Preamble (For O.J.)
On the 17th June 1994, somewhere in the range of 95 million people around the world watched a single event unfold on TV. A white Ford Bronco trundled along an LA expressway, flanked by an absurd number of police cruisers. Allen Cowling was in the driver’s seat, and in the back was O.J. Simpson, the barrel of a gun in his mouth. The LAPD had issued a warrant for his arrest that morning, as a suspect in the murder case of Nicole Brown-Simpson and Ronald Goldman. Instead of surrendering to the police, Simpson elected to go fugitive, fleeing his home and leaving behind a note that seemed to declare his intention to commit suicide. For more than an hour and a half, a fleet of news helicopters followed the procession through the centre of the city, broadcasting live around the country on every network. More people would watch as friends and family attempted to talk Simpson down than would watch that year’s Super Bowl. Abroad, those for whom the murder trial was a distant, unimportant event involving a celebrity in a far-away country suddenly could not avert their eyes: from that point on, the trial was a point of conversation regardless of where you were in the world. Someone was driven to despair over their grief and guilt, and the lowest point of their life was captured and converted into spectacle for the purpose of ratings. The face of modern reality TV was revealed for the first time.
The Rise of Reality TV
Last year, I watched The Traitors on ITV. The conceit of the show is that, secluded in a castle in Scotland, one majority group (the Faithful) attempt to locate and expel a minority group (the Traitors) from their midst in a series of round-table debates, in order to win a cash prize. If any Traitors remain at the conclusion of the show, they automatically take home the money. It’s a psychological drama in reality TV dressing, requiring constant and cautious consideration from the players. Relationships fray under scrutiny, groupthink emerges, scapegoats are crucified. It’s seriously compelling reality television with a Sartrean bent - relying almost entirely on the interpersonal relationships of the contestants to generate momentum - Claudia Winkleman (the only ‘official’ presence) acts as a sort of demiurge who organises challenges that are mostly disconnected from the crux of the show.
Anyway, in the final episode of the first season, only one Traitor was left in the game, a guy called Wilf who made it that far by scapegoating his fellow traitors and endearing himself to the remaining Faithful. This is, within the explicit rules of the game, precisely how one is meant to play in this situation. Yet, when I idly discussed the show with a friend, I was surprised to hear them refer to this guy (who they had never met) with something approaching anger. ‘What he’s doing is very manipulative’, they told me. ‘Anyone who can so convincingly lie to people they supposedly care about like that is clearly fucked in the head’. I thought this was a failure to apprehend the fictional gauze layered over the whole premise of the show (‘reality’ TV is an oxymoron deep down). After all, Wilf was only doing what was expected of him by the premise of the show - if he didn’t lie to his friends, he wouldn’t be in the running for £100,000.
Read the last sentence of the previous paragraph back. Now ask yourself, what sort of psychopath would see that as an acceptable line of argument?
In an interview in April, OfCom chair and former Tory peer Michael Grade called modern television ‘Cruel, exploitative, and patronising’.1 No argument there. He also identified a distinct shift in the focus of programming from one dominated by professional entertainers (largely sorted and sifted by the workings of the entertainment industry at large) to a situation where ‘the public are entertaining themselves’. This, he argues, is in large part an issue of budget. The days of ostentatious, scripted late-night terrestrial television are behind us, broadcasters are too impoverished and sclerotic to dig themselves out, so this is what we get.
This isn’t a cultural studies newsletter, nor am I so old that I’m going to wax lyrical about the halcyon days where TV would rot your brain in a slightly less obvious way. Lest we forget that more than one of those ‘professional entertainers’ whose disappearance Grade laments were the subject of a far-reaching police investigation into historical sexual abuse? That some 15 million people tuned in weekly to watch Jim’ll Fix It? The medium has always been cancerous, and perhaps the only worthwhile critique is a negative one: what does it mean that at one time people were willing to ignore the cruelty behind the scenes as long as they could see something that made them feel good, but now they’re happy to just take the cruelty as it’s presented to them?
