It suddenly sunk in in a way that it hadn’t until then that I was going along and being an imperialist. . . . I am reenacting a whole system that I don’t believe in and that I disapprove of, and yet it’s the roots of our own nation.
—Carolyn Heinz, Participant in Colonial House
AT THE END of his introduction to a special issue of the journal History and Theory titled “Unconventional History,” Brian Fay asks, “Don’t unconventional practices of historical representation, analysis and assessment—unconventional relative to those present in academe—provide an opportunity to see the weaknesses (as well as the strengths!) of conventional historiography?”1 Many of the weaknesses that unconventional forms make visible result from conventional history’s privileging of a cold, clinical, detached gaze on the past, its categorical refusal to breathe life into the situations, events, and individuals depicted, its rejection of any modes of engagement that lie outside the cerebral, and its inability to make the past seem relevant, important, or useful to people in the present.
One would be hard-pressed to imagine a form of historical representation more unconventional than the genre “reality history TV.” In the shows I consider in this chapter—Frontier House (PBS, 2002), Colonial House (PBS, 2004), and Texas Ranch House (PBS, 2006)—individuals from the present are cast into the past: they are made to abandon all aspects of their contemporary lives, from clothing and personal effects to values and dispositions, and are then placed in a setting that is meant to simulate life in a particular historical place at a specific historical moment. Participants are made to confront the material, ideological, political, and economic conditions that would have shaped existence at a given historical moment. Because this “unconventional historical practice” breaks virtually every rule of academic history, it is easy to dismiss the genre as mere entertainment, as many historians have done. Indeed, one would be remiss not to take account of the way in which the generic conventions of reality TV have shaped these products, making their entertainment value part of the equation. Nevertheless, these shows’ unconventional form raises some significant epistemological questions about how historical knowledge is both produced and acquired. In other words, following Brian Fay’s lead, I ask what a profoundly unconventional practice of historical representation—perhaps more accurately called a historical experiment—can make visible both in terms of a specific historical understanding of the period depicted and in terms of the larger project of history itself. What are the differences between the kinds of knowledge produced by traditional written academic history and the kinds produced by the more experiential history experiments of reality history TV that rely on an embodied form of reenactment? In her insightful and important book on historical reenactments, Rebecca Schneider has sought to articulate the complex temporality of reenactment; furthermore, her research reveals that at least some reenactors, contrary to their “common depiction,” are well aware of the “problems of ambivalence, simultaneous temporal registers, anachronism, and the everywhere of error” and that “many of them find reenactment to be if not the thing itself (the past), [then] somehow also not not the thing (the past), as it passes across their bodies in again-time.”2
It is important at the outset to distinguish these reality history TV shows from more common forms of historical reenactment. Although the participants on these shows want the immersive, living-in-the-past experience that all reenactors strive for, the parameters of the show prevent or at the very least complicate such immersion. The continual presence of video cameras and cameramen as well as the requirement that participants reflect on their experience by making video diaries and be interviewed in the course of their experience have the effect of breaking the illusion or frame. And as I later describe in detail, the ways in which participants are made to confront race and homophobia also work to alienate them from the past, to confront the differences between past and present, thereby creating the possibility that they will gain some kind of historical consciousness. Furthermore, although some historical reenactments do attract audiences, the experience is primarily for the reenactors. That is not the case for reality history TV, which as its name suggests, is intended for a large television audience.
On these shows, there is a qualitative difference between the participants’ experience and the viewers’ experience. Just as Schneider points out that some reenactors are able to acquire a critical self-awareness, my analysis of reality history TV suggests that some of the participants on these programs do acquire substantive historical knowledge. Nevertheless, for many the experience is so seductive that a critical distance is difficult for them to maintain. By contrast, the viewers stand to learn the most. Viewers of reality history TV are structurally positioned to remain continually aware of the mediation and cognizant of the reenactment as reenactment rather than actual experience of the past. The viewers’ distance, literal and critical, from the experience makes them more likely to maintain the kind of awareness or self-consciousness that, as Collingwood points out, is essential to historical thinking. Viewers gain an intimate look at the participants’ deprivations, their intellectual and physical crises, and their often unsuccessful attempts to grapple with them, but they also see the participants’ unwillingness to fully abandon the mindset of the present. As I have described in the previous chapters, the viewers’ affective engagement is not reducible to identification. In fact, some of the historical insights come from the viewers’ critique of or alienation from the participants’ experience. Because these shows represent, among other things, formal innovations—by which I mean experiments with the form that historical representation can take—I begin the chapter by considering briefly the role that form plays in structuring knowledge and the potential value of formal innovations in producing new ideas or enabling otherwise unthinkable thoughts. I then consider the reality format and the specificities of this genre by considering its formal logics, which I investigate more thoroughly in an analysis of the three shows themselves.
As I described in the introduction, formal innovations—which can refer both to unconventional genres for representing the past as well as to unexpected stylistic decisions and modes of addressing the viewer—have the potential to reframe the past and in the process produce new insights about it. Artistic practices, which of course would include work in the filmic, televisual, and digital realms, are important to Jacques Rancière in that they represent “ways of doing and making” that have the potential to intervene in and challenge or reconfigure the prevailing “distribution of the sensible.” In the case of such a disruption, or “heterology,” “the meaningful fabric of the sensible is disturbed: a spectacle does not fit within the sensible framework defined by a network of meanings, an expression does not find its place in the system of the visible coordinates where it appears.”3 Rancière calls attention to the profound relationship between form and meaning as well as to the ways in which formal changes and innovations make seeable, sayable, and thinkable—not to mention experienceable—ideas and formulations that otherwise remain inconceivable, literally outside the grasp of thought. Such innovations address the viewer sensuously and in so doing change the way the world looks and can be perceived. Jill Bennett makes precisely this point when describing specific instances of art about trauma; the art pieces she describes are “not representations of the body in pain, which serve to induce shock or secondary trauma, but a sense of what it is to see from a series of compromised positions: from the body of a mourner, from the body of one who shares a space with the mourner, from the gap between these two. And it is perhaps, above all, the refusal to reconcile these differential placements that moves us away from a sympathetic identification or mimicry toward a critical thinking of loss in this context; toward a way of seeing that changes the terms of our engagement.”4 The point here is that formal innovations have implications for knowledge production more broadly as new forms make possible new vantage points and insights.
Walter Benjamin’s writing on photography serves as another instance of aesthetic innovation’s capacity to intervene in the “distribution of the sensible”—to define, in Rancière’s words, “what is visible or not in a common space, endowed with a common language.”5 Benjamin believed that new visual technologies—as well as their attendant practices and conventions—produced new kinds of perception, new ways of seeing. Human perception, he suggests, is not static or natural but rather conditioned by history and thus changeable over time: “Just as the entire mode of existence of human collectives changes over long historical periods, so too does their mode of perception. The way in which human perception is organized—the medium in which it is occurs—is conditioned not only by nature, but by history.”6 Perception is quite literally altered by new technologies for looking, which produce new kinds of looking; things heretofore invisible come into view. In this chapter, I explore the particular generic conventions of reality history TV in ways that are inflected by Walter Benjamin’s claims about the relationship between form and perception.
Iain McCalman and Paul Pickering point out in their introduction to the volume Historical Reenactment: From Realism to the Affective Turn that throughout history each new realist technology has been instrumentalized in the service of historical reenactment: each is imagined to enable greater verisimilitude. Now with computer-generated imagery, McCalman and Pickering suggest, it has become increasingly “possible to depict people and events of the past with seemingly literal and living detail . . . an illusion so real as to be indistinguishable from archival footage.” Although McCalman and Pickering worry about the potential for the simulation to be more real than the past itself, they insist on the need to take seriously individuals’ desire in the present “to experience history somatically and emotionally—to know what it felt like.” They articulate the notion of “reflexive reenactment,” which acknowledges the unpredictability inherent in reenactment, thus underscoring that it is never simply a simulacrum of the past. This notion instead emphasizes a “creative exchange with the past.”7 Theirs is another way of articulating or theorizing the self-conscious component that Collingwood takes to be essential in historical thinking. For Collingwood, historical thinking is predicated on one’s consciousness of one’s engagement with history; one must be aware that one is thinking about the past.
