‘Welcome to the Hotel California’: TV narcissism and the real
Mirrors on the ceiling
Pink champagne on ice
And she said
We are all just prisoners here
Of our own device
– The Eagles, ‘Hotel California’
The media have … become the last authority for self-perception, the ‘reality test’ of the social persona: I am seen, therefore I am. (Frohne 2002: 262)
In recent analyses of television culture a number of critics have provocatively outlined the congruence between TV as a mass media form and the public narrativisation of traumatic events or experiences. In Jon Dovey’s account of contemporary first-person factual media,
Freakshow, he locates the transformation and consolidation of factual genres in the 1990s within the context of a neo-liberal political economy in which commodification and capitalisation have reconstituted the public service in the shape of a market-led ethos. This ethos has altered the shape of public service broadcasting and whilst the focus may not now be on widening access, Dovey acknowledges that ‘new domains for the expression of identity’ have nonetheless been secured (2000: 4). These televisual spaces are, according to Dovey, ‘filled by voices proclaiming and celebrating their own “freakishness”, articulating their most intimate fears and secrets’ (ibid.).
1The public disclosure and narrativisation of personal identity is a crucial ingredient of a revitalised (and economically viable) factual TV market. Entertainment media appropriate the ‘real’ feelings and emotions of ‘real’ people to signify credibility and ‘unfiltered immediacy’ (Frohne 2002: 259). A sense of self-staging, of the constructedness of reality and of the artificial realism of media worlds are commonplaces of contemporary culture. For those theorists locating reality TV within a postmodern society of the image, media spectacle has displaced real-life experience. However, the excess and expanse of the media world on offer cannot conceal a sense of impoverishment or loss of the material grit of the real. Slavoj Žižek has characterised the twentieth century as the century in which the ‘passion for the Real’ erupts in the face of the postmodern immersion in semblance (2002: 3). Ironically the search for the authentic amidst media spectacle has resulted in compensatory media representations:
The authentic twentieth-century passion for penetrating the Real Thing (ultimately the destructive void) through the cobweb of semblances which constitutes our reality thus culminates in the thrill of the Real as the ultimate effect, sought after from digitalised special effects, through reality TV and amateur pornography, up to snuff movies. (2002: 12)
Žižek cites Peter Weir’s The Truman Show (1998) and its antecedent, Philip K. Dick’s novel Time Out of Joint (1959), as notable examples of the American paranoiac fantasy that the world around them, a consumerist affluent Western capitalist paradise, is actually a fake. This is a theme also followed in the popular blockbuster film directed by the Wachowski Brothers, The Matrix (1999). In all these fictions, the hero gradually awakens to the discovery that the world around him is a fiction designed to keep him happy and productive. Žižek reads these fictions as a comment on a dematerialised social imaginary: ‘The underlying experience of Time Out of Joint and of The Truman Show is that the late capitalist consumerist Californian paradise is, in its very hyperreality, in a way unreal, substanceless, deprived of material inertia’ (2002: 13). As such the protagonists proceed to discover the real behind the insubstantial everyday.
Real life appears devoid of substance in late capitalist society. Our neighbours and workmates and friends, immersed as they are in consumer culture, appear as real-life actors and extras: ‘the ultimate truth of capitalist utilitarian despiritualised universe is the dematerialisation of “real” life, its reversal into a spectral show’ (Žižek 2002: 14). This awareness of the false divide between the real world and the staged contained world of media life is encapsulated by one contestant of
Big Brother 4 (2003). John, previously ejected from the house, was re-introduced in a gimmick to revive the inter-dynamics of the rapidly diminishing number of housemates. He had been one of the most explicit commentators on the theatrical nature of the house and its inhabitants; speaking to the diary room about strategies to appeal to the public and about the performance of authenticity by some of the other contestants. By the time of his return, the other housemates had been isolated for weeks without any contact or news from outside apart from their highly constrained exchanges with Big Brother in the diary room. Commenting on the experience of being out and then back in the spotlight, John undercuts any notion of freedom that the housemates have connected to the outside when he sings to them the lines from the Eagles’ popular song ‘Hotel California’. The song tells of a dangerously willing entrapment as a visitor is lured off the highway to the enchanting delights of a hotel from which there is no escape:
Welcome to the Hotel California
Such a lovely place.
