Media Whip

Article 1 – Faking It: An American Guide to the Simulacrum

October 13, 2009 at 9:16 pm (Uncategorized)

Exactly how real are the US’s popular, glossy reality shows like Laguna Beach: The Real OC, The Hills and Real Housewives Of…?

[The producers ] totally set up the BBQ scene for Brody and I to meet each other… they said, ‘The audience would get a kick out of seeing the ex talk to the new guy’… It was some of the best acting I’ve ever done.
Gavin Beasley on his stint as Lauren Conrad’s date in ‘The Hills’ (speaking to Reality TV World’s Christopher Rocchio, 2007)

French philosopher Jean Baudrillard argues in his book Simulacra and Simulation that, ‘The simulacrum is never that which conceals the truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none.’ He is essentially suggesting that in contemporary society our system of representations, symbols and images has become so vital, it supersedes the truth it claims to signify to the extent of that truth fading into oblivion, or failing to exist at all. Cynical as this may seem, think of the incidents often recounted by soap opera actors portraying villains, where viewers will approach and chastise them in public for their character’s behaviour. To this audience, the actor doesn’t exist; it is the character they engage with. Baudrillard’s theory is particularly appropriate to the study of reality television and to the exploration of the idea that on TV, we rarely see a ‘true’ reality. Situations are manipulated, events are dramatised and incidents are staged and enhanced ‘for entertainment purposes’. Paradoxically, ‘reality’ is fashioned within a genre that claims to give the audience the ‘truth’ as it actually happened. In other words, they create a ‘truth’ that never has, or arguably never would have existed in reality.

While it has existed in various forms since entertainment television’s conception, it was at the turn of the millennium with a spate of ‘fly-on-the-wall documentaries’ and the first UK version of Big Brother that the term ‘reality television’ became part of our everyday vocabulary. With many British reality shows translating successfully Stateside, the US has since generated its own breed of ‘reality’ entertainment shows that prompt controversial questions – are they documenting real events, or are the events staged? The idea of feigning occurrences to enhance a ‘reality’ show certainly reflects Baudrillard’s proposal that the simulacrum creates a more interesting, ‘valuable truth’ when reality will no longer suffice.

In 2002, MTV created The Osbournes, which claimed to follow the everyday lives of metal singer Ozzy, his wife Sharon and their two younger children. The show adopted a ‘warts and all’ approach to its depiction of the family, however siblings Kelly and Jack protested on a MADtv episode that the editing process made it appear as if they used profanities more than they actually did. Seemingly tied into this altered perception, misleading episodes later appeared incorporating pranks at the audience’s expense, arguably highlighting the family’s complaints that the edited portrayal is sometimes inaccurate and emphasising how easily viewers can be duped into thinking a situation is real.

In 2003 MTV produced another celebrity ‘reality’ programme – Newlyweds: Nick and Jessica, based around the married lives of ‘wholesome’ singers Nick Lachey and Jessica Simpson, implementing a similar ‘truth-telling’ approach whilst editing footage to take it out of context (recontextualise). For example, Simpson’s infamous confusion at the tuna brand name ‘Chicken of the Sea’ which endeared her to the public led to her conscious characterisation as a stereotypical ‘dumb blonde’, with editors taking pains to incorporate similar incidents of puzzlement and ensure she had a ‘dumb moment’ at least once an episode. Along with careful editing – re-using and lengthening shots, creating montages, adding incidental music – less satisfactory reality is manipulated and a new ‘truth’ is manufactured.

The popularity of these celebrity-based shows with their exploitation of participants for comic effect eventually spawned The Simple Life, a merging of the sitcom format with that of reality entertainment, initially placing arguably ‘lazy’ socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie on a farm to live and work. It followed a ‘documentary’ format with an informative voiceover; however, the narrator adopted a mock-Southern accent and regularly appeared to ridicule the girls for their ineptitude. Whereas The Osbournes and Newlyweds filmed its participants’ supposed everyday lives, here, the show put its celebrity subjects in situations extremely unnatural to them and recorded how they coped… or didn’t. ‘Some scenes have been created for entertainment purposes’, a disclaimer appearing briefly at the opening credits of many US reality shows including The Simple Life, is arguably a kind of catch-all phrase that ‘covers the backs’ of the programme creators for manipulating situations, similar to the panellists on shows like Have I Got News for You prefixing a potentially libellous statement with the word ‘allegedly’. It blurs the boundaries between reality and fiction further still as it does not specify which scenes are ‘artificial’. One could argue that any scene involving ‘unnatural’ situations has been ‘created for entertainment purposes’ per-se. However, ‘created’ scenes could mean any additional pre-filming processes, such as staging or scripting.

