Reality TV Shows and the American Identity: The Postmodern Situation - Essay Example

Reality TV Shows and the American Identity: The Postmodern Situation More American young people can tell you where an island that the 'Survivor' TV series came from is located than can identify Afghanistan or Iraq. Ironically a TV show seems more real or at least more meaningful interesting or relevant than reality.” John Fahey The television is more sophisticated than it ever was since it commercially available during the 1920s. As it becomes more accessible to everyone, it also becomes a platform to modify culture, or at least perpetuate a culture. Reality TV shows are popular in this era called the Information Age. Along with the new media like the internet, reality TV has become one of the world’s most effective tools in shaping culture, thereby affecting economy and the behavior of societies of their audiences. Reality TV has made an impact by means of “showing ordinary people who are filmed in real situations” (Cambridge Dictionary, 2011). According to Murray and Ouellette, reality TV is “an unabashedly commercial genre united less by aesthetic rules or certainties than by the fusion of popular entertainment with a self-conscious claim to the discourse of the real”. This type of TV show steadily gained popularity after MTV started airing the show Real World in 1991 where adults were put together in a room filled with cameras and microphones. This show started it all. Now, reality TV has many subgenres, depending on the nature of the show like the gamedoc format (Survivor, America’s Next Top Model, The Apprentice), Big Brother/docusoap (Real Housewives of Miami, The Real World, Jersey Shore, Keeping Up with the Kardashians), the makeover program (Queer Eye for a Straight Guy, Extreme Makeover, Style Her Famous) and many others that present “ordinary people” in it (Le Roux). Television is already part of the analog culture that made a splash in the 20th century, like the radio. But even if the television is almost a relic, it still continues to make waves because of its significance in the pop culture, or in culture as a whole. The modern era where the television made its first appearance (think: The Great Depression, World War II, 1960’s Cultural Revolution, etc) is gone, making way for the Post-Modern era. Post-Modernism challenges the Modern ideas constantly, this is because the two ideologies that represent generations of audiences are so different. Take for example, the Baby Boomers. They are the major audiences of the Modern Age. They were those who were born from 1946 to 1964. They did have television when they were growing up, but the content of television then was way different: the shows have idealized sitcoms, forums for politics and the like. They have watched President Kennedy getting killed right from their own living rooms, and every single disaster in American history after that. Comparatively, the Post-Modern children (those who were born after 1964 but generally those who were born after the Cold War) had MTV. MTV is the most innovative thing that has happened in television history. It changed the record industry, the television industry, the movie industry, and well, the field of marketing in general. It also changed how people viewed entertainment. Because of MTV, this Post-Modern children was defined by the music they listed to (played by MTV) and the things that they bought. MTV was the opposite of modern TV with its irony, sarcasm, irreverence and politically correctness. It is the model of the post-modern culture, having eschewed the older, more conservative one. It has become the corporate avant-garde, with its own economic and politic power, replete with a visual feast to entertain the youth. This breed of young television viewers are now products of the consumerist thrusts of the Post-Modernism. Post-Modernism is not only limited to the economic side of culture. The premise of Post-Modernism lies on the theory of Baudrillard about the Simulacrum and Simulation. According to Baudrillard, the simulacrum is a copy without the original, similar to the matrix (the computer program) in the movie The Matrix. Simulation, on the other hand, is a model of the reality through conceptual models which have no connection to reality. In relation to television, what we see on it is not the real thing, but rather the simulation of it: Tiger Woods is a simulation of a shamed athlete; Nike is not about selling rubber shoes, it is about the lifestyle/image that the brand represents. This is because, as Baudrillard puts it, the boundary between the reality and simulation vanishes, thus, creating the world of hyperreality. Now, the television industry blurs the lines of reality and fiction with these reality TV shows. It blurs the lines of information, entertainment and politics with their news-magazine-tabloid shows. The audiences get the images (simulations), symbols (simulacra) all the time, in their homes, and willingly at that. These simulations and symbols get them to work, play and do everything in between and too much of these symbols make the audience cynical, because these simulations have devoured reality, thus, having more reasons in making more reality TV. This makes people need reality TV, and the question of whether it is real or not is not significant. People feel that they are involved in a reality TV show since they can see themselves in the ordinary people characters. With the internet, they can be interactive, making it seem that they have a power in contributing ideas for the show. With reality TV, the audience gets more power over the show, and who doesn’t want to see their own show? The audience participation for these kinds of show is definitely high, liberating them from the old Modern culture. It provides them with escape and validation at the same time. Escape, because the audience does not want their own respective realities but and validation, because their participation and their