Such a lovely place…
Last thing I remember
I was running for the door
I had to find the passage back to the place I was before
Relax said the nightman
We are programmed to receive
You can check out any time you like
But you can never leave.
Housemates themselves forecast the inability to leave behind the experience of the
Big Brother house by anticipating their future absorption into celebrity culture as a result of their 24/7 TV/web existence. As noted in
chapter 1, other reality TV participants have commented on the problems, too, of extricating oneself from their own stereotyped media image.
Aside from the hours of self-absorbed confession and revelation that entrapment in the house promotes, eviction from the house is one of the key constructed ‘traumas’ that shape the housemates’ weeks in captivity. To be evicted signifies a rejection by the public and by their companions who select those to be expelled. In the penultimate week of Big Brother 4, Nush, one of the two housemates selected to go up for public vote for eviction, explains her response to Big Brother in the diary room. She speaks hesitantly about her attachment to the house, claiming that it may be silly because she knows that the house is not real but nonetheless the place feels ‘a bit like home’. She anticipates her nostalgia once outside, and looking tearful adds that the difficulty is in knowing that the experience of the house can never be recaptured, that one can never return. The stage-set of the house is clearly unreal but also extremely comfortable/comforting. Big Brother 4’s set-up has a heated outside pool, a large deck with huge bean bags in a seating area. The living area again has huge brightly-coloured sofas, cushions and soft rugs. The effect is modern but also infantile – resembling a child’s playroom with bright colours and simple curved shapes. Isolation in the house is a key factor in the forced close interpersonal relationships that develop for public observation. A number of the contestants speak of their anxiety at leaving and possibly entering a hostile outside world as they have no sense of the kind of public reception they will receive. Whenever a housemate is voted out, those remaining huddle by the closed door to listen for cheers or jeers from an invisible public – an enigmatic sign of outside judgement. The house then is experienced as hostile at times, protective at others and the public become an unreal invisible but powerful other.
Kevin Robins argues that many discourses on the benefits of new media offer an escape from mundane reality into a new simulated reality. He suggests that such idealisation of the simulated worlds, made possible by new media technology, are ‘powerful expressions of fantasy and desire … articulated through the discourse of science and rationality’ (1996: 39). The various new realities of reality TV offer artificially-constructed domains that hold real people. They are plainly simulations but contain characters that lay claim to an existence outside of media space. Some critics have aligned these programmes with game shows in their pitting of ordinary people against each other in an artificial environment. In reality shows like
Big Brother, Castaway, Temptation Island and
Survivor rules and regulations similarly structure the microworld. In one sense then to enter these worlds is to engage in a constrained world of reason and of order.
2 Danger and conflict are highly regulated: the crocodile or snake one encounters is likely to be placed there by the film crew; the risks of food deprivation or heat exhaustion are carefully monitored. Yet reality TV also offers the unscripted event that occurs when individuals are thrown together: structured through matrices of jealousy, rivalry, distrust, erotic attraction and so on. Robins’ description of the ‘microworld’ of virtual reality seems analogous here:
To enter the microworld is apparently to enter a world of logic and reason. But it is more than this. The microworld is also responding to deeper needs and drives than those of reason. This image space is also a container and a scene for unconscious and pre-rational dramas: getting ‘into’ the image is also about acting out certain primitive desires and fantasies or about coming to terms with fears and anxieties. (1996: 49)
The charge of identification with characters alongside the predictability of a managed environment and regularised life segues with the unpredictability of ‘the real’ – the event that may erupt beneath the surface of order at any moment. Reality TV offers contradictory pleasures, broadcast as a highly edited and condensed event (a single episode) and as 24-hour spectacle (as webcam footage), displaying an orchestrated microworld replete with the possibility of volatile agents and relationships. It offers the new ‘fullness’ of a mediated reality and hence, whilst very much part of the new media environment, it draws on the embodied human encounter to signify emotional and existential realism: the stuff that happens when real people encounter one another. Consequently, this type of programming ‘could be understood as an euphoric effort to reclaim what seems lost after digitalisation’ (Fetveit 1999: 798).
