Friday, June 20, 2003

Reality Television

In London this spring I discovered that talk show host Jerry Springer is a major celebrity in England. His show is a big hit there, and one of the West End theatres has produced a popular improvisational play based on the show. I’m afraid that the experience is a kind of cross-cultural voyeurism, the attraction of which is partly the self-flattering understanding that the British themselves could never sink so low. To the British, the Jerry Springer Show is America.

So-called reality t.v., I know, has a vast following in other countries; but there is still something essentially American about the genre, and it begins with tell-all daytime talk shows that have the feel of an arena therapy session in which the patients play to a public audience and the therapist-host enables the sickness. In a fit of idleness one morning, I found myself watching one of these shows, and I suddenly realized I had wandered into the eighth circle of Dante’s hell.

This summer my students and I have been reading Dante’s Inferno, an early fourteenth-century epic poem that recounts the journey of the character Dante down through the nine circles of hell. The Roman poet Virgil is Dante’s guide throughout this sadistic fantasia which features murderers boiling in blood, suicides imprisoned within barren trees (they can speak only when a branch is broken off, and then their voices bubble up through the bloody sap), and thieves who are transformed into lizards. Dante’s was an age when sins came in distinct varieties and could be weighed, classified, and catalogued.

In the passage I was reminded of, Sinon the liar quarrels with Master Adam the counterfeiter of money. Virgil sees that Dante has been staring at the two sinners, listening to their senseless quarrel, like a man sitting in front of a television with his mouth gaping. Virgil rebukes him, saying that merely “to want to hear such bickering is base.” If Dante were writing today, he would surely say that television, and celebrity video culture in general, degrades us.

In the vast anonymity of a television or movie audience, we feed like vampires upon the lives and adventures of those lucky few who animate our screen. We live vicariously; it is as though our own lives had already ended. Light from the shifting images plays across our faces in the dark, ghosting us, making us look and feel insubstantial. The celebrities who fill our vision seem very much alive, always ready with a snide comeback, a laugh, a sob or a tantrum. They are nothing if not dramatic. Even when they are bad, even when they are felons and murderers, if they are blessed with the glow of popularity, of notoriety, they float above all censure like the Greek gods. We live in an age of video celebrity, where the only real sin is being unknown.

Reality t.v. is a halfway house between anonymity and true celebrity. The contestants are granted demigod status, immortality—for a brief time. In the Inferno Dante, the viewer, is the one who belongs to reality; he is a substantial being walking among insubstantial shades, human souls devoid of being because God has abandoned them. But the effect of celebrity culture is to empty out the lives of the viewers. The media world is presented as the only world that counts, and the empty images comprise the only reality. As novelist Don DeLillo has said, television has become the ultimate arbiter of reality. No one—nothing—is real until it appears on television. This effect accounts for the otherwise mysterious appeal reality t.v. has for its sacrificial contestants.

But try this experiment. Turn on your television and practice looking on everyone you see there as a dead sinner lost in Dante’s hell. Trapped in their eternal punishment, the most they can hope for is to relive their fates in reruns. You on the other hand, you are maybe not glamorous but are really alive and have choices, and you can turn off the television, and you can walk out of your house into the miraculous sunshine of a Michiana summer morning.

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on June 20, 2003
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