On Cruelty
A definition of ‘cruelty’ would probably help here. We might cite Nietzsche in praise of cruelty, which he ties into the will to power. ‘To see others suffer does one good, to make others suffer even more: this is a hard saying but an ancient, mighty, human, all-too-human principle. . . . Without cruelty there is no festival: thus the longest and most ancient part of human history teaches.’2
In Nietzche’s formulation, one might be cruel in order to exercise power over another, their victim. Similarly, one may spectate for much the same reason. This is far more than a simple hedonistic impulse (though a certain frisson in enjoying the suffering of another is undeniable in this instance), it is the pleasure that comes with the expression of power and, thusly, domination.
Let’s bring it back to Walter Benjamin, who writes in The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: ‘The public is an examiner, but an absent-minded one’. Let’s be honest, the idea that people watch reality TV is quite a stretch. It acts more as a low-level background hum that rarely offends, but also prevents any concerted effort at concentration from taking place. One eye on the TV, one eye on the phone, your brain is effectively anaesthetised. Something is getting through, though, slowly seeping up the optic nerve like a clot.
‘Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves’. To add a Zizekian bent to the whole thing, we might say that Fascism teaches the masses to express themselves in the manner which best suits its own aims. It convinces them that their goals are in alignment with Fascism, and to express themselves thusly. This leads to a veneration of Fascist aesthetics, defined by Susan Sontag as ‘a preoccupation with situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain; they endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude [...] [It] glorifies surrender, it exhalts mindlessness, it glamorises death’.3
Let’s take an example ripped straight from the headlines: Piers Morgan interviewing that woman from the Baby Reindeer show. There’s a distinct sense that you ‘shouldn’t be watching this’, but that you are too fascinated to look away. What if I said that you were right in the first instance - the sense that you shouldn’t be watching Piers Morgan harass a clearly very unwell woman on TV is whatever shriveled little bit of meat that you once might have called a conscience trying to warn you off? You’ve been trained to ignore it. After all, what’s a bit of guilty fun? Who am I to tell you what you can and can’t watch? Before you know it, a nightclub in Coventry is offering meet-and-greets with a stalker, inviting clubbers to sexually exploit her. I’m not being ghoulish either, just look! This is what you’re endorsing!
The voyeuristic obsession with watching other people, the water-cooler gossip about people you don’t even know, is a shameful impulse that TV executives have worked tirelessly to normalise. In keeping with Nietzche’s formulation, a moral dimension completes the image: by sneering at these idiots who ritually humiliate themselves for Huel sponsorships, you can place yourself in a superior position. After all, you’re too smart to let yourself be humiliated in public. It’s the same reason why you cross the street and avert your eyes when you see someone having a mental health episode in a public place. You are briefly made aware of how precarious everything is, how easily you could be on the other side of the screen, with everyone pointing and laughing at you instead, so you join in with them and laugh as hard and long as you possibly can.
You might read the above and say: ‘Well, I don’t really like reality TV either, but accusing its audience of fascism goes a bit far. Besides, it makes your entire argument read like an undergraduate high on Frankfurt School dregs.’ Perhaps. Perhaps it’s not far enough. Keep in mind that the most popular reality television show in the UK has an actual running death toll. Contestants travel to a villa in Mallorca and subject themselves and each other to mind-numbing tedium until they can obtain the reward of having sex on national TV. Four people linked to the show have died by suicide. It’s remarkable that, when ‘mental health awareness’ is an issue that receives constant lip service, so many seem willing to abandon it completely when the opportunity for mockery and lowbrow salacious gossip arises.
End
While the individual is certainly at fault, they can only be apportioned part of the blame here. After all, they have likely spent much of their life plugged into the ideological organ that is the Idiot Box, culturally conditioned to accept its banal cruelty as normal, even desirable. A whole system crouches behind the screen, inviting you to passivity, to indulgence of your worst impulses. It’s far from the most harmful manifestation of this system, but it’s there everyday - chipping away at your resolve. Resist the siren’s call. It’s time to look away.
https://www.theguardian.com/media/2024/apr/14/tv-has-become-exploitative-and-cruel-says-ofcom-chair-michael-grade
Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kauffman, 1967.
Susan Sontag, ‘Fascinating Fascism’, The New York Review, 1975