The rituals of the outside world are borrowed to structure the
Big Brother routine. In the final week of
Big Brother 4, the housemates are rewarded on their final evening with a mock Christmas Day. Completely isolated from the outside world for weeks, the Christmas treat serves almost like a homeopathic remedy as Scott, Steph, Ray, Cameron and John are all separately called into a room to receive a small inoculation of the reality that awaits them outside. The room is bare save for a giant throne-like chair and the floor is strewn with white mock snowflakes. Each housemate sits waiting and then receives a Christmas card posted in to them with messages from friends or relatives. The poignancy is in the deliberate insertion of a real message in an overtly fantastic fairytale-like
mise-en-scène. This small dose of the outside world is continued later in the Christmas celebrations when the housemates each unwrap a package from outside, containing a special object from home. These are all intimate objects – a toy car, a walnut used as a gift each Christmas and so on – whose meaning is private, arcane and enmeshed in a personal history prior to the house. The effect is uncanny – as the housemates voluntarily stripped of their intimacy and privacy for weeks have a ‘real’ emblem of their unscrutinised lives brought in and unwrapped before the camera’s gaze.
This uncanniness extends to the final day in the house. As each of the extremely nervous housemates anticipates the order in which they may be voted out, Cameron declares that he could not bear to be in the final two left in the house, he would be ‘terrified’. As the eventual winner of Big Brother 4, he is in fact the last to remain, and as runner-up Ray departs, he begs him not to go. Left alone, Cameron talks to himself, looks agitated, snacks distractedly on food, reads out loud the opening sentences from the book of rules for the House: ‘Welcome to the Big Brother House…’ Intermittently, Cameron calls out to the invisible controller of the house to let him out, not to drag out the exit. After his departure, the camera continues filming. The house then takes on an ominous state. The viewer is offered shots of each empty room, echoing voiceovers of the housemates declaring themselves ‘guinea pigs’, imagining others watching and so on, accompany these shots. These ghostlike traces imbue the final images of the house with an uncanny quality. It is as if the fantasmatic support of the reality of the house has been stripped away, the house only means something if there are inhabitants there to watch and others outside to watch them. The images evoke emptiness but also imbue the house with a hallucinatory quality returning reality TV to ‘virtual reality’ now that the housemates have moved beyond the camera’s range.
Contestants on shows like Big Brother or Survivor or The Mole often speak of their voluntary self-imprisonment in a media-created community as a challenge but also a way of confronting or finding themselves. Often the desire is also to find a quick route to a new media career. This blurring of real self and media personality points up the narcissistic nature of reality TV and of the role of the media as the new horizon of contemporary self-realisation. In an episode of Judge Judy, the US television court show, Judge Judy confronted a father and his teenage son who was an alleged dangerous driver, having sped through a suburb with his rowdy friends threatening the life of pedestrians. They in turn were suing their male neighbour, who, enraged at their refusal to stop driving and concerned for his children, had hit the side of the car with a baseball bat. Father and son had already had the verdict found against them in seven separate court cases and yet had still submitted themselves to television trial. Judge Judy, shaking her head in mock amazement, asked them why they had bothered to come on television – did they think this verdict would be any different as they were clearly at fault? Frequently on Judge Judy, defendants and prosecutors who have previously lost their case in a court of law submit themselves to the televised humiliation of appearing before the Judge. Their submission to the television gaze is symptomatic of a belief in the integrity of one’s performance before camera to direct and rectify a false image of the self and to verify one’s status as the victim.
Trying to understand the crisis in self-image a number of contemporary critics have latched onto the idea of contemporary society as ‘a culture of narcissism’. In particular, Christopher Lasch indicates that narcissism is now a general condition of being in late capitalism; it signifies a detachment from a world seemingly without value. In contemporary late capitalist cultures such as Britain and the United States, cultural pluralism, lifestyle diversity and niche marketing arguably produce fragmented and self-reflexive selves. Older forms of authority and security – the law, democratic government, judiciary, medical experts and so forth – have been critiqued and displaced by an increasing public political cynicism and a turn to the self as the only possible marker of integrity (Frosch 1991). The politics of the self is a phenomenon arriving out of the 1980s and signals the rise of a narcissistic and self-reflexive culture in which individual crises, family histories and personal complexities provide an anchor for contemporary insecurities in the affluent cultures of advanced technocratic society.