This boundary-blurring crops up frequently when reading any media text. If a television programme, film or advertisement claims to represent ‘reality’ in any form, a mediation process has taken place between what transpired and what one sees on the screen, whether this is simple cutting room recontextualisation or the falsification many US ‘reality’ shows have been accused of. These boundaries become even more indistinct when the reality show itself has been inspired by fictitious TV drama.

Laguna Beach: The Real OC and The Real Housewives… are obvious examples. Observing the popularity of teen drama The OC and the Desperate Housewives saga, producers have obviously engaged with the fact that the lifestyles portrayed are of interest to audiences, hence their production of ‘reality’ versions. The New Jersey edition of Real Housewives on Channel 4 recently focuses on the ostentatious wealth of the five women in question, and despite the documentary ‘look’ and ‘feel’ of the programme, it is set up to be viewed like a drama or soap opera. We are given teasers of what is coming up, and the opening credits present the show’s subjects as characters, posing in front of a gold background with their respective families in tow, their monikers glittering.

While it supposedly depicts real events, The Real Housewives of New Jersey embraces the conventions of a TV drama with its careful editing to incorporate mystery and tension. It introduces us to four closely linked ‘characters’, and with perfect timing, presents a fifth, the ‘outsider’ Danielle. Unlike the others she is a single divorcee with a somewhat ‘colourful’ past. She has already befriended one of the group, and in a camera interview the friend, Jacqueline, ‘hopes the others will accept Danielle’, Cue dramatic non-diegetic music that builds to a crescendo as the camera zooms in on a ‘concerned’ Jacqueline. What could have been a simple declaration of genuine concern is dramatised via the editing process as an ominous foretelling. Clearly, the others will not accept Danielle, and just in case the less than subtle media language didn’t make this point clearly enough , we have already been exposed to teasers in which one ‘wife’ declares, ‘And then she came along,’ and another tips a table in Danielle’s direction.

Merging reality television with drama even further is MTV’s The Hills, a Laguna Beach spin-off ‘starring’ Lauren Conrad from the original series (the term ‘starring’ complicates the reality concept further). Conrad has left Laguna Beach to pursue a fashion career, studying at design school and interning at Teen Vogue. However, while a voiceover is provided, this is no documentary. Conrad’s narration takes the form of a confessional diary and the style in which is it shot, coupled with numerous events taking place within a very short space of time, make the show look more like its fictional predecessor The OC than a programme recording real events. Non-diegetic music is taken to the extreme with fashionable recording artists providing a ‘soundtrack’ effect (appropriate for an MTV-produced programme), and camera interviews are replaced with intimate conversations with the ‘characters’ whose names are provided at the bottom of the screen as they appear, evocative of MTV’s The Real World (one of the original reality shows that prompted questions as to just how ‘real’ that world was).

Should we feel the need to suspend our disbelief whilst watching something that purports to be a reality show? In the first episode, no sooner has Conrad arrived at her new apartment and met housemate Heidi Montag, she receives a call from Teen Vogue asking if she can attend an interview in a mere twenty minutes. Of course this is not impossible, perhaps unlikely, but it adds a sense of drama and tension to the scenario. The sight of Conrad frantically ironing her skirt with hair straighteners while Montag excitedly squeals may be a lot more entertaining than Montag simply giving Conrad a tour of the apartment as they’d initially ‘envisaged’, but is it reality? Controversy dogs The Hills at every turn. According to a fellow diner supposedly present at Conrad’s ‘date’ with Gavin Beasley, ‘It was clear that this… is not a reality show. They took five takes of Lauren ordering dinner.’ Additionally, recontextualisation via editing also rears its head, with Beasley stating that, ‘I ordered that salmon roll for myself and Lauren said she would like to try a piece, so of course MTV edited the scene to make it look like I’m force-feeding her the salmon that she hates…’ Even the show’s producers, creators and spokespeople have confirmed that some scenes are filmed simply to add ‘continuity’ to the programme.

David Rupel helped edit two seasons of The Real World. In his defence of the editing processes reality television undergoes, he states, ‘One of the most common complaints I heard was that people thought we edited things too much and that we weren’t telling the real story… Trust me. As someone who has literally watched tens of thousands of hours of raw footage, nobody is interesting all of the time… if you watch every second of someone’s life, the majority of it is quite boring.’ Baudrillard declared that we value a ‘simulated real’ over what is real. The contrived ‘version’ of reality provided by the shows examined here is evidently considered more compelling than the more authentic ‘boring footage’ Rupel describes. The skewed perception of reality that leads a soap fan to reprimand an actor for their character’s actions, leads us to the recognition that audiences are quite content to value soaps as real. Therefore, why not value reality as soap?