input (and their recognition) validates their existence in the real world. Ironic as it may seem, but that’s how it works, because at the end of the day the audience wants to “integrate our sense of self with our desire to be something other than ourselves” (Dorfman). For the producers, reality TV is cheap and easy way to get money as it gets a lot of ratings and is very lucrative. They pay lesser writers when they produce reality TV shows. The reality TV shows get to be endearing to the audiences because the audiences wee themselves in it, and they participate in too, vicariously. Almost all of these reality TV shows perpetuate negative images of the people. They actually form or reinforce stereotypes in society: like the poor, little rich housewife in The Real Housewives series, or the prep school brattiness of rich kids in NYC Prep. These types of shows, usually Big Brother by subtype, but none of them probably comes close to the identity stereotype perpetuated by Jersey Shore: the guidos. Jersey Shore received a lot of negative press because of this. A guido, is a stereotype of Italians in America. They are usually viewed negatively; crass, if you put it. The cast of Jersey Shore take pride on being guidos and guidettes, offending a larger (and classier) number of the Italian-American population. They have taken this as an insult, saying that this was actually a racial slur, taking it as anti-Italian (the Jersey Shore cast are Italian Americans). The Italian American groups claim that the show perpetuated negative stereotypes for their people (promiscuous and out of control) and the South Jersey residents also get offended because they feel that the show “badly reflected the area”, making it seem that their place is “ground zero for out of control behavior”, fearing that it may affect their tourism. The reaction of the Italian-Americans is understandable. They, as a people, have endured ages of racial contempt in America. Historically speaking, the Italians have struggled in their American existence. There was a mass lynching of Italian in New Orleans (1891), Italian-Americans were branded “enemy aliens” during the World War II, and other racial slurs. The self proclaimed guidos and guidettes of Jersey Shore only aggravated the feelings of these Italian-Americans. Although the show is quite obtuse, it does poke fun at the guido stereotype and at their expense. The tragedy of their people seem to be ancient, and true enough, the producers can now make fun of it, indirectly through themselves. There are a lot of Italian stereotypes in Hollywood, most famous of all is The Mafia stereotype. These stereotype provided platform for various pop culture references and also changed the way, in some time or form, the people viewed Italian Americans. But then again, this was during the early 70s, the modern period. Today in the Post-Modern world, the people are more open to other interpretations of the Italian stereotype: the warm, affable and family loving guys that people see in the other reality TV shows with Italians, like Cake Boss from TLC. The thing about being Italian in this show is again, just a symbol (simulacra). He is not making traditional Italian cakes, he is making fancy cakes for the middle-class. Same with the cast of Jersey Shore: their being guido and guidettes stand for something deeper, not just their racial heritage. Their being guidos and guidettes are simulacra because if they are truly and meaningfully attached to their own Italian roots, they would not really call demote themselves by labeling each other with awful racial slurs. This is because stereotyping is easy and interesting to use when one is in a reality TV show. This is because without these sanctioned stereotypes, the show would be boring; the show would be more of reality. This stereotype is only specific to the Italian-Americans, specifically from the Italians-Americans native to New York-New Jersey area. The Italians from other areas of the country do not have the same stereotype, more so are the Italians who came from mainland Europe. The rest of the audiences react positively to this stereotype because people know that this “guido-Italian-American” is not true. They know that it is a farce, only reserved for the cast of the reality show. The audience knows that these stereotypes have no basis in reality. Because in a post-modern world, nothing seems to fit in the box anymore. This means that the old, racist notion of the Italians has actually been broken down and it gave Jersey Shore license to satirize it. The old stereotyping belongs to the archaic Modern times, and these times call for more open minds, even if it sometimes perpetuate negative images. But then again, these “negative” shows do not really affect the audience perceptions, namely because the audiences are now disaffected, thanks to reality TV as well. References: Cherry, Kristin. Reality TV and Interpersonal Relationship Perceptions. University of Missouri, 2011. Web. August, 6 2011. Dorfman, Roderigo. The Future of Reality? Television. Exquisite Corpse Cyber Issue 11, 2002. Web. August 6, 2011. Fahey, John. Reality TV quote. QuotesDaddy.com (n.d). Web. August 7, 2011. Drunk Punch Love. Jersey Shore. MTV Networks. MTV, New York. January 27, 2011. Television. Le Roux, Jenell. A Cut and Paste Identity: An Investigation of Reality TV’s Role in Postmodern Identity Construction with Special Reference to Ordinary People as Celebrities. Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University, 2011. Web. August 6, 2011. Marche, Stephen. How Jersey Shore Transformed America. Esquire Magazine Online, April 14, 2010. Web. August 7, 2011. Morreale, Joanne. Reality TV, Faking It, and the Transformation of Personal Identity. Purdue University, 2005. Web. August 6, 2011. “Reality TV.” Cambridge Dictionary Online. Cambridge Dictionary, 2011. Web. Augsut 7, 2011. “Simulacra and Simulation”. Loyola College Media Lab. Loyola College, 2011. Web. August 7, 2011. Read More