To understand narcissism, as a contemporary malaise rather than pathology, is to understand the desire to consolidate a sense of one’s self in a culture seemingly devoid of meaning and of objects and relations providing self-affirmation. Consequently, identity is affirmed through the luxury of a consolatory mirror image afforded by the ubiquitous presence of the media in our lives. It is worth quoting Lasch at some length here:
We live in a world of images and echoes that arrest experience and play it back in slow motion. Cameras and recording machines not only transcribe experience but alter its quality, giving to much modern life the character of an enormous echo chamber, a hall of mirrors … Modern life is so thoroughly mediated by electronic images that we cannot help responding to others as if their actions – and our own – were being recorded and simultaneously transmitted to an unseen audience or stored up for close scrutiny at some later time … This intrusion into everyday life of this all-seeing eye no longer takes us by surprise or catches us with our defences down. We need no reminder to smile. A smile is permanently graven on our features, and we already know from which of several angles it photographs to best advantage. (1978: 47)
The apparent omnipresence of media observation is internalised as a sort of self-scrutiny. But also the self becomes dependent on the consumption of media images. So paradoxically the media image becomes both the de-realisation of reality and – through reality TV, game shows, talk shows, social experiments, CCTV footage and so on – the source for unhindered observation and detailed monitoring of real people like ourselves. In this ‘new economy of attention’ to appear on television is to assume cultural capital. Social distinction becomes dependent on media performance and even simply on media presence:
Andy Warhol’s promise that everyone could be a star for fifteen minutes has become the component of collective self-confidence and the standard for personal self-esteem, which postmodern individuals openly pay homage to in their technological self-marketing whether as contestants on Face 2000, or as participants in the ‘community of shared destiny’ in Big Brother’s container, or as criminals on death row fighting for the right to have their executions broadcast. (Frohne 2002: 261)
The desire to rid oneself of intimacy and to capture media attention demands the deliberate insertion of oneself into media space. To stand out demands that one share one’s intimate secrets on camera, participate in the game show or talk show, submit one’s legal wrangle to televised jurisdiction or sell one’s home video moments for the fleeting recognition of canned laughter.
Whoever desires to be prominent or notable requires the mass visibility of media recognition, albeit for a moment. On the one hand, as we have argued, this yearning to speak oneself to camera suggests a desire for the mark of authenticity, for the social legitimisation of one’s existence. In this sense, the process of revelation is partly shaped by a self-conscious absorption in the emotions, desires, needs, pains and memories that the contemporary individual, attuned to a popularised psychoanalytic discourse, uses to understand his or her location in the world. As Lasch argues: ‘the emergence of a therapeutic ideology that upholds a normative schedule of psychosocial development … thus gives further encouragement to anxious self-scrutiny’ (1978: 48). The therapeutic discourses that pervade contemporary society reinforce notions of psychic and physical health, physical attractiveness, social integration and development, and interpersonal and career success as factors attendant on ‘an eternal watchfulness’ (ibid.). Consequently, subjects look for symptoms of malfunction or trauma. The individual polices his or herself for signs of ageing, ill health, psychic stress or social/relationship/career flaws and everything can be fixed by career or lifestyle coaches. Emotion and self-monitoring of internal responses are a core element of one’s private and public persona. In response to whatever social dilemma the British talk show host Robert Kilroy-Silk is covering – whether ageing, drunk driving, unemployment or sexual abuse – he asks his participants ‘How do you feel?’
On the other hand, the desire to be watched, to be witnessed by others uncovering one’s intimate identity and even everyday rituals of cooking, eating, conversing, competing or sleeping reveals the craving for an observer to witness the minutiae of one’s social performance. Recently the internet has been flooded by webcam sites which enable the viewer to continuously follow an event or place – a scene on a street or at an institution or the life of someone in their home, their fridge contents, their bedrooms. This indicates the importance with which the media has now become associated with social identification.
