Reality TV: Realism and Revelation

The public expression of traumatic memories can be considered as an important ingredient of the reality TV format. Thomas Elsaesser (2001) signals the raft of personal experiences and memories of trauma – personal memoirs, testimony, family history – currently in the mass media market. Whereas earlier periods tended to concentrate on publicly legitimated memories of trauma informed by grand narratives – war, ethnic cleansing, disaster – towards the end of the twentieth century private stories began entering the public domain. Correspondingly, the range of possible genres for dealing with the extreme experiences of trauma has also expanded as new, seemingly less formal genres accommodate personal accounts. Importantly, alongside that expansion has come the call for cultural critics to acknowledge the role of popular media texts in articulating trauma and for theoreticians to move beyond the individual subjective analysis to think through the cultural scene of such traumatic expression and its popularity (Radstone 2001).

In his analysis of ‘post-traumatic culture’, Kirby Farrell convincingly argues that trauma can be seen as both ‘a clinical concept and a cultural trope’ (2002: 14). He regards it as a contemporary medium for the expression of unease about a world in which power structures and forms of authority are beyond everyday influence and where individual responsibility and impotence seem all pervading. Trauma, seen as a trope, ‘may be a veiled or explicit criticism of society’s defects, a cry of distress and a tool grasped in the hopes of some redress, but also a justification for aggression’ (ibid.). In the current ‘post-traumatic culture’ of Britain and the United States, which is attuned to the widespread damage of advanced industrialisation, the acute injury and internal damage to individuals and communities caused by war, plane or train disasters, sexual abuse or terrorism have all gained statutory recognition. In the post-Vietnam US, trauma has been part of courtroom exchange in claims for military-induced damage; a practice continued in the aftermath of the Gulf Wars both sides of the Atlantic. The women’s movements have drawn upon trauma to politicise the private sphere and it has been cited to lend credence to arguments about domestic violence and sexual abuse. To this we can add that trauma can be used ideologically; the aftermath of civil war or state torture, starvation or rape is rendered invisible for cultural groups seen as outsiders intruding on ‘our’ national and emotional resources. Trauma can be used as a counter-claim to evict traumatised refugee-strangers from our land or to scapegoat outsiders. It has functioned at the centre of ideologically and ethically loaded debates about abortion and ‘false-memory syndrome’ and is now embedded in many areas of public policy and criminal law (Farrell 2002:24). In all respects, what is certain is that ‘trauma’ is common currency. And the media function as a vehicle for the expression of violent cultural events and their aftermath as well as ‘a register of dissonance’, the jolt of cultural recognition of the individual and collective capacity for violence and atrocity.

Since the 1990s trauma has shaped some of the central media narratives and its popular expression has proliferated in Hollywood movies such as the account of survival and subsequent psychic crisis in Peter Weir’s Fearless (1993) and Mike Nichols’ Regarding Henry (1991). Alongside such fictions, diverse factual narratives explore ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ from the war stories of ‘berserking’ Vietnam veterans to the celebrity profiles in Vanity Fair which locate driving ambition in the survival impulses arising from childhood psychological injury. Whilst trauma has become both an explanatory tool for cultural distress and an enabling fiction, Farrell suggests that a corollary of such cultural overexposure is the need for the traumatised subject and the media to find a reinvigorated discourse that can compel an audience numbed into compassion fatigue:1

As we have already argued, crucial to this popularisation of trauma is the diffusion of psychoanalytic discourses in contemporary culture and in particular the concept of the recoverable self.2 Reality TV can be analysed for its popularisation of psychoanalytic discourse from the ‘ego psychology’ prevalent in American-style confessional chat shows to the increasingly popular survival show in which a series of combatants overcome personal inhibition and physical limitation to attempt to achieve a higher and often financially lucrative status. The immediacy of the ‘real event’ is established through images of determination, failure, personal strength and inner conflict. In talk shows such as Oprah or Sally Jessy Raphael (NBC) video footage of ‘survivors’ in their hometown or amidst family, work colleagues or friends, sometimes provide an everyday ‘authentic’ backdrop to the studio confession. In survival shows, technology provides some signification of authenticity. Sweeping overhead shots capture the action and the location of competitors or mobile tracking shots of camcorders follow them, footsore but determined, over rough jungle terrain. Close-ups or night-vision shots of competitors show them in highly dangerous but also highly monitored circumstances: balancing on wires over ravines, perched on a pole in the sea for hours under a blistering sun, burrowing underground in pitch-dark passages echoing with disorientating sounds. In shows like Survivor or The Mole, or historical reconstructions like The Trench or The 1940s House, participants speak to video camera of their tiredness, fear or pain. Whilst such footage acknowledges the visceral effects of intense competition or physical deprivation, the hidden ‘damage’ or psychological barriers to success have to be verbalised and are often couched in therapeutic discourse either by host, commentator/expert or frequently by the subjects themselves.