Coming at reenactment from another angle, Graeme Turner has coined the expression “demotic turn” to refer to the increasing visibility of “ordinary” people in the media; his work explores how ordinary people “turn[] themselves into media content through celebrity culture, reality TV, DIY websites, etc.” Although he is in some ways critical of the politics of participation, his bigger project is to “examine closely what is going on in these new media developments, and what kinds of potentials they actually offer to the ordinary people involved.” Reality TV, he suggests, reflects a “major shift in how television content has been produced, traded, and consumed over the last decade or so.” Yet opinion on its cultural function is divided between those who see it as a tasteless, cynical exploitation of people’s interest in becoming famous as well as their fascination with other people’s humiliation and those who see it as an empowering development that has opened up the media to new participants in ways that mirror the democratization so often attributed to the digital revolution and Web 2.0. Turner is skeptical of the claims for democratization, but he does believe that there is a potentially important pedagogical dimension to the format in that the shows function like an extension of everyday life and thus invite the audience to participate in an ethical critique. The viewer is compelled to assess the choices made by the participants. Furthermore, according to Turner, the way that the experiences embed themselves in everyday life for both viewer and participant makes them very different from genres such as drama that are framed as outside of one’s everyday life.8
The runaway popularity of “reality television” in the 1990s, on the one hand, and the continued popular interest in the historical past, on the other, spawned the creation of this most unexpected genre: reality history TV. The format was largely the brain child of Alex Graham, founder of Wall to Wall Video, a UK company that has been at the forefront of unconventional historical programming (including not only the House series that I discuss here, but also the wildly successful Who Do You Think You Are?). Wall to Wall’s first “living historical experiment” was The 1940s House (1999), which enjoyed critical acclaim and a wide viewership. It was followed by The 1900 House (1999–2000), Edwardian Country House (2002), Frontier House (2002), Colonial House (2004), and Texas Ranch House (2006)—the last three of which I consider in detail in this chapter. These miniseries aim to illuminate a particular historical era or epoch in a specific historical setting by borrowing the conventions and devices associated with reality TV in the tradition of MTV’s The Real World (1992–), such as thrusting participants into a shared living experience and filming in what we might describe as a warts-and-all documentary format. But unlike the standard reality TV fare, the reality history TV series insists on the importance of a rigorously researched historical frame—a setting and overall material environment—created by academic and public historians. In these shows, individuals are meant to travel back in time. The idea is that they will live, albeit briefly, under conditions (material, ideological, political) identical to those of their historical predecessors. The promotional material for these shows likens the experience to a time machine; at the beginning of each episode of Texas Ranch House, for example, we are told: “This is the true story of fifteen brave men and women who travel back in time, daring to live as the early cowboys and ranchers did over 130 years ago.”9
As the product of strange bedfellows, these shows really do embrace contradictory impulses. The programs borrow some conventions from the contemporary documentary, including unscripted speech, authoritative voice-over, and intimate and at times embarrassing footage. Yet these reality history TV shows have a predictable narrative arc: several families and a handful of unmarried people are taught about the historical period they will enter and are trained by historians and practitioners in the skills they will need to survive; they are given a mission (for example, store enough food to last through a Montana winter, round up cattle for the cattle drive to make enough money to pay your debts, and so on); they attempt to carry out the mission and are ultimately assessed by a panel of experts on the extent to which they were successful in their endeavors. This kind of narrative is of course different from the fully scripted narrative of a film or a historically conscious drama series. The documentary film style asserts that what we see is in some way “real life,” actual experience—as opposed to acting. The format combines authoritative voice-overs, which supply historical details and context, with both direct camera address by participants and a cinéma vérité–like observation of their experiences. There are no scripts, and much of the filming occurs in real time. Although there is inherent drama in inserting individuals from the present into physically and emotionally demanding historical circumstances, the drama is amplified by the editing process, in which thousands of hours of footage are winnowed down to highlight particular events, traumas, fights, obstacles, and pleasures. Because these shows are clearly meant to entertain, even if their primary mission is to educate, many of the events that occur are played up for their dramatic (even melodramatic) effects in ways that threaten to undercut any productive work they do. Nevertheless, there is a commitment to the idea that the participants learn by doing, and the audience learns both by watching their contemporaries struggle and by analyzing the nature of those struggles.
It is hardly surprising that these shows’ very premise has been criticized: it is of course impossible to fully abandon one’s contemporary mindset. Some critics focus on the epistemological problems of collapsing time, of losing the sense of distance between past and present or the sense of the past as a “foreign country,” which is crucial to the historian’s conception of historical inquiry. Vanessa Agnew, for example, worries about the presentism such experiences invite, the fact that “testimony about daily life and social interaction in the present is often equated with, and becomes evidentiary for, a generalized notion of historical experience.”10 Her concern that participants will misread the past by projecting their own contemporary responses backward is not unfounded. This concern is connected to the one I mentioned earlier: that experiential sites and events—such as historical reenactments—foster an easy identification with the past, creating the illusion that one can know in some concrete way what it was like back then. And yet as the popularity of these reenactment-based reality history TV shows suggest, people are drawn to the prospect of being brought close to or engaging the past somatically. As I have suggested in the previous chapters, the real potential for the production of knowledge about the past in these nontraditional formats occurs in those instances when a delicate balance is maintained between drawing individuals into specific scenarios/crises/issues of the past in an affective, palpable way and yet also relentlessly reminding them of their distance and difference from the past—which is also often achieved affectively.11 I articulated the importance of this balance in my work on prosthetic memory. There, I use as an example the experience of visiting the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Visitors to the museum take on Holocaust-related memories, which makes them feel more connected to the events yet does not lead them to think even for a moment that they themselves had the experience of living through the Holocaust.12 In the case of reality history TV, what is captured on film and offered to viewers is the participants’ experiences living in an artificially constructed version of the past. Although the participants may at moments feel that they are actually living the past, viewers never do. Viewers are offered intimate access to the struggles the participants face, but for them the artificiality of the experience is always front and center. The artificiality prevents them from being immersed in the reconstruction and thus predisposes them to the kind of reflexivity necessary to historical thinking.
What needs to be explored, then, is the particular ways in which this engaged, affective experiential relationship with certain aspects of the past, as contextualized and framed by the parameters set by archaeologists and public historians, produces knowledge that is largely inaccessible through traditional history monographs. Can the shows produce a deeper understanding of the complexity of the past, or do they simply turn the past into a charade? Does these shows’ medium—their generic form in particular—create the conditions whereby one is forced to engage critically with the past in all its complexity and contradiction? Does the fact that the participants, try as they might, can never fully lose their perspective from the present force them to grapple with the contradictions (such as being dependent for one’s survival on other frontierspeople or being prejudiced against some of them on racial grounds) that they must live daily in practical and material ways—contradictions that might be easily reconciled intellectually? In other words, rather than assuming naively that participants can actually lose themselves in the mindset of someone from the remote past, we must consider what those ideological confrontations look like on the ground. These shows are not without their flaws, but I hope to show that there is more to them than meets the eye. As I suggested in the introduction, Gilles Deleuze argues that the familiar, that which is immediately recognizable, impedes critical thinking by producing complacency. Changing the forms through which we engage the past might thus be a crucial step toward thinking critically about and thus gaining new understandings of the past. To make this case requires us to abandon the idea that these shows “dumb down” history or, equally condescendingly, “meet people where they are.”