The current baring of the self to camera for reality TV displays two elemental truths: firstly, that our ‘real’ selves are only ever the performance of a role. In
Big Brother, the participants step outside of ‘real’ life to ‘play themselves in their screen-roles’ but divided from us and framed by the television or computer screen their real selves can be more easily interpreted as culturally coded acts (Žižek 2002: 226). Secondly, reality TV lays bare the truth about integral fantasmatic structures of subjectivity caught up with illicit forms of observation. For example, Žižek notes that in the common fantasy of being caught/observed while in sexual activity, the fantasy proper is centred not on the imagined sexual act but on the imagined other who watches us. Crucially, our sense of self is guaranteed by the fantasy of an ‘other’ who observes us and whose gaze confirms the solidity and worth of our existence. Therefore, rather than fearing the omnipresent surveying gaze we embrace it. Thus it could be argued that the dynamics of multi-platform observation replicate the imaginary possible characters watching us in a complex fantasy
mise-en-scène. The media now has moved beyond offering the pleasure of pre-fabricated scenes to offer the pleasure of supposedly un-fabricated scenes. Here, the urgent need for another’s observation extends beyond the masochistic desire to submit to another’s gaze or the exhibitionist’s desire to display. Žižek maintains that our current fascination with image-mediated reality indicates a desire for the eye of the camera to verify and validate one’s existence: ‘the subject needs the camera’s gaze as a kind of ontological guarantee of his/her being’ (2002: 225).
Therapeutic culture and new media economies of realism
Reality TV, then, arguably promotes and caters for the desire to be observed and to have one’s existence validated through observation. It extends and plays upon the notion that daily existence is in some senses inauthentic or hyperreal or simulated or performative. It foregrounds the ways in which subjectivity more broadly is formed through a matrix of looks, of processes of seeing, being seen and of our self-conscious knowledge of being seen. It suggests that within media culture being publicly regarded can constitute an affirmation of the self.
Reality TV has contributed to the establishment of a new realism in the digital age which is founded on the individual subject’s self-revelation and their interactions with others as the marker and touchstone of authenticity. This revelation is declamatory and must take place in a public forum. It must attract viewers through processes of both identification and voyeurism. On reality TV and with multi-platform programming we can watch the multi-perspectival aspects of one person or groups’ interaction in all their minutiae; perspectives which seem to substantiate reality TV as a privileged mode of access to the personal. The most illuminating critical work on the multiple spectator positions offered by television has been undertaken in relation to soap opera. Soap opera’s structure (multiple storylines and characters, open-endedness and patterns of time that echo real life) and its emphasis on the personal and the quotidian make it an important precursor of reality TV. Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, illustrating the merit of using psychoanalysis to address the specificity of fictional televisual experiences, pointed to the multiple and partial identifications of soap opera which stand in stark contrast to the much more anchored identifications of classical film narrative. She suggested that the ‘constant plurality of secondary identifications intensifies the viewer’s imaginary activity, enabling the slide from fictive to real in order to solidify the connections between the characters’ world and ours’ (1992: 237). Tania Modleski suggests that television soaps present us with a cast of varied personalities, these ‘numerous limited egos’ allowing for a transitory but highly engaging set of identifications (in Flitterman-Lewis 1992: 237).
This ability to interact imaginatively with a number of ‘realistic’ personas and their experiences on screen certainly seems to correspond with some of the structural characteristics of reality TV. Reality TV shows which offer a temporary community of individuals, for example, enable the viewer to occupy a range of roles, shifting, changing and doubling up on a variety of subject positions. Appealing to the mobile positions and scenarios offered in fantasy, the viewer can identify with individuals, yet also feel disconnected or frustrated as television participants’ plans, deceits, motivations and deceptions are never fully disclosed. The ability to slide from fictive to ‘real’, or in the case of reality TV to slide from generic ‘reality’ programme to ‘real’ comes easily and smoothes the path into an acceptance of the new realism.
In the mass-media market, as the conventional political commitment of non-fiction television producers has been marginalised and fiscal considerations are prioritised new, more personal and more cost effective forms of non-fiction television have come to the fore. The multi-channelled conglomerated television arena demands cheaper programming and niche marketing. ‘Trauma TV’ – as a variant of the reality TV formats – has developed out of television innovations such as the video diary and the talk show to air social and personal issues to a mass audience and, in terms of production values, to do so economically.
