Visceral bungee © 2004 UrbisMedia
World War I was supposed to be “the war to end all wars”. Then there was World War II. Both conflicts were responsible for thousands of books, movies and television programs about them and war in general. But the reality of war was really restricted to those who had been through combat. “War is hell,:” we are often told, but who wants to go to hell to find out, when you could go to a movie. War movies used to be relatively un-real , but when Steven Speilberg’s Saving Private Ryan came along it seemed likely to be the war film that finally showsus about war like it really is: War is hell.
But maybe we’ve had too much experience with using our willing suspension of disbelief, to be able to really believe it. Can the director who made space aliens so realistically cuddly that kids want them as house pets make war so cinematically realistic that we will stop all this mutually-assured destruction? One might be willing to rent or buy Saving Private Ryan to get some clues to those rhetorical questions, but there’s a cheaper way to do it: just turn on your TV. It’s not just war that’s hell; reality is hell.
“The evolution of hyenas has made them the most efficient killers of the African savanna: they hunt in packs.” So the narrator intones in that matter-of-fact style of animal documentaries. The video shows the pack taking turns hounding, chasing, finally exhausting the bounding gazelle. In the end they converge on it, tearing the life and the organs out of the quivering carcass. Their muzzles are red with blood.
It’s nature in the maw a couple of channels over as well: “Shark Week” they call it. Tonight the voice-over almost gleefully tells us what magnificent “killing machines” (a hackneyed metaphor of shark documentaries) these Great Whites are. There’s plenty of blood and guts in the water, and a teaser for the next show gives us a glimpse of the wounds of some divers who have survived being Great White Lunch; photos of the torsos and limbs of shark bite victims.
A few clicks on the remote and a woman forensic pathologist on a gritty British cop import is removing a pair of lungs from a cadaver. She holds them up in full view, dripping blood and ooze, and talks about them as insouciantly as if she were doing a cooking show. (“Now we’ll just sauté these for a few minutes in white wine and garlic and . . . “)
Mind you, this is all programming during the dinner hour and now nothing on my TV tray is looking like what it’s supposed to be. So I click on, desperate to escape more gore and its afterimage. But I stumbled on another “educational” cable channel just as a surgeon is opening up a thorax with a sweeping scalpel cut. No imitation lungs here; this is real viscera in a real surgical procedure. At least I think it is . Something catches in my throat.
I zipped past the news channels because I remember that last night the local broadcast dwelled ghoulishly on some bodies being removed from a freeway head-on. The national news was featuring Somalian machete carnage this week. I clicked onward but not before I catch the teaser for one of those “real stories of emergency room doctors” shows. Gurneys are pushed down corridors like shopping carts on that shopping contest show; chests are defibrillated; needles are shoved into veins; there’s shouting, blood and adrenaline. I felt like dumping my dinner and dialing 911.
I finally settled on a program about “movie magic”; if the blood and viscera looked real at least I knew they were fake. Virtual reality is easier to take than the visceral kind. But neither is especially helpful in attempting to discern whether all this violent imagery is sensitizing us viewers to how “hellish” life can be, or de sensitizin g us, or just confusing the “hell” out of us.
Years ago I remember reading in a film book that the audience watching the 1903 silent feature,The Great Train Robbery , were horrified when they saw a man shot in one scene. Despite the clumsy, exaggerated fall of the man, many in audience thought he had really been shot. It might be argued that in the intervening years audiences have developed a better “willing suspension of disbelief” that allows them to view the most realistic portrayals of mayhem and almost reflexively encode it as just good “special effects”. But one is left to wonder whether the psychological effects of such viewing are merely restricted to the evolution of an efficient mental switch between identifying what’s real, and what just looks real.
Judging by the amount of reality cop, hospital, nature and news shows on television, audiences are gorging themselves on visceral reality. Even sports programming has found a niche: a feature on an ‘Extreme Games” show showed young skateboarders bashing into walls, falling off motorcycles at high speed, and what happened to one guy who bungee-jumped with a cord that was too long. Another show has videos of real people being attacked by real dangerous animals. Yet another show sweeps the bottom of the gene pool for people who will overcome their “fear factor” for money and dangle precariously from construction cranes while sending emails from their Blackberries and eat bugs and drink raw sewage. That’s entertainment these days. (“I’m ready for me close up of castrating myself, Mr. DeMille.”)
The notion that we must be shown everything in as graphic detail as possible to appreciate the “reality” it represents is as fallacious for entertainment as it is when we make toys that are completely programmed, or over-design suburbs, shopping malls, and theme parks with no room for any form of genuine participation or interaction. The best places, programs and movies are those that draw us and our imaginations (not just the designers’ and directors’ imaginations) into them. Those who have seen Saving Private Ryan should go out and rent Johnny Got His Gun (no, it’s not about some junior high kid from some small town in Alabama who thinks it would be fun to use his classmates for target practice) to see how hellish war can be when ourimagination is engaged by a motion picture.
The purpose of our pursuit of reality is the pursuit of truth . But when that pursuit simply becomes one more version of entertainment commodity then that purpose is corrupted, the medium debased, and “truth” is measured in cheap thrills, or whether we buy some product. The antiwar message can become just another box office promotional gizmo, the “educational” nature program cheap titillation.
Commercials for many of these programs offer videos for purchase featuring footage of plane crashes, auto racing pile-ups, and the devastation of various natural disasters. Presumably these are for viewers who graduate from those humorous “home video” programs that consist of kids falling of bikes and skating into poles and walls, and for some curious reason, all manner of flying objects hitting fathers in their testicles. How real is all of this anyway? If these are just the incidents that happen to have been caught on home videos then we can only assume that a large percentage of the children in the country are brain-damaged and have emasculated fathers. Where’s Freud when we really need him.
The real reality is that much of this video verité is faked. Shows about UFO abductions are made with “dramatic recreations” blended with some real footage, so that the viewer is not quite sure where the real reality and the fake reality leave off or begin. Real “live” cop shows recreate car chases and drug busts with a deliberate, jerky camera “news footage” look of the six o’clock news further blur the line.
Is it likely that audiences for these programs and those of World Federation Wrestling or the afternoon dysfunctional family feud shows are going the get the “message” of Saving Private Ryan? It would seem that they are likely to think that it has great special effects, but not lose their appetite for their popcorn, nachos and Big Gulps.
And to return to nature shows, last week I saw one that showed lions copulating. This documentary lingered on the scene with all the prurient patience of a porno flick. Stay tuned: the feeding instinct isn’t the only audience appetite those reality show producers and programmers are eager to satisfy.
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©2004, James A. Clapp (UrbisMedia Ltd. Pub. 11.18.2004)