Sam Brenton and Reuben Cohen, Shooting People: Adventures in Reality TV, Verso, London, 2003
The authors only sketch the outlines of this analytical frame, before quickly eschewing it to move onto other, less interesting matters, namely detailed accounts of how various reality TV shows -- principally Survivor and Big Brother -- began life. More interesting is Brenton and Cohen's discussion of the role or, more accurately, the complicity of the psychological fraternity in reality TV. Psychologists are present in various ways in reality TV, from screening prospective participants, providing 'professional' interpretations of the contestant's behaviour in 'special editions' and debriefing the contestants when they are released from the micro-worlds the shows create. The pay-off is a glut of research material, much of which finds its way into professional conferences and papers, and a higher, if not an entirely accurate, public profile for their profession.
In discussing the role of psychologists, Brenton and Cohen note the parallels between reality TV and some of the more infamous psychological studies. Particular mention is made of the Stanford County Prison experiment in which a group of psychologically well-adjusted middle class men were subjected to a simulated prison environment. The experiment was halted when the 'guards' and 'inmates' (not to mention the psychologist leading the experiment, Philip Zimbardo, who took on the role of the prison warden) began to internalise their respective identities, taking delight in sadistic violence and arbitrary power or cowering in the face of authority. As Cohen and Brenton argue, the arbitrary use of power and food and sleep deprivation, which are standard in both this experiments and reality TV are not far removed from torture techniques.
Such parallels raise the issue of the contestants' consent. Aside from the issue of withholding information (few if any contestants are privy to the details of what they are in for), consent also assumes that at some level the subject has a reasonably coherent sense of themselves, such that they are able to assume responsibility for giving consent. This may be true at the outset, but is not the disruption of this subjectivity, stripping it back to its most basic level and reconstructing it in ways more suited to the requirements of TV production the very essence of reality TV?
The form of subjectivity that reality TV needs and actively seeks to nurture was well captured in J.G. Ballard's 1975 novel High Rise, in which the social structure within a high rise apartment block -- the paradigmatic expression of modernity and progress -- disintegrates into an orgy of violence. The book's narrator observes the new kind of subject that was coming into being as the social strictures of the self-contained world of the high-rise begin to unravel.
A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high-rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down, and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake.
Although Brenton and Cohen do not cite Ballard, this is perhaps the most accurate description of the ideal reality TV participant. Such a 'social type' is arguably symptomatic of postmodernity more generally, but it is also the kind of subject that the otherwise meaningless challenges and the construction of a self-contained micro-world, like Ballard's high-rise apartment building, is intended to produce. The power of reality TV to reconstruct subjectivity becomes disturbingly evident when things go awry, as when a contestant on the US version of Big Brother pulled a knife on a fellow contestant, or when a contestant committed suicide weeks after appearing on the Swedish Expedition Robinson. Without this disorientation of subjective experience you don't have a reality TV show. You have, instead, a bunch of people locked in a house or marooned on an island -- without the essential dynamic that produces the drama. The disruption of the contestants' subjectivity, along with their efforts to resist it by re-asserting norms of social life developed outside of the micro-world, is therefore not simply a potential byproduct of reality TV; it is absolutely integral to it. The undermining of subjectivity in this way arguably, undermines the conditions within which consent -- informed or otherwise -- might be given or witheld.
To its credit, the tone of this uneven and sometimes disjointed book is firmly critical with the final sections in particular imagining the potential impact of the format on mainstream politics: with Fox's American Candidate applying the format to the selection of a presidential candidate (which the authors see as an attack on the democratic process) and Republican-friendly movie producer Jerry Bruckheimer's efforts to make a reality TV show featuring US military personnel. The attractions of the latter show (its working title is Profiles from the Front Line) to the Pentagon are obvious enough; as a Pentagon official was reported to have told British current affairs show Newsnight: 'The advantage of working with entertainment producers is that these guys are less likely to go to Baghdad and get the flipside'.
If it gets the go ahead, at least the producers have a ready-made pitch: it was, after all, the armed forces who pioneered the practice of 'going commando' long before Survivor's unfortunate Nicole gave us the 'no underwear' angle.
