unfortunately, life is not always more interesting than fiction. In Australia, there was a time when Big Brother was such an event, every evening the whole nation tuned into 30 minutes of pure slumber party surveillance humdrum. I’ve had more interesting conversations with my dog, and I don’t even have a dog. Other shows like Amazing Race and Survivor make use of real competition, strategy, adventure and skill, and sometimes the audience might actually learn something about the world, like how to make fire with a rubber band, and about human nature, like how people are either snakes or rats. Most of the time, however, we are merely playing voyeurs to suffering,
The American Idol craze, for one, would not be such if it weren’t for Simon Cowell’s skin-crawling, accurately acerbic critiques. "Yes, you’re a beautiful girl, but you’re one ugly performer," he tells one Britney-alike on the verge of tears. She did happen to sing and dance with a crumpled face and gaping mouth. It is Cowells’ remarks that we repeat to our friends over phone breaks and coffee, with the evil giddiness of gossipy adolescents, and not whether any of the actual performances were worthy of our idolatry. The contestants, regardless of talent, win out of popularity, and how much they have of it is an indignantly inverse correlation to Cowell’s disapprovals (e.g. the Jasmine-LaToya controversy which resulted in the entire state of Hawaii texting up for Jasmine).
Cries of racism, though unwarranted, have been hurled against the fact that the more vocally powerful black singers have been dismissed. Remember, audience voters have the last say. This can either mean that perhaps American audiences don’t want to see yet another R&B star pop the charts, or that they’d rather see continued humiliation live on TV.
Which brings it inevitably to William Hung, who didn’t even make it past the auditions – he didn’t even make it to the end of the never-more-painful She Bangs. But who’s got the last laugh? William Hung himself, with a chart topping karaoke record and music videos with half-naked chicks? A guy who can’t sing to save himself from getting fobbed off the boat, whose teeth are as crooked as bamboo stilts, and who has the sexual appeal of string cheese? No, not poor Will, God bless him though for "trying his best" and "being sincere." Yes, it’s the audience who’s laughing at this appalling display, look at that poor Asian guy embarrassing himself so naively, for our amusement! He’s heartbreakingly unthreatening and touchingly unvirile – let’s make him a star.
Cries of racism this time echo truer, if only because it brings back specters of the blackface and minstrelsy and big Mammy and that horrible Chinese guy in Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The feminized, infantilized Asian male in the history of Hollywood cinema is a history of repression – Jackie Chan and Jet Li, already contemporary examples, have yet to attract, what more get nookie from a white leading lady in their American films.
William Hung’s success is one of those weird pop cultural anomalies that is not just weird but possibly a sign of something disturbing. More scandalous than Hung shaking his bonbon are the images of the Iraqi prisoners, being tortured by a smiling American girl giving the universal sign of "bring it on." Lynndie England, the unfortunate poster girl of Torturegate, has become a media symbol for innocents to project their anger and righteousness. But also one that forces us to ask the dark and secret question, how far would we have gone, were we in the same situation?
If war was a reality TV show (and it already is, to some degree) where contestant-prisoners were made to endure bizarre and cruel experiments in exchange for their life, freedom or $1 million, surely the audience would demand for something worth their viewing time, they would demand blood, they would demand be entertained. How did England go so wrong, breaking her own humanity down as she broke down the detainees, depersonalized and blind in their hooded anonymity. Was this an extreme symptom of pleasure at the Other’s pain, a wrong-turn thrill at their degradation, just like TV viewers’ "harmless" schadenfreude as they watch another snarky, full-of-it bimbo get denied by the hunky rich bachelor on national prime time?
People are macabre, and will never shake off the voyeuristic desire that has haunted us from times even before gladiator games and public executions, the tug that makes us slow down and crane our necks at an accident, the gray curiosity that makes us peek through our fingers. Sometimes the desire oversteps the boundaries of mere viewing, it transgresses the screen, and becomes part of the action. Sometimes passivity itself is already party to the crime.
There are a few more reality shows lurking on the horizon, one more inane and terrifying than the other, based on more and more graphic, invasive things like winning a baby for adoption, or plastic surgery. Extreme Makeover has people wanting so bad to be radically transformed that they are willing to put their bodies – all of it – under the knife. Not sated with live police busts and televised trials, people are clamoring for the return of the open execution, death penal-TV. The line toeing bad taste, and the exploitation of it, is being dangerously tested by whoever comes up with these programs, and will persist as long as there are people out there enjoying themselves, flashing their desensitized thumbs up approval at these theaters of horror. TV is a mirroring eye that not only reflects, but creates our reality. When it goes bad, you can always shut it off, but it just might be better to shut it down.