Despite the shortcomings of reality history TV, the experience structured by this kind of reenactment does produce some otherwise difficult to obtain insights about a very different world. Historian Alexander Cook, who participated in the 2001 BBC series The Ship, in which a “crew of fifty ‘experts’ and volunteers [including historians Vanessa Agnew and Ian McCalman] sailed a replica of Captain James Cook’s ship Endeavour from Australia to Indonesia along the path it sailed in 1770,” has reflected at length on this experience. As a reality history TV participant himself, he argues that, “despite their obvious inauthenticity as a replication of historical experience, these reenactments at least invite participants and audiences to take seriously the challenge of considering historical actors as human beings rather than as incidental by-products of material conditions, the bearers of some abstract historical spirit, or as passive vehicles for the self-articulation of discourse. At the same time, and to some extent conversely, they also force participants and audiences to consider the material, environmental, and cultural constraints under which all lives are lived.”13 In other words, without being strictly deterministic, it is legitimate to suggest that material and physical constraints affect the contours of life—what is seeable, thinkable, sayable at a given historical moment; being placed in a position to confront those conditions or to watch one’s contemporaries confront them reveals a radically different distribution of the sensible, an experience that opens up the possibility that new historical insights will emerge. Importantly for Cook, these historical experiments are valuable only if they produce new historical insights (instead of simply revealing what historians already know); in this conception, participants are more like researchers than pawns. For Cook, the biggest potential pitfall is the problem of analogy: our experiences are not and can never be identical to the experiences of those who lived in the past. He writes, “The key to using these experiences constructively is to remember that no proper conclusions about history can ever be drawn from unsupported analogy. If the visceral nature of personal experience can be a powerful stimulus to reflection, it can only work effectively by sending us back to conventional sources of historical evidence armed with a new set of questions and a renewed sensibility.”14 There must be, in other words, an active relay between affective experience and cognitive processing that is structured or supported by a historical frame. Rather than posit history as fixed and unchanging, this genre inevitably makes visible history’s unfinished nature, its contingency, and its connection to the needs of the present.
In subsequent sections, I explore what the formal parameters of this genre—everything from physical deprivation and unexpected obstacles such as bad weather to the cinematographic choices such as cinema vérité camera footage coupled with authoritative voice-overs and direct address by participants—have for the kinds of historical meanings and understandings that might emerge. If the parameters of academic writing—the use of footnotes as a kind of intellectual scaffolding, the distancing effect of the cold detached tone, the third-person narrative voice—affect one’s sense of one’s relationship to the past, so too do the constraints of this television genre.15 The specific formal elements of the reality history TV genre help to condition the kinds of meanings and perceptions that emerge. I argue that the genre produces new types of historical knowledge in three ways: through the principle of encounter in the Deleuzian sense; through the emphasis on the embodied nature of the endeavor (which has implications for one’s relationship to the period and events encountered); and through the trying out of historical paths not taken in a manner not dissimilar to what is known as “alternate history.”
In Deleuze’s articulation, for new thoughts to come into existence there needs to be a provocation: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition but of a fundamental encounter.” In the essay “Image of Thought,” he suggests that recognition promotes complacency and thus forecloses thought or inquiry. The provocations he describes often occur on the level of the sensible in the aesthetic realm. A sensuous encounter “may be grasped in a range of affective tones. . . . In whichever tone, its primary characteristic is that it can only be sensed. In this sense it is opposed to recognition.”16 Such sensuous provocations, though, compel interpretation, meaning making. In the House series, individuals from the present are forced into sensuous encounters and made to confront—in sometimes jarring, visceral ways—aspects of the past less legible in written history. These shows are actually structured around the principle of encounter—both physically (in terms of the confrontations with vastly different living conditions) and intellectually (in terms of ideologies about race, religion, and sexuality). When participants encounter the unexpected and the unfamiliar, cognitive work has to be done to process and make sense of it.
Many of these confrontations—and this is the second point about affect and the body—come as a result of physical, tactile, embodied confrontations. The problems these encounters pose are not first and foremost intellectual, though they do compel intellectual work, but are instead physical in that they have the potential to lead to insights about the past—not just for participants but for viewers, too. Bodily discomfort and deprivations are central to all House participants’ experience. Finally, in many instances, the participants from the present make choices that are not “historically accurate” but rather a product of their contemporary mindset in the twenty-first century. In so doing, they are in effect producing an “alternate history.” In this genre, Catherine Gallagher writes, “a slight change in circumstances sets off a chain reaction that takes the course of history in a direction dramatically different from that of actual events.”17 But alternate history is, as Gavriel Rosenfeld points out, “inherently presentist” in that “it explores the past less for its own sake than to utilize it instrumentally to comment upon the present.”18 This logic undergirds reality history TV in several ways. First of all, the genre exposes the extent to which individuals look to the past to fulfill their own personal and even idiosyncratic needs in the present. Second, it brings to light the material, economic, and political conditions taken for granted in the present. And finally, by inserting people into the past, the shows produce alternative outcomes on some issues. It is clear how these alternative outcomes, which function like correctives to the past, have political ramifications for the present and future. As Rosenfeld suggests, the primary function of alternate history is “to express our changing views about the present.”19 What is less clear is how these reality history TV shows advance historical knowledge of the past. What I argue in my discussion of them is that by perhaps counterintuitively highlighting the point of departure, the moment at which the past is so intolerable that people from the present refuse to reenact it, they bring that intolerable moment into dramatic relief.
To think more concretely about both the potential of this form and its pitfalls, I turn to the shows themselves. Although they follow a clearly defined, formulaic structure—first, training in the skills necessary, then journey to the site, followed by a close-up look at challenges and tribulations, and finally the culminating assessment—they all do not work in exactly the same way. Frontier House (2002) was the first of the House shows set in the United States, and its goal was to offer a window onto the difficult lives the frontierspeople led in the effort to “prove up” the land. As an authoritative voice-over describes at the beginning of the first episode, “Land in the American West was once advertised as free for the taking. Under the Homestead Act, nearly two million families came to settle virgin territory. The frontier. Their struggle to survive still haunts the landscape.”20 Authoritative voice-overs such as this one are central to all of these shows, and they serve an important pedagogical function. First and foremost, they work to construct the historical frame within which the historical experiment takes place. They create the parameters for what I have elsewhere described as a “transferential space,”21 an artificially constructed frame inside of which actual experience occurs. They explain the political, economic, and social conditions that shaped life in this historical period. In this way, they anchor the participants’ experience to very specific social, political, and economic conditions and constraints. As several commentators have also noted, these voice-overs often work to debunk commonly held myths about the period or event at hand. Malgorzata Rymsza-Pawlowska, for instance, suggests that “a main misconception that is prevalent in romanticized accounts of the Old West is that of ethnic homogeneity,” due, in part, to the influence of shows such as Little House on the Prairie (NBC, 1974–1983).2 2 The voice-overs, in other words, serve as a pedagogical corrective, replacing the more common Hollywood and popular-culture depictions of the period with one that better matches the current scholarly consensus.
These shows are not exploring just any historical periods: they focus on iconic historical eras central to American national myths—starting a New England colony, moving out West as a pioneer, or being a cowboy or rancher—and as such their project is inherently demythologizing. For these myths to have persisted, more violent and less palatable histories have been submerged—in particular, the dispossession of native inhabitants and the mistreatment and enslavement of Africans. These shows thus force participants and viewers alike to confront and reckon with the incompatibility of the national myths and the history that lies buried beneath them.
FRONTIER HOUSE
The format of the reality history TV show, as I have suggested, is unconventional in that it combines a historical frame that has been worked out by teams of historians, many of whom work in the area of applied history, with a reality, entertainment-driven format. Of the five thousand applicants to participate in Frontier House, three families were chosen, and they had to submit themselves to a period of training with historians and other specialists (i.e., livestock handlers) and to a lesson in the historical conditions in Montana in 1883. This training was necessary both so that participants could begin to imagine the structure of daily life at the time but also more practically so that they would have the skills needed to survive—milking cows, chopping down trees, building log cabins, lighting fires, cooking without electricity or modern ingredients, and so forth. In a fairly conventional documentary style, the program reveals the participants engaging in these daily activities. But in keeping with the reality TV format, the participants also address the camera directly, often in a confessional tone, telling viewers what they think about their experience, how they feel physically and emotionally, the extent to which their expectations are being met or thwarted, and, most insidiously, what they think about the other families. In addition, each family has been given their own video camera to record in video diary format their most private thoughts in private moments, away from the camera crew and often late at night. The technology they use for these video diaries is of course anachronistic. And yet recording these diary entries has the effect of forcing the participants to reflect in a self-conscious way on what they are encountering. In other words, it creates a critical, self-conscious engagement with the reenactment itself. In this way, the technology actually forces a kind of perception, a kind of self-reflexivity crucial to historical thinking. Furthermore, we as viewers are offered the opportunity to reflect on what the participants are doing or not doing both at these self-conscious moments and, perhaps more importantly, at the moments when they are most fully engaging in the experiences that make them feel they have traveled back in time.