3 Television confessionals and the therapy culture within which they are embedded are the cultural backdrop here. Therapy culture, infused with psychoanalytic discourse, has informed the popular imagination through mass media images. Psychoanalysis provides a shared discourse with which to economically transmit ideas about emotional conflict and desire. The common tropes of psychoanalysis – Oedipal rivalry, primal desires, taboos, anxiety about death, loss and survival, group identification, repression, dreams as ciphers of the unconscious – have filtered in simplified form into mainstream film, television shows, radio dramas and magazine advice columns.
Talk shows, some documentaries and a range of confessional light programming draw upon psychoanalytical registers to underpin the display of emotion and memory on the small screen, affording them a sense of emotional realism and analytical worth. They provide representations of the active witness; the ordinary person on screen as the ‘privileged possessor and producer of knowledge in an extraordinary, often forensic setting, in which speech and truth are policed in multiple ways’ (Peters 2001: 709). In doing so, some critics have laid claim to such programmes as a democratisation of the public sphere. For despite such policing, these programmes have been styled as both democratic and demotic; their ordinary filmic subjects appearing to address the viewing public in a less mediated and uninhibited form. Increasingly, the discursive gap between televisual subject and the viewer seems to have diminished as the ordinary individual is given the chance to speak directly to audiences via talk shows, video diaries and so on. And, more importantly still, the viewer gains the sense that they too could be on television, that they might also be on the threshold of media visibility.
It has been argued that such televised confession is a secular service that supplants or supplements religion and taps into a current desire to unburden the self of its anguish. In the mid-1990s, an incredibly popular phone-in line in the United States underlined the cultural need for an outlet for personal guilt or anxiety: the
Apology Line. Thousands of callers phoned the elaborate computerised answer machine set in a Manhattan apartment and funded by an anonymous individual whose voice, as ‘Mr Apology’, welcomed callers and invited them to confess and to indulge in self-revelation. Originally set up in 1980 as an art project, by the mid-1990s the service, promoted by stickers and leaflets around New York, had around a hundred calls a day of which about a dozen left a message. The remainder of callers phoned to listen into a diverse range of confessions ranging from the banal to the criminal. Callers confessed to not crying enough at a grandmother’s funeral, to spitting in hamburgers served to police officers, committing incest with adult siblings, adultery, drug peddling, arson and even murder. The answer service used voicemail technology to divide confessions into categories: sex, romance, humour, child abuse, the Church of the Apologetic Predator (for religious or spiritual problems), and addiction, as well as Apology Pet Corner. The Apology Line’s slogan was ‘Call, Listen, Perhaps Share’. Listeners called in sometimes to leave a message responding to others’ confessions. The creator described the line as part ‘vicarious thrill’ in listening to others’ violations and obsessions, part group therapy, a ‘peer-advice thing … People get an idea of where they stand in the community’ (Freedland 1994:27).
4In attempting to understand the need for such self-revelation, cultural critics have noted that mass forms of popular culture provide ways of confronting and managing the basic psychic tensions of contemporary urban life (Richards 1994; Elliott 1996). Furthermore, that negotiation of the self within contemporary collective living is arguably infused with therapeutic discourse: a process in which ultimately personal identity, location in the world, self-development, recovery and fulfilment often narrow to the small circle of the individual and those closest to him or her (Parker 1997). Popularised therapeutic discourse provides a language for acknowledging the intensities of subjective experience in a world where power structures and decision-making processes appear to alienate and exclude the everyday individual and the quotidian life. Some analysts of the late modern/postmodern age have argued that, from the end of the twentieth century onwards, ‘risk’ is an attendant factor of existence. As techno-economic development is equated with a sense of the possibility of wide-scale peril and insecurity on a global scale, individuals increasingly factor the imagined future dangers and merits of risky existence into their everyday sense of local, national and global events. For contemporary individuals this promotes a sense of scepticism about institutionalised knowledge and power and a heightened self-awareness that we are living with risk management in our personal daily lives (Beck 1992; Giddens 1990). Consequently, the
zeitgeist of the affluent late capitalist social universe is of an intensified reflexivity in which ‘people reflect upon the consequences of their action, in both the personal and social domains’ (Elliott 1996: 68). This development of intensified reflexive rationality is linked to a heightening of individualisation, so that as broader social and institutional structures become subject to interrogation, the subject turns increasingly to seek an ontological security through calculations and assessments about personal life and life-style options.