The conventions of talk shows are crucial, as precursors of the reality TV format as they familiarised audiences with therapeutic discourse and valorised the televising of raw emotion as a marker of a previously undisclosed emotional reality. Sigmund Freud (1925) makes a distinction between ideational elements (interpretative discourses) and affect (raw psychic experience). The rendering of the unconscious into words and representations can be understood as both cathartic and healing but also as a defence mechanism in which intellectual discourses smooth over disturbing violent emotions. Talk shows provide forums for public confessional that appear open and direct, but also substantiate the idea that talk conceals as well as unveils the latent traumatic event. Shows such as Oprah, Trisha, Ricki Lake or The John Walsh Show (NBC) convey the idea that some experiences are too ‘real’ to be expressed by words alone and rely on guests breaking down in tears, showing signs of distress, wringing their hands or visibly trembling as physical registers of hidden damage. Popularised psychoanalytic notions of trauma, working-through and recovery are embedded in the presentation of these programmes. In fly-on-the-wall documentaries such as Cutting Edge: The Wedding (C4) and British reality TV series such as Nurse (BBC2), Lakesiders (BBC) (the filming of the ‘community’ of workers and shoppers at an Essex shopping mall) and Airport several participants break down at different moments in the narrative as they reveal marriage break-ups, emotional worries or family troubles. These moments are constructed as those nearest to real communication, outside of language when the person filmed bares their soul to the camera.

In an episode of The John Walsh Show, Walsh carefully interviews a young woman who has been set alight and badly scarred by her ex-partner. Two men, hearing her screams, had saved her when she was only seconds from death. Her memory of events is hazy and has been pieced together with the evidence of her rescuers (who also appear on the show) and police accounts. Her story of recovery is articulated through a mix of religious and therapeutic references. Invited to recount the experience, the camera lingers on her face, deeply damaged, particularly at the moment when her voice trembles and falters, she fidgets with her hands, and tears start in her eyes as she tries to recall the previously traumatic void of burning alive. In this, perhaps rather too obvious example, we can see the broader talk show convention of valorising the body and the voice as markers of an invisible reality to which only the interviewee has recourse. Geoffrey Hartmann has located this desire to animate the transient or ungraspable as part of visual culture’s ‘illusion not of making absent things present but present things more present (than they are or can be)’ (2000: 112). He claims that television, even when presenting factual information rather than fiction, ‘emits a hyperbolic form of visuality’ as a means to assure truthfulness and to justify the audience’s credence’ (ibid.).3

Some talk shows – Jenny Jones, Jerry Springer, Ricki Lake – have embraced hyperbole and increasingly orchestrated physical conflict or violent responses between former partners, betrayed children, rival lovers or angry neighbours to ensure the camera shot of explosive behaviour or ‘raw emotion’ and to exploit the audience’s response – the cat calls, boos and cheers, sharp collective gasps and gusts of incredulous laughter (Grindstaff 1997:168). Those shows that do not revert to carnivalesque displays of extreme behaviour, but present themselves as mannered confessionals, face the technical problem of how to represent the traces of a traumatic experience which by its very definition as trauma is absent, perhaps even to the speaker themselves. And secondly, how to represent this in a way that counters the cold, objectifying status of the ‘imperturbable camera’ and its intrusive gaze when dealing with human vulnerability and exposure (1997:118).

One episode of The John Walsh Show exemplifies the typical playing out of the above characteristics. John Walsh talks to men who have turned in a relative to the police for murder. Bill Babbit is one of the guests. He surrendered his brother Manny, a Vietnam veteran, for the murder of a 78-year-old woman. Babbit recalls this traumatic event in the first person to a studio audience. The witnessing of his brother’s mental deterioration after military service in Vietnam and the discovery of his crime are recounted in a measured voice interspersed with sympathetic prompts from Walsh. Babbit quietly narrates his numbed realisation of his brother’s crime, the horror of acknowledging the murder, the ethical crisis of informing on him and the stages of coming to terms with the loss of a loved one who was markedly changed following service in the Vietnam conflict. His personal crisis culminated in the blow of the law reneging on its promise that his brother would be spared execution but would be given therapeutic treatment instead.

