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Faking It:
a Guide to the American Simulacrum
American Reality shows – they’re glossy, manipulative, and highly addictive. And they often open with the words: ‘Some scenes have been recreated for entertainment purposes’. So where exactly is the ‘reality’? Emma Louise Howard gets to grips with the genre, and finds the ideas of theorist Jean Baudrillard useful in unpicking it
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’, 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 where that truth fades into oblivion, or fails to exist at all. Cynical as this may seem, think of the experiences of actors portraying soap opera villains who have been publicly chastised by viewers. To this audience, the actor’s persona is irrelevant; 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 constructed 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.
From The Osbournes to
The Simple Life 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
english and media centre | December 2009 | MediaMagazine 53
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