The three families selected for Frontier House represent geographic, racial, and class diversity. The Clunes are a wealthy, white family from Malibu, California; Gordon has his own business, and Adrienne stays home with the children (Aine, fifteen; Justin, eleven; and Conor, nine). They are accompanied by a niece, Tracy, also fifteen years old. The Glenn family, also white, from Robertson County, Tennessee, would be considered middle class. Karen, a school nurse, has two children, Erinn, twelve, and Logan, eight, from a first marriage and is now married to Mark, a community-college professor. The Brooks family is represented by Nate, a young African American man from Boston who works in education, and his father, Rudy, a retired correctional officer. Rudy accompanies Nate until Nate’s fiancé, Kristen McLeod, a white woman also living in Boston, joins them for a “frontier wedding.” Including African Americans among the settlers was a deliberate strategy to debunk myths about the frontier as racially homogenous and to serve as a visual corrective to commonly held ideas about frontier life. As a voice-over in the first episode points out, “Many history books ignore the presence of African American pioneers. In fact, by 1880 almost half a million black Americans were living in the West.” Part of the show’s pedagogical force comes from confrontations like this—deliberate challenges to mainstream ideas about the place and time. These voice-over confrontations are largely cognitive, but they are nevertheless of apiece with what I am describing as moments of encounter that take place affectively in the participants’ day-to-day lives—with the important exception that they are exclusively for us, the viewers.
The dominant impulse that drives virtually all of the knowledge production in the series is not narrative or narrative arc, but rather “encounter.” These encounters are both large and small, but virtually all of them are characterized by a kind of bodily confrontation with a set of circumstances that are unfamiliar or unexpected. As many commentators have noted, physical deprivations are among the first experiences voiced by the participants.23 At those moments, the participants are encountering something outside of what their contemporary lived experiences have given them access to. Importantly, though, the deprivations and discomforts are circumscribed by the historical frame—so they do not experience just hunger qua hunger but hunger in the context of the uncertainty of life on the frontier, of not knowing how long the supplies will last or whether the harvest will be sufficient. Indeed, the show describes the challenge facing the participants primarily as a struggle for survival: an early voice-over asserts that “60 percent of the homesteaders did not survive the five years required to prove up their land and secure ownership. Our challenge: Can modern-day families live five months and prepare for a Montana winter under the same conditions?” In the first episode, for example, before even reaching “Frontier Valley,” Nate Brooks notes the changes in his body, the soreness, and Adrienne Clune concedes that she is so tired she wants “to cry.” Upon setting out for Frontier Valley, a horse gets spooked, and young Conor Clune falls out of the wagon. Upon reaching the site where they will camp for the night, Adrienne declares, “Quite a day . . . quite an introduction to the hazards of the frontier. It was, like, incredible. A little more than I had anticipated. A little more real than I wanted to get.” Conor adds, “I fell out a wagon, I lost my worm without even getting a bite, I was attacked by a vicious dog.” These physical encounters make the experiences feel real for the participants in a way that they do not for viewers. However, for both groups, viewers and participants, the show has already begun to debunk the myth of the frontier as romantic and exciting. Of course, the deprivations and physical challenges grow more intense over the course of the participants’ time in Frontier Valley. Adrienne Clune laments that she does not have enough food to feed her growing children, that they have to learn to use alternatives to toilet paper, that they have to grapple with the bone-chilling cold. One snowy morning, the Clune girls must walk to the Glenns’ house, where they expect to find their milk cow, who wandered off in the night, but without any dry clothing to wear the girls set out wrapped in blankets: “We had to walk like almost a mile in the snow, which was maybe ten inches deep, and I didn’t have any clothes, so I had to go outside with a blanket and two gloves for my socks. . . . Aw, my leg is numb, I don’t feel it. It’s burning.” They do indeed find the cow there and proceed to milk her, despite the elements. Mark Glenn, who has fully embraced the role of homesteader and who lacks any self-consciousness about the reenactment, comes out and reprimands the girls for milking on his property, which reduces them to tears. Nate, on his way to visit the Glenns, comes upon the girls and expresses genuine concern over their uncovered, raw skin (see figure 3.1). He offers to take a turn with the milking, saying, “You should get up and walk around. You don’t want to get too cold.” He tells them to go home before frostbite sets in and offers to take the cow. “Forget about the camera, forget about everything else, just concentrate on getting your feet warmed up and getting back to your place,” Nate says. His concern exceeds the parameters of the show, in effect breaking the frame, reminding viewers both that the situation is artificial (it is being filmed) and at the same time that it is real (the girls are actually in physical danger). This experience, though of a different order of magnitude from the real danger people of the time faced, nevertheless dramatizes the unpredictability of life on the frontier.24 In addition to these physical confrontations with the elements, the participants face the unexpected: the road is out, and so they must walk because they have no other choice. Unlike unpredictability in the modern world, which can be easier to manage, on the frontier the stakes were much higher. Says Nate, “I think back to the folks back in 1883 that came out this way. You can have the best intentions of coming out and starting a life here, and it only takes one broken leg or a weather storm that came or animals eating your crops, and before you know it, you’re bust.”
To highlight the way this experience affects the body and to show in a dramatic fashion how the participants’ bodies have literally changed over the course of their time in Frontier Valley, the opening titles for the show use morphing technology. These physical experiences work different ways for the participants, at times proving to them that they have really gone back, are really living the lives of their historical predecessors, and at others catalyzing reflection on the experience and casting that knowledge backward. The seductiveness of the physical changes, the way they serve as evidence for having gone back, however, in general works against their ability to think critically about the reenactment. However, their romantic notions of meeting the wilderness and starting anew are challenged by the difficulty and the physical strain. The point is not that they ultimately know exactly what the settlers felt (in actuality they are just as far from the past as viewers watching at home are), but rather that at certain moments their own embodied experience leads them to view the frontier experience through a different lens. The experience is not an identification with the past so much as the gaining of a new vantage point on it, one that is inaccessible through other means.
FIGURE 3.1 Nate Brooks tells the Clune girls to go home to avoid frostbite. From Frontier House.
Some of the encounters produce cognitive dissonance—forcing an individual to inhabit simultaneously two mutually contradictory narratives. Such an experience compels interpretation and meaning making. Acquiring historical knowledge conventionally, either by reading books or by sitting in a class, is largely a mental exercise. What is being transmitted are ideas: about what people believed, how they lived, what conditions governed their lives. Because these ideas about the past are fundamentally abstract, lacking the shape and texture of the kind of knowledge we have about things we have experienced, it is possible to compartmentalize them so that even contradictory ideas can be maintained side by side. Indeed, the ability to hold contradictory ideas is often considered a sign of intelligence and higher-level thinking. But that ability also has the potential to block deeper thought or interrogation. In other words, being forced to confront or even experience the discomfort of those contradictions has the potential to catalyze deeper, more complex thought. It becomes much less possible to manage the contradiction. In some cases, the contradiction is experienced as cognitive dissonance, where one’s beliefs do not align with reality, as is the case in the next example.
Because the children of Frontier Valley will be missing more than two months of school, the families take steps to establish one there. The families are told, however, that existing laws would prohibit any children that Nate, an African American man, and Kristen, his white wife, would have from attending the same public school as their white children. Kristen knows intellectually that her future children will be considered black, and obviously she knows that racial difference continues to have social significance even in 2001. And yet when she learns about this law, she is forced to confront racism in a literal and visceral way. She says, “It just shocked me because I haven’t experienced racism firsthand yet. And I’ve experienced it through Nate’s stories. But I didn’t even, it didn’t even dawn on me, and to have someone say we’re not going to let your kid in, I realized, my kid, oh my kid, my gosh, this is going to affect me and my family. I’m naive, and I haven’t made that connection really yet.” This situation, in other words, forces her to experience that connection, which affords her a visceral understanding of the form racism took then, but which will also affect how she will live in both the present and the future.