In keeping with talk show conventions, The John Walsh Show is ‘not a balance of viewpoints but a serial association of testimonials’ and, in a now-ritualised process, family members or friends are often called upon to add their personal account (Carpagnino et al. in Livingstone & Lunt 1994:63). In this episode for example, Manny Babbit’s adult children are called up alongside their uncle. They have not spoken to their uncle for over three years since he turned their father in to the police. Walsh switches to a mix of therapeutic, religious and counselling discourses. Continuing the role of therapist, he uses a lowered voice, maintains eye contact with the guests, asks questions, reinterprets accounts in psychoanalytic terms and confronts their emotions or responses to events.4 He asks the uncle to ‘get past the anger’ that the children feel. He asks the children if they have come to terms with their uncle’s actions and their father’s execution whilst suggesting that Manny Babbit has now ‘gone to a better place’. He talks of ‘healing’, pain and loss. Of the murder victim’s family, Walsh speaks to camera, stating that ‘I pray they have found the closure they sought’. In The John Walsh Show, as in many talk shows, therapy turns into media-friendly fireside homily.

As images of trauma are increasingly embedded in popular formats the difficulty of freshly inspiring empathy arises for the programme makers and the corresponding pressure to respond with empathy occurs for the viewer. To accentuate the horror and distress, the talk show draws on a number of filmic and narrative devices. In The John Walsh Show, a number of representational tropes accentuated the strength and integrity of Babbit’s emotional distress whilst he himself appeared calm and measured. John Walsh used repetition to reinforce the immensity of events – for example when told that Manny Babbit was on death row for 18 years, he incredulously turned to audience and camera to repeat ’18 years’ several times. Babbit was shot in medium close-up to accentuate the minutiae of his emotional facial expressions. News headlines – ‘war hero ends his life in death chamber’ – complemented the account of Manny’s exemplary military service and consequent psychological disintegration. The audience in particular registered a personal identification through their tears or hands clasped to face or breast as the tale unfolded.

John Langer has located such techniques within the culture of popular journalism.5 He suggests that news stories of everyday men or women who are suddenly ensnared in a state of crisis also draw on the physical presence of witnesses who provide testimony on behalf of the victim; adding a veracity not available to media professionals and offering an image of emotional engagement. In response to key moments, the camera frequently cut to the shocked or anguished or sympathetic response of one or two of the audience who compensated for Babbit’s composure. Manny Babbit’s children and their story provided another level of identification for viewers; they suggested that trauma, even when it did not affect the subject directly, could occur to someone close to them. Walsh’s interventions offered a slightly more detached identification with the victim: ‘safe yet still concerned, sympathetic without getting overwhelmed, engaged but at a distance’ (1992:121).

As with many talk shows, Walsh is positioned on the side of lay people rather than experts (Livingstone & Lunt 1994: 36–70). In keeping with his former hosting of America’s Most Wanted: America Fights Back he is constructed in NBC publicity as an advocate of the victim with a highly credible reputation. The publicity claims that, following the 11 September 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center twin towers, the White House called on him ‘to help the American people come to terms and better understand the war on terrorism’.⁶ Walsh himself declares himself an ordinary man who also shares an exceptional allegiance with victims. His own personal tragedy frequently enters public discourse as evidence of a special knowledge of pain, suffering and a lack of closure, which his television shows allegedly provide for others.

In July 1981 Walsh’s six-year-old son Adam was abducted and later found murdered.⁷ The suspected perpetrator was never charged with the crime and later died in prison serving life for other felonies. In the Babbit interview, Walsh presents himself as a survivor of the emotional destruction that crime can cause: ‘Heartbreak and anguish can consume you for years, like it consumed me for years and take you to places you don’t want to go.’ As an ordinary individual he situates himself outside the state institutions and represents a candid despair at statutory punishment, colluding with Babbit’s anger at a judicial system that deprived a war veteran of therapy and enforced a death row sentence. Walsh speaks of the ‘criminal injustice system I’ve lived with for 21 years’. In an interview about his work on America’s Most Wanted tracking the 11 September terrorists, Walsh describes his horrific encounter with Ground Zero and conjures up images of traumatised families searching for missing relatives in the rubble of the twin towers. In this and numerous other crime scenes, Walsh links others’ anguish to his own search for his missing son. He is representative of the media celebrity as privileged possessor of psychic crisis. His personal pain constitutes justification for his media role of articulating the trauma of the ordinary person: ‘We are going to tell those stories of the people that are waiting because I have been there. I walked in their shoes when I was searching for my son.’⁸

In this respect, such talk shows have in common with television and film ‘trauma drama’ a readiness to communicate popular scepticism about social institutions. Jane Feuer (1995) has suggested that the trauma dramas, popular on US television in the 1980s, pitched official against individual action in narratives that uncovered hypocrisy and official cover-ups to the detriment of the ordinary individual and family. Her first example is ABC’s Friendly Fire (1979), in which ‘ordinary’ American parents are driven to investigate their son’s ‘accidental’ death at the hands of his own side in Vietnam. Describing Feuer’s analysis, Derek Paget concludes: ‘The very title of the film throws back at the military its own ghastly newspeak euphemism, the product of a war of “body counts” and “pacification programmes”’ (1998: 170). Trauma drama and US talk shows often share the self-help individualism endorsed in the Reagan years and showcase the actions of individuals forced to pursue the truth in the face of official incompetence or suspected cover-ups. They both proclaim a heightened realism underscored by the narratives of personal battle and triumph over institutional failure or irresponsibility. Paget claims, that in this respect, trauma drama ‘opens up documentary space’ and ‘thereby mimics the actual experience of individuals forced to act on their own behalf’ (1998:171).