5Therapeutic discourse can offer a route to the complexity of psychic life but it can, in highly simplified form, also be drawn upon to conjure up consoling fantasies of mastery over risk and over the self. Notions of a recoverable self and a re-armoured ego abound in women and men’s magazines, daytime talk shows, life-style programmes and makeover shows. The route through personal dilemmas and individual dissatisfaction is located in the pathologised individual. Self-understanding is offered through pop-psychological analysis combined with a therapeutic scan over family history and personal relationships. For example, Alvin Hall, the host of a popular financial makeover show
Your Money or Your Life (BBC1), is described as ‘psychologist’ and ‘money guru’ in the accompanying BBC paperback (Hall 2002: front cover). The paperback offers individuals or couples with financial problems ‘a practical guide to solving your financial problems and affording a life you’ll love’. The first chapter, ‘Money or Your Mind’, follows the standard formula of his half-hour television programme by locating the root of financial problems in emotional problems – the ‘demons’ which control excessive spending and ultimately loss of personal control. The self-help text is littered with psycho-speak: ‘the psychology of the credit card’, ‘practise tough self-love’, and ‘the talking cure’. The television show features people who are in significant debt – through hefty mortgages, bank and credit card debts and overspending. Their behaviour is analysed as one of personal irresponsibility rooted partly in underlying psychological patterns of behaviour. To remedy their self-destructive conduct, Hall probes the inner psychological tics of his profligate subjects: what empty space inside or anxieties are they trying to remedy by overspending? Rather than, for example, analyse the broader economic structures that produce and encourage such consumption, the men and women on his show are excavated for emotional weaknesses and underlying traumas that trigger detrimental financial behaviour. The route to personal equilibrium, happiness and financial stability is through re-modelling the inner self via its connection to the consuming self.
The limits of subjectivity and the fantasy of remodelling a dysfunctional self are explored in lifestyle coaching programmes such as Life Laundry (C4). Participants are invited to submit their cluttered house to a coach who will teach them to rethink their relationship to personal belongings and to their domestic space. Participants are invited to explore different facets of their identity and to speak about their emotional investment in the detritus that is hoarded in their disordered houses; indeed, the programme is advertised as helping participants let go of material and emotional clutter. Both the home and the piles of belongings that are sifted through are acknowledged as libidinally invested objects. Homeowners often break down as they divest themselves of years of hoarded belongings and are encouraged to talk through the memories and feelings attached to toys, photos, collections, clothing and so on, as they emerge from the piles of clutter to a new streamlined identity. Gay Hawkins, speaking about lifestyle programmes, has commented: ‘At stake here is a way of thinking about the role of television, not simply in making subjects … but in unmaking subjects, in cultivating new sensibilities and engagements, in enabling different micropolitics of the self’ (2001:414).
BBC’s dating lifestyle programme Would Like To Meet offers the opportunity to reflect on self-conduct, interpersonal relations, different personas adopted in different environments and how others react to oneself. The programme takes single men and women who feel that they have been unsuccessful with their love life and coaches them into new social behaviour to attract a partner. It offers advice and asks the participant to reflect upon their self-image and public image in different scenarios. In the final week of the third series (BBC3, 17 August 2003), Helen Thorogood, a 35-year-old career woman from Southampton, puts herself at the mercy of the programme’s three resident ‘coaches’. Her behaviour is subjected to the modification of the programme’s body coach, celebrity stylist and confidence coach who suggest changes to her dress, conversation, social drinking, life goals, expectations of a partner and so on.