This situation with the school also highlights the way in which these experiments create the occasion for alternate history. Although the families are willing to adopt certain dispositions of the past and to adhere to their logics (in terms of diet, creature comforts, daily schedule, and so on), none of them is willing to live or express the racism that certainly would have existed at the time. Furthermore, they make a collective decision to hire a private teacher so that the school will be open to Nate and Kristen’s future children, a decision they acknowledge would have been historically unlikely. In fact, although these families have been divided over virtually every other issue, they are united in their response to this situation. As Karen Glenn says to Judy Harding, the teacher, after learning about the law prohibiting the attendance of children of African descent: “We have an African American family here in our community already. And we adore them. And I don’t think anyone at this table would ever not want them not to have the same rights and education and opportunities that our children have.” Gordon Clune, with whom Karen has been continually locking horns, agrees, saying, “We’d want them to be educated along with our children. We’d want that.” They decide to establish a private school and pay for it themselves. The families then tell Nate about the racist laws. Their inability to reenact this part of the past is particularly enlightening for viewers. The white families seem untroubled by the fact that their collective decision here works against the “accuracy” of the reenactment. However, the viewer has the opportunity to reflect on the significance of the participants’ inability to reenact racism. By writing the history differently, with an outcome that does not match the historical record, the participants are inadvertently calling attention to both the new trajectory and the old. As Nate explains, “When racial discrimination existed in 1883, I’m sure it was very prevalent here in the Montana territories, but that doesn’t change the fact that the people who we are today in the modern world were not 1883 couples. We’re living an experiment.” In other words, being forced to live this experience of racism makes the couples choose an alternate route, but one that in the process makes palpable and even more visible the racism of 1883, putting a face on it that even those living in 2001 cannot willfully ignore. As Nate describes, “It’s scary when we look back at an 1883 history book, and we get to laugh at it and say, ‘Oh God we’ve come so far. We certainly don’t do this anymore.’ When the racism or the prejudice or stereotypes are still there, they’re just subtle.” Kristen, too, gains a tangible, material awareness through this experience of what it would really have been like for an interracial couple on the frontier as the circumstances force her to encounter those prevalent beliefs. She muses, “I wonder what it would really be like for us. I think it would have been a much huger issue. Nate would have been black black then.” In some ways, this encounter calls attention to the different form racism takes in the present moment, a point upon which both Kristen and Nate reflect. Racism is alive and well in the present, but it is more subtle and indirect, and it tends to be structural and systemic as opposed to interpersonal. To be “black black” in Kristen’s words, might be to experience racism directly, as an a priori condition of existence, a racism that is socially acceptable. Even though the families opt not to treat Nate or his and Kristen’s future progeny as “black black,” their confrontation with the racist laws highlight in an intimate way their implications for frontier society.
COLONIAL HOUSE
Focusing on another iconic historical moment, Colonial House, like Frontier House, produces historical knowledge in ways similar to those I illustrated earlier: through the logic of encounter and its subsequent production of cognitive dissonance and more complex understanding as well as through the playing out of alternate histories. In Colonial House, seventeen applicants were chosen from the United States and Europe to shed their contemporary lives and set out for seventeenth-century New England with the goal of establishing a successful and sustainable colony. They would be assigned roles and have to live on a plot of land on the coast of Maine away from civilization for four months. As the narrative voice-over at the start of the series announces, “Four hundred years ago the east coast of America was a promised land. This remote site is home to a new colony. Everyone here is learning what life was really like. They travelled back to 1628 to the roots of a nation. Can this group of strangers live by seventeenth-century laws and build a prosperous community? What will become of them in this new world?”25 The principal participants were Jeff Wyers, a Baptist minister from Waco, Texas, in his 2004 life who is named governor of the colony, his wife, Tammy, and their three children, Bethany, Amy, and David; Don and Carolyn Heinz, both professors at Berkeley in the present; Paul Hunt, a present-day laborer from Manchester, England, living as an indentured servant in the colony; Jonathon Allen, a present-day graduate student from South Carolina, living with the Heinz family as an indentured servant; Danny Tisdale, an African American living in Harlem in the present; John Voorhees, a carpet salesman from Beverly, Massachusetts, his wife, Michelle, a seamstress with her own shop in the present, and their son, Giacomo; and Amy-Kristina Herbert, an African American actress and adjunct professor, assigned the colonial identity of a widow living with the Voorhees family.
As was the case with the participants on Frontier House, the first layer of experience and a pervasive theme, particularly early on, is bodily deprivation; we are told that as night falls, “the temperature plummets to near zero.” Aboard a sailing ship heading for a plot of land in Maine, the participants confront the bone-chilling cold. The men set off on small boats to explore the shore, while the women and children remain aboard the sailing ship; we are told by voice-over that in 1621 the women and children lived aboard the Mayflower for two months while the men set up the colony. The experience of being away from her husband in unknown circumstances causes Michelle Voorhees to tear up. Dabbing at her eyes, she says, “I know that the men’ll get back. But I can’t imagine being those people not knowing. Can you imagine being those women and children just being stuck on the boat? You can’t see anything. Just being alone, wondering if they’ll ever come back. It must have been horrifying.” Before the series began, she had known in an intellectual way that it must have been frightening, but the experience of being on the boat and apart from her husband literalizes it for her. And once at the colony, the situation stays very much the same: lots of tears and confessions about how little they understood about just how difficult it would be.
Very early on the show makes visible something not often considered in relation to the project of history, especially as it is understood by people outside of the profession: the radically different motives people have for engaging with and learning about the past. For Don and Carolyn Heinz, the experiment would shed light on the ideals upon which the country was founded. Michelle and John Voorhees, by contrast, declare that “we are here to see how we can live close to the land without modern conveniences.” And Jeff Wyers is motivated by religious faith. In response to his son’s pleas to take them all home, he says: “What it brought home to me was all the people watching their loved ones die for a dream, a dream of having a place where you could worship God without the state telling you to do it, and many of them held their children as they died, and they were still glad they came.” In tears himself, Jeff continues, “I told him that we were doing it in the hope their story could be told and people could see how deep their faith is and how real God was for them. I’m not here for the camping trip . . . I’m here to tell those people’s stories.” Furthermore, because the participants have different motivations, they are in different relationships to the project of reenactment and are thus not all equally capable of engaging in the kind of historical thinking the reenactment makes possible. Viewers, by contrast, are more straightforwardly positioned to encounter the participants’ experiences, both the successes and failures, as provocations to historical thinking.
The participants’ encounters with the indigenous peoples provide the first opportunity for the production of an alternate history. Within the first moments of the opening episode, we are told in authoritative voice-over that it is wrong to think the colonists found nothing but wilderness; in reality, they settled on land where native communities already lived. And, indeed, the participants have several meetings with current members of the local Passamaquoddy tribe, which in the present day owns the land they are meant to settle. The meetings with the Passamaquoddy, who are “real Indians,” are epistemologically unstable. Although the tribal members on the series do not live as their ancestors did, they nevertheless have a different relationship to the role they play than do the colonists, who have no direct connection to either the land or to the English colonists of the seventeenth century. Importantly, the presence of these “Indians” makes visible and material the issue of dispossession; for both the participants and the viewers of the show, seeing these actual Passamaquoddy as people fosters a sense of discomfort, making it harder to maintain their idealized vision of the colonies as a society built on lofty principles of freedom. To drive home this point, the Passamaquoddy refer to the treatment of the indigenous peoples as “a holocaust” on our soil. The use of this anachronism (the Holocaust would not occur for more than three hundred years) calls attention to the difference between the original experience and the reenactment, creating the conditions for historical thinking and reflection.
This encounter with the native peoples as well as the ones that occur later in the series take the form of alternate history. The colonists know that they will need to depend on the natives for trade; first and foremost, they need seed corn to establish a crop. In the very first episode there is an awkward moment when they are unsure if they should go in search of the natives or wait for them to come. When they do see the natives in the distance, the governor’s daughter, Bethany Wyers, waves, and the colonists yell, “Hello.” Although there is some nervousness—John Bear Mitchell, a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe, describes a bit of “fear on both sides”—this encounter is significantly less worrisome than the encounters of 1628. As a member of the colonists’ group points out, their predecessors would have “put on armor and readied muskets.” This encounter, in its awkwardness, offers an alternate history to the accepted version: there is no violence, implied or carried out. But we are offered in a very straightforward manner the point of view of the contemporary indigenous population, which serves to challenge some of the enduring myths about the colonial settlements.
As was the case in Frontier House, the most provocative and provoking moments in the series occur when characters are forced to experience in an embodied way a kind of cognitive dissonance. The epigraph for this chapter gives a comment from participant Carolyn Heinz, an anthropology professor in the present day. She is articulating a conundrum posed by her encounter with members of the Wampanoag tribe: “It suddenly sunk in in a way that it hadn’t until then that I was going along and being an imperialist. . . . I am reenacting a whole system that I don’t believe in and that I disapprove of, and yet it’s the roots of our own nation.” She has been placed in a scenario where she is forced to live two contradictory, perhaps even mutually exclusive narratives simultaneously: that the U.S. nation was founded on the ideal of freedom and that the U.S. nation was always, from its earliest colonial days, an imperial presence, dispossessing others of their freedoms. Neither of these narratives or ideas is on its own surprising, and she has clearly thought about each one on its own terms. And yet this historical experiment has brought her to an intellectual crisis wherein she is forced to inhabit two positions that cannot be reconciled. In her life in 1628, she is simultaneously living both of these ideas, and that experience is perplexing, a catalyst to thinking about the colonial enterprise in a more complex way. Engaging in this reenactment forces her to experience these two well-established historical truths as a contradiction—and that, I think, reflects some of the potentially important and useful work done by this kind of reenactment for the more self-aware participants. There is something about the structure of embodied encounter here that makes these insights visible, makes it seem problematic to separate the high-minded notion that the United States was founded on an idea of freedom from the more negative notion that it was from its inception an imperial venture. Importantly, in the moment of reenactment Carolyn is not having the experience of the colonist; she is having the experience of a twenty-first-century self engaging in the practices of the colonist, an experience that compels her to self-awareness about her own historical thinking.
Other problems arise around some of the colonists’ unwillingness to conform to the deep religiosity that would have characterized colonial life in New England. In the second episode, the colony’s preacher, Don Heinz, prepares for the first Sunday Sabbath service. Religion was a fundamental part of life for the majority of the colonists in 1628, but it is not for the diverse group to whom Heinz must now preach. Michelle Voorhees, for instance, worries about saying prayers she does not believe in and asks the camera, “If in the future I feel I really have a problem with it, will I be excused?” The religiosity of the Wyers family (the father is a Baptist preacher in his contemporary life) was enhanced by a tragedy that occurred to his family in Texas during this historical reenactment: his daughter Bethany’s fiancé and his older son were seriously injured in a car accident. The Wyers departed the colony for a short period but returned with renewed vigor for the project: Jeff declares, “My perspective has deepened—they would have lost people here—it’s very real.” Interested in those who came for religious reasons, Jeff wants the colony to be a “City of God.” But according to the other colonists, Jeff is “tightening the screws”; in keeping with seventeenth-century common law, Jeff says that the colony will no longer tolerate profanity, that modesty shall be observed (shirts and trousers for men, head coverings for the women), and that violation of these laws will lead to punishment: offenders will be tied to a post or tree or placed in the stocks. Jeff further declares, “It is the law that everyone observe the Sabbath.” Michelle Voorhees experiences this law as a loss of freedom and refuses to attend service, opting instead for a picnic with her family. And they are not alone in their resistance to the rules. Many have violated the laws against profanity. On Judgment Day, all law breakers must be punished: Paul Hunt is shamed and given a scarlet letter in the shape of a P for profanity.The punishment for Sabbath dissenters is different—John Voorhees must punish his own wife by tying up her leg. Jeff ultimately makes a decision that again creates something of an alternate history: he concedes that the Sabbath punishment is unenforceable at this point. He will suspend the enforcement of laws concerning attendance at the Sabbath service while continuing to encourage everyone to come. Again, as was the case in Frontier House, the participants do not self-consciously reflect on their unwillingness to play by certain rules, to adhere fully to the social norms of the times, but it is extremely obvious to viewers. This departure from historical accuracy again calls attention to the nature of the difference. It brings into dramatic relief for the viewers a world in which people’s everyday lives were fully shaped and confined by religious beliefs and their attendant ideologies about profanity, modesty, and women’s place—“silence is the best ornament on a woman”—and blasphemy.
The issue of race is raised quite pointedly, not in relationship to the native peoples, but rather in the decision to cast two African Americans and an Asian American as colonists even though blacks and Asians would not have been part of the racial makeup of the New England colonies as understood by historians. In much the same way that Kristen, white wife to Nate in Frontier House, is forced to embody the contradiction between her ideas about race and the reality that her kids would be black and thus unable to attend school with white kids, Danny Tisdale, an African American who plays a freeman in the colony, must inhabit a role that puts him in a position of bad faith toward his contemporary self and ancestors. Within the show’s narrative, his character is desperately in need of corn crop, a crop that will require extensive human labor. The need for labor makes real for Danny the conditions that led to chattel slavery. He is thus inhabiting the role of a freeman who has a vested interest in crop production and so feels himself complicit in the development of slavery: “It’s 1628; fifty years later we have slavery. . . . In a very strange way I’m part of it.” Danny thus departs without saying good-bye to the rest of the colony, leaving the governor short on manpower. In the role of a freeman, he is forced to confront the fact that he is participating in a system that would soon slide into slavery. Like Carolyn Heinz, he is forced to embody two contradictory positions that might be maintainable side by side intellectually, in the abstract, but are literalized and made irreconcilable through this experiential form of engagement. He asks, “Am I reliving a slide that led to disastrous results?”
Amy-Kristina Herbert, the other African American in Colonial House, also leaves early, though she says she had planned to do so all along. She does not explain it in these terms, but her reason for participating in the show is precisely to create an alternate history. “Part of the reason why I wanted to do this project as a black woman, black American rather, is that this is the beginning of the country I live in, you know; my roots do not come from Puritanism, but this is the beginning of America, and I am American. People need to stop thinking of ‘here’s my people’ when they think of America. They need to see American and think of America and see faces that aren’t white, see faces that aren’t stereotypical, and this is the best place to do that. You know, me a black girl with braids in my hair in a pilgrim outfit—as ridiculous as the image is, it’s no more, it’s no more ridiculous than trying to classify who’s more American than who” (see figure 3.2). Does peopling the New England colonies with Africans who would not have been there rewrite the past for the present? Or is it jarring, calling attention to how out of place an African American woman looks in the New England colonies, reminding us of the homogeneity within the colony?
FIGURE 3.2 Black pilgrim Amy-Kristina Herbert leaves the colony. From Colonial House.
Another alternate history is constructed on the issue of sexuality. Halfway through the series, Jonathon confesses that he holds the biggest secret in the colony: that in his twenty-first-century life he is gay. We watch him suffering until he can no longer stand it. As was the case with race, this is another instance in which the colonists are unwilling to abandon their twenty-first-century dispositions. Not only would a 1628 governor have punished with death a person for homosexual acts, but the very idea of a homosexual as an identity category did not yet exist. And yet when Jonathon asks for a private conversation with Carolyn and Don Heinz and then “comes out,” Carolyn immediately says, “Jonathon, this is not an issue for us. . . . Don’s daughter is gay”—her use of the term gay obviously an anachronism in the colonial context. When Jonathon eventually decides to come out to the whole community, at church no less, he is once again supported by the congregation. He says, “I am gay, and for the past two months I have really struggled being here because in 1628 I wouldn’t even be having this conversation. I wouldn’t be speaking to you because the governor would probably stop it and take me out there and kill me because homosexuality was punishable by death. For the past two months I’ve been struggling because I haven’t been able to be myself, and I just hope that history will not repeat itself and, when I reveal this, that people will not look at me and say, ‘Well, hate the sin but love the sinner.’ That doesn’t work for me. I have to say it’s liberating actually. I feel a lot better now.” For the viewers, seeing how he suffers with the secret and acknowledging what would have happened to him had he lived in the seventeenth century make palpable the discomfort and fear one would have experienced as a nonconformist. Again, there is a difference between knowing intellectually that homosexual practice was not tolerated in the colonies and watching a gay person confront that realization. But, importantly, Jonathan does not have to pay the price. Like the decision to hire a private teacher so that Nate and Kristen’s kids can go to school with the other families’ kids in Frontier House, the community here cannot shake their contemporary attitudes toward sexuality. By choosing to accept Jonathon, they are enacting an alternate history. As in the previous examples, they do not interrogate their actions; the desire to accept Jonathon seems self-evident because they cannot fully shed their present-era mindset. For the viewers, however, the colonists’ refusal to follow the social norms of the times has the effect of casting a light on the alterity of the past.