Helen’s behaviour and her dress in bars, on dates and at work is subjected to a variety of filmic techniques that signal the mood and tone of the viewing experience. The wobbling tracking shots of a hand-held camera follow Helen and body expert Tracy Cox into nightclubs and bars where they meet and chat-up potential dates. The feel is voyeuristic but also mobile, like a night ‘on the pull’. Video footage of Helen walking into work or to meetings is interspersed with footage of the coaches scrutinising video replays as they comment on her dress or note her attempts at behaviour modification. Filmed in medium to long shot, viewers see Helen within her surroundings. She is a component part of different spaces: a situated self, whose judgement about dress, image and appropriate levels of formality is modified according to setting of home, office or nightclub. In contrast, the to-camera intimacy of the video diary sections, with its amateur aesthetic of out-of-focus images, close-up direct address, Helen’s hushed exchange and the rustling background noises signify a personal dialogue beyond the reach of the coaches’ surveillance. Helen presents herself and her problems through therapeutic language. Speaking to camera, with tears streaming down her face, she explains her string of one-night stands as a search for (temporary) fulfilment followed by self-dislike. In these video diary sessions she links her sexual behaviour to her childhood bereavement following her father’s premature death and a desire to fill a gap in her life. She locates her binge drinking in a lack of confidence and inability to approach the opposite sex without feeling inadequate. The result of the television life-coaching is pursued on the programme’s web pages in which each participant updates readers on their personal progress and identity since filming stopped. The website has links to dating, parenting, relationship, health and lifestyle information.
All these programmes differ from, for example, the didactic quality of news or current affairs in that ‘their performance of expertise is informal and authoritative rather than authoritarian’ (Hawkins 2001: 418). Furthermore, they offer spaces for confession and self-interrogation and advice to the individual seeking ‘to maximise quality of life through acts of choice rather than through relations of obligation and dependency’ (ibid.). The would-be datable participants of Would Like to Meet are firmly positioned within therapeutic and lifestyle consumer discourses that locate them as bodies and psyches open to self-regulation and self-analysis. As with most lifestyle programmes, the ordinary people filmed are taken to be fully cognisant of the plethora of identities that they could possibly perform. Arguably such programmes also tap into the contemporary distrust of institutions mentioned above, and instead offer small-scale authorities; ‘everyday experts of subjectivity’ (ibid.). In this sense they are a populist response to widespread popular frustration about social institutions alongside a sense of individual emptiness or lack of fulfilment and offer instead new ways of mapping and re-fashioning the self in social space and interaction.
Numerous critics have situated the contemporary cultural experience of emptiness, dislocation or disconnection from society as symptomatic of postmodern experience. The search for personal meanings is linked to an age of globalised media images, in which everything appears as a copy, a simulacrum of something else – where authenticity and originality are endlessly deferred in the relay of communication. As Anthony Elliott argues: ‘Some of the most provocative elements in recent discussions of postmodernity have been in those areas of social and cultural theory, which explore the splintering, surface facets of contemporary selfhood’ (1996:23). Elliott connects reflexive subjectivity with the fantasy processes through which subjects constitute, through imagery, both themselves and also others. He links this to an emotional receptivity in which the contemporary subject searches for and attains a sense of relatedness to others, generated through the postmodern circuits of technology, inter-linked computer systems and mass-media simulation (1996: 28–30). Media imagery offers a ‘fantasy zone’ for generating rolling identifications which enable the subject to think through their relationship with self and links with others. We could think of Trauma TV then, in its varied formats, as ‘an affective, representational space in which to think through the limit of subjectivity: the struggle of placing the “subject” in question’ (1996:31).
To follow this line of thinking is to accept that, alongside the imaginary search for wholeness and plenitude never sated by the plethora of self-help media texts, the subject’s discontent is frequently coupled with a nostalgic yearning for a sense of authentic community. Media imagery can offer pseudo communities of ordinary people temporarily bonding in competition, experiencing alternative ways of living as a group, or united in a studio discussing shared problems, dilemmas, answers and successes that suggest an affinity with others. Trauma TV – in its guise as confession, survival, quest, mock community – answers a desire to see on screen others who, through their particular stories, echo broader hopes for and anxieties about contemporary life and whose public self-exposure provides a form of social legitimisation of that yearning. It creates simulated communities who battle with simulated trials whilst reflecting upon their personal motivation and allegiances with those thrown together in the pseudo-world of the house, jungle, school or prison. In talk shows, where the interpersonal relations of host and guests are watched by a studio community, the viewer is also provided with a privileged proximity to individual pain, desire, horror, survival and memory, but paradoxically it does so in the very public and distant space of the television screen.