TEXAS RANCH HOUSE
Although twenty-first-century participants in these historical reenactments are unwilling to embrace the racial prejudice that they would surely have felt in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries or the prejudice that New England colonists would have felt against individuals who engaged in homosexual acts, in neither instance do the male participants have trouble adapting to a strongly patriarchal society, a critique that Maura Finkelstien, a twenty-five-year-old graduate student assigned the role of house girl, voices in Texas Ranch House. In 1867, two years after the end of the Civil War, Texas and the South were in economic ruin. As a voice-over explains, homesteads were bought up by entrepreneurs and turned into ranches. The project for Texas Ranch House participants is to turn the ranch into a profitable cattle business. As owners of the ranch, the Cooke family from suburban California are supported by Maura, the “girl of all work,” along with six cowboys and a cook. Although Texas Ranch House is clearly the most soap opera–like of the three series I am considering, it has a few moments that function in the potentially constructive ways I have identified in the other shows. It is worth considering, for example, Maura’s observation that the men have no trouble slipping into a traditional patriarchal mindset, raising the question of why the male participants find that so easy when other prejudices are too uncomfortable for them to reenact. She says, “I thought you could come out here and make a happy life as a woman . . . but you can’t; all the guys are so diverse—from different places—and yet they all are sexist, and . . . they all love it and embrace it, and it took them five minutes to put on that jacket.” This is another instance where we as viewers, thanks to the distance created by our mediated relationship to the reenactment, are led to insights about gender that many of the participants themselves do not attain. Viewers are encouraged to analyze why it is that whereas racism is less acceptable but has taken on more subtle and covert forms in the present, sexism both evident and not so evident is still to a certain extent acceptable.
Even more provocative is the encounter between the ranchers and the Comanche. As in Colonial House, part of the historical impetus of Texas Ranch House is to challenge the idea of westward expansion and ranching as a benign, wholesome family adventure. And also as in Colonial House, the indigenous peoples figured in Texas Ranch House are not just assuming a role: though living in the modern world, the Comanche on the show understand themselves to be Comanche in the contemporary present, destabilizing the clear lines between reenactment and reality. We are to understand the limited scope of the Cooke family’s vision both literally in that they are completely oblivious to the natives’ camp nearby and figuratively in that they are ignorant about the history of the land as land already occupied by an indigenous tribe. Viewers are told in voice-over, “Just seven miles from the jubilant cowboys a Comanche scouting party has returned to the land of their ancestors. The Comanche people were feared for their ferocity and aggressive horsemanship.” We hear voices speaking in what we assume to be Comanche and see a teepee being erected. Documenting the land as Comanche land, the voice-over continues, “They numbered in the tens of thousands and controlled 240,000 square miles of territory that extended into what is now Colorado, Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and New Mexico. Descendants of Comanche chiefs, the visitors [the presentday Comanche] have come to experience their ancestral history.” Among them is Michael Burgess, chief tribal administrator for the Comanche nation in the present; he explains: “It might have been one hundred years since the last time a teepee was anywhere within fifty miles of here.” He explains that they have been “struggling with the onslaught of the modern world.” Although Burgess is himself a Comanche in his “real” life, this form of experiential re-creation is as much of an historical experiment for him as it is for the “white” participants. Of the traditional clothing he has donned for this experience, he says, “It’s different to walk around with these leggings, these buckskins, and I’m thinking this is something our Comanche people need to do.” Although we are to understand that these Comanche participants have a more authentic connection to their historical predecessors of 1867, there is something to be gained for them too by wearing the clothing and inhabiting the space that their ancestors inhabited. Comanche artist and musician Calvert Nevaquaya describes a palpable sense of belonging on the land, that they “can feel our people there, can feel their presence.” The Indians are the provocateurs here (in an earlier episode, two of the Cookes’ horses went missing, and we learn here that they were rustled by Comanche), but a historical voice-over contextualizes this kind of theft within the larger context of western expansion, explaining that during the nineteenth century, as the Texas frontier expanded, the Comanche defended their territory by raiding horses and cattle to trade.
Two of the Cookes’ ranch hands, foreman Robby and cowboy Jared, come upon the Comanche while “riding the line.” Michael Burgess invites them into his camp and then into the tepee. Part of the work of the encounter is to reframe the whole project or conceit of Texas Ranch House or to call attention to the fundamental problem of its very premise: the premise, as Cooke later describes it to Burgess, is that “we’re here peacefully; we’re just looking at making a life, taking care of the family.” Herein lies the contradiction: they cannot be there peacefully. This, too, is a case where the participants are forced to inhabit two contradictory positions simultaneously, which produces cognitive dissonance and catalyzes historical thinking. As a voice-over attests, “In 1867, the great Comanche trail actually passed though the location of the Cooke ranch.” Burgess himself makes this point to the ranch hands and the viewers: “It’s not that we don’t own this land; it’s that this land is still ours even though there’s a government and other people who live here. We never gave this up easily, we were duped out of a lot of it, and we were murdered out of a lot of it. That’s part of the history.” Nevaquaya, speaking to the camera, explains what he sees as this encounter’s purpose: “I wanted them to know how bad it damaged our people. . . . When I was sitting there talking about it, I felt myself getting angry. They were looking at me as a Comanche, a wild Comanche, and it was just kind of that rivalry there, that villain. Of course, I hear a lot, too, from people, ‘That was a long time ago—why you still talk about it today?’ . . . Well you know it still, it affects our people today. . . . Why let it go? . . . This is our country.” As he says this, he is quite literally speaking to the viewer. In so doing, he points a finger at the viewer, too, who is also complicit in the violence against his people.
The unstable situation caused by the presence of “real Indians” within the sphere of reenactment/experiment and the effects of their ontologically uncertain status affect the other participants in a range of ways. In discussions with the ranch hands in the tepee, Burgess makes clear that he wants to trade horses (including the ones they stole from the Cookes) for some of Cookes’ cattle. They discuss some terms and set up a meeting for the following day at the Cookes’ ranch, but before the men leave, Burgess very calmly states that Jared will stay with them. To Jared, he says, “You’ll be safe—promise.” Although we do not see Jared’s face, we see him look over at Robby. Clearly they are surprised. Robby smiles at him, and Jared shifts his position. He smiles awkwardly and blushes. “There were a thousand thoughts racing through my mind all at once,” he says. “As friendly as the invitation was, I had just become a captive.” Jared is clearly not scared for his life, but he understands that he has no real choice but to comply. Like the danger in Frontier House, the danger here is of an entirely different magnitude from what it would have been had Jared actually become a prisoner of the nineteenth-century Comanche. A voice-over tells us that “Jared’s detainment is symbolic. In the nineteenth century, both cowboys would almost certainly have been viciously tortured and killed.” And yet the experience of uncertainty within the context of hostile relations between ranchers and Comanche engenders a sense of insecurity that he wears and manifests on his body. Jared knows he is merely a participant on a TV show, but the shock of the experience is clearly destabilizing nonetheless.
The situation with the Comanche more broadly and with Jared specifically makes the Cooke family anxious. Although no one thinks Jared will actually be harmed, his captivity was unexpected and shocking. Mrs. Cooke, speaking to her girls and Maura, says, “Hopefully they’ll be peaceful.” A voice-over alerts us to the fact that her great-great-grandmother Debbie Anne Wise was killed by a southern Plains tribe. Maura, responding to Mrs. Cooke, echoes what was said earlier in the day at the tepee: “We did actually, you know, invade their land and kill most of them off.” One of the daughters retorts, “They did their fair share of killing, too.” That night Mr. Cooke calls a special meeting to discuss the situation, asking Robby to confirm: “You didn’t get a sense that they were hostile?” There is no mention of Jared, but we see him in the early morning darkness participating in the Comanche’s sunrise ceremony: we hear the music and see them in the dark playing instruments and chanting. They leave Jared behind when they go off to negotiate with Cooke.
In some ways, the planned meeting between the Comanche and the Cookes is like the alternate histories we have seen in Frontier House and Colonial House in that no racial prejudice is expressed. In fact, while nervously awaiting the arrival of the Comanche, the Cooke ranch prepares a luncheon for them. A voice-over attests: “Laying out the best china and entertaining Comanche would have been unthinkable for early ranchers”—they would have loaded guns and hunkered down. When the Comanche arrive, greetings are given and introductions made in English. The camera reveals two Comanche warriors on the hill. Those at the ranch take a seat; Mr. Cooke speaks first: “We’re here peacefully. We’re just looking at making a life, taking care of the family.” Although at the start of the series that claim might have resonated with viewers, it no longer seems tenable after hearing the Comanche point of view. The rancher narrative of “just making a living” on open land is fundamentally incompatible with the violent dispossession of Comanche lands that was part of westward expansion. The viewer is forced to see the contradiction: although the two narratives can be maintained intellectually, they cannot exist side by side in practice. Burgess and Cooke begin discussing trade terms, going back and forth with little progress. As was the case with Jared’s captivity, Burgess here asserts a kind of quiet power, which poses a conundrum for participants and viewers. He says to Cooke, “You’d be bargaining from the weakest position ever. We were trading, and I told you ten cows per horse, and you didn’t meet my price, there’d probably be ten warriors over here, ten more over here.” Mr. Cooke, upset that he has no leverage in this negotiation, says: “In 1867, we would have had guns and ammunition.” Trying to get Cooke to see the contradiction, the cognitive dissonance between his sense of “trying to live peacefully” and the fact that he is doing this on stolen land, Burgess says, “You want to live peacefully. And you want to stay here, and you’re in our land, so what you’re going to end up doing is trading with us so you can live here.” Finally understanding, Cooke says, “So the price would be higher because it is your land.”
In some ways, this episode seems like another instance of alternate history in that the family prepares lunch for the Comanche instead of grabbing their guns. But this scene functions differently because the Comanche here are supposed to be threatening; the show tries to create an undercurrent of fear. In part, this is a result of the fact that for the Comanche participating in the show, as for the indigenous peoples participating in Colonial House, this dispossession happened to their actual ancestors, not to some abstract historical predecessors. When the two sides appear to be at loggerheads, a very uncomfortable moment arises. In a quiet voice, Burgess says, “If we don’t get thirty cattle, we might have five women,” and counts the five women at the ranch with his fingers over his shoulder (see figure 3.3). We know all the while that his threat is not real, that the contemporary Comanche would never harm the Cooke women, and yet voicing the threat in the context of the negotiations creates a powerful confrontation or encounter that produces an embodied sense of discomfort and one that ultimately provokes a deeper understanding of the stakes for the ranchers. Of this moment, Mrs. Cooke’s describes, “My skin was crawling. Technically our whole well-being were in the hands of just those few men, so it was a very unempowered feeling. And very scary. I started to feel defensive for my children.” Again, the epistemological insecurity of the “realness” of the Indians, despite the contrived nature of the scenario, produces a kind of friction that functions as a productive catalyst to new thoughts, a greater understanding of the complexity of the situation. She understands in a visceral way her complicity in the violence, that despite her well-meaning, twenty-first-century intentions (like those of the colonists in Colonial House) the ranchers are inhabiting the subject position of land thieves. She reflects, “It was a very humbling experience to have the Comanche say, ‘Well, this is ours; we’re just letting you stay here.’ Coming up from California, we didn’t know this land belonged to someone else. And then there was the question, Should I really be here? I almost felt like I was being sold a stolen car. And now we’re face to face with the original owner, and I can’t say I disagree with them.”
FIGURE 3.3 Comanche chief Michael Burgess with Cooke women. From Texas Ranch House.
Michael Burgess also strongly makes the point that the experiential is a crucial mode for certain kinds of knowledge acquisition, not only for his own people but for the white participants as well. Although Jared, the cowhand held captive, is eager to return to the ranch, we are to understand that he has had a fulfilling experience among the Comanche. Of his experiences as their “captive,” spending the night with them, he says, “They’ve been very willing to teach me. . . . I will carry it with me up here [taps his head]. I will speak to others about the history—I will teach them what I’ve learned.” Burgess underscores the importance of this experiential engagement, of going through the motions in an embodied way. Of Jared he reflects, “I really think that Jared was the person this was for. Jared, the inquisitive mind. . . . You can read a lot, but until you get involved in it, you don’t learn a lot.”
But at issue is not only going through the motions: it is being forced to encounter, as an embodied person, the contradiction between two intellectual positions that can be held side by side only in the abstract. Of being forced to inhabit two mutually incompatible positions, Jared asserts, “When you tell history from one side, then you tell history from the other side, sometimes it doesn’t even seem like the same story.” Trying to think through those contradictions has the capacity to produce more complex understandings of the past. Instead of the pluralist model where each group’s story sits side by side with every other group’s story, the experience of the show forces viewers and participants alike to reckon with the fact that not all stories can sit easily beside all others, that they are mutually incompatible, even contradictory. That experience has the capacity to force viewers to rethink even the progressive-seeming multicultural narratives.
Texas Ranch House tries to position the viewers, along with the participants, so that they experience these encounters almost like a punch: we are told in voice-over that by the 1870s the U.S. Army was involved in a full-scale campaign to rid the West of Indians and kill their buffalo. The voice-over quotes Colonel Richard Irving Dodge: “Kill every buffalo you can. Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” Of the 30,000 Comanche once populating this region, only 1,597 were left when in 1875 they were forced onto the Oklahoma reservation. This comment is meant as a visceral hit to viewers, and now that they have seen how the dispossession takes place, it is all the more affecting.
. . .
I have tried to show the ways in which these reality history TV shows in certain instances and around certain kinds of issues can and do provoke historical thinking in the vein Collingwood describes and thereby produce historical knowledge. And yet, of course, the programs are also quite flawed. In many ways, they feel like soap operas, playing up interpersonal tensions for heightened dramatic impact. And although the participants do face a low level of danger, the very fact that there are camera crews present, the contemporary world sits just around the corner, and they can exit the situation whenever they want means that the stakes can never come close to replicating the life-and-death struggles of the past. In some ways, the dynamics of these shows are quite different from those of the fictional television series discussed in chapter 2. Deadwood and Mad Men, precisely because they are scripted dramas performed by actors, are able to take an unflinching look at racism and racial prejudice. By contrast, the participants in the reality history shows could not bring themselves to embrace those ideologies. At first, this seems like a real limitation of the form because racial prejudice would have been fundamental to the way individuals of the past experienced their world in all three historical moments depicted. However, the participants’ obvious failure to embody and perpetuate racial prejudice calls attention to itself; this departure from the historical record functions like alternate history, the new version inadvertently bringing into relief the old. Furthermore, the inclusion of contemporary Native Americans in Colonial House and Texas Ranch House works to destabilize and upset the artificiality of the frame, producing real discomfort for the participants. In both cases, this discomfort serves as a productive catalyst to thought. These shows aim to entertain, but they also reflect an attempt to reckon with the past—to take it on, take it seriously, and force both participants and viewers to contemplate the fact that the contradictory ideas we hold about these episodes in the American past cannot be reconciled as easily as we tend to think they can. Even a long-form drama such as Mad Men that oscillates between seducing viewers into its pleasures and excesses at one moment and forcing them into a position of critique at others cannot make competing or contradictory narratives seem mutually exclusive to the extent that the House programs do.