Arguably, therefore, Walsh’s persona represents a broader move within popular realist formats to challenge the ‘expert’ and their specialist knowledge and to hold them accountable to ordinary people (Livingstone & Lunt 1994: 98–9). Authorities and experts are given second ranking in a hierarchy of credibility behind ordinary people, whose suffering ranks highest. Additionally, in talk shows, experts are increasingly exhorted to adopt both a conversational or self-help discourse and to claim personal experience to legitimate their advice to a media/studio audience. This was illustrated in an episode of Kilroy (BBC1, June 2003) on experiences of child abuse. When the expert was called upon to provide the closing message of the programme, Robert Kilroy questioned him in personal terms, disclosing that the expert had formerly been the victim of child abuse. Whilst this may have been a strategic move by Kilroy to humanise expert impersonal advice with his personal story, the speaker angrily rejected this positioning. In a distinct clash between host and expert the latter refused to embellish his advice with intimate personal details and rebutted – ‘I’ve not come here to speak about that.’ He alleged that his appearance on Kilroy was solely to promote his charity and help-line for abuse survivors to which Kilroy retorted that at least he had been given the final few minutes of television speaking time. In contrast, at the end of his confession on The John Walsh Show, Bill Babbit spoke explicitly about his personal experience claiming it as the backdrop to his formation of a charity: Murder Victims’ Families For Reconciliation. However, despite the different emphases, in both cases, the ordinary anecdotal account of trauma was prioritised over the expert abstraction illustrating that, in talk shows, experts are most valued if they appear on a level footing with the disenfranchised. Furthermore, in talk shows, trauma is rightly defined as an experience of continuing impact; in which a past wounding event continues to return and to influence the present life.9

To their credit, many talk shows gesture towards moral integrity and claim to use the ordinary person’s trauma and survival to (try to) motivate their viewers towards an ethical life. Again, the role of trauma as cultural trope seems apposite, for television disclosure of personal trauma energises public narratives of right and wrong, good and evil, and marks the ordinary subject for their ethical decision to speak out. These stories of severe trauma represent one end of a spectrum of televisual representations that attempt to shape our ethical sensibilities. For, as Gay Hawkins argues, new popular formats – from programmes on changing personal dress, garden or house styles, to cookery and diet shows, talk shows and morning news-chat – ’involve examinations of ways to live’. They divest ‘information about the care and management of the self, explorations of the tensions between collective versus self-interest, audience participation in quests for the truth of the self’ (2001: 412). In early June 2003, television reviewers noted a swathe of new reality lifestyle programmes hitting the British TV screens. A sub-genre of factual programming on lifestyle coaching was in full swing and in the US, journalists also commented on the mounting success of ‘makeover’ reality TV. In the second week of June, a number of programmes competed with more conventional documentary programming for audience numbers. These shows appeared to be a development of popular makeover programmes such as Changing Rooms (BBC1) and What Not to Wear (BBC2) and of talk show confessional mixed with the voyeuristic observation of ordinary people beloved by reality TV.10 Dubbed by reviewer Jason Deans as ‘car crash lifestyle TV’, he commented on the propensity of such programmes to invite viewers to voyeuristically observe ordinary people and to ‘share in the humiliation of participants who have aspects of their personal lives ripped to shreds’.¹¹ In contrast, editorial director Daisy Goodwin of Talkback Productions (maker of numerous ‘self-improvement TV’ shows),¹² argued that: ‘Everyone wants to know how to improve their life … these shows both give you hope – you think, “If she could find a date, so could I” – and make you feel better about yourself, because you think, “I’m not as bad as that”‘ (in Lyall 2003: 2).

Talkback Productions’ The Dinner Party Inspectors explored dinner party decorum by visiting a private party set by an ordinary group of friends or relatives each week. The inspectors, a slightly parodic upper-middle-class duo, Victoria Mather and Meredith Etherington-Smith, swilled white wine while watching the party via a surveillance video and the television audience’s own surveillance of the party was cross-cut with the inspectors’ withering comments on dress sense, culinary disasters, appropriate behaviour and conversation. Through much of the series, therapeutic discourse infused dinner table talk. In one episode, the hostess spoke of her search for psychological wholeness, drawing on pop-therapy solutions from feng shui to a magazine-style checklist of positive and negative life points. In another excruciating episode, a hostess pushed her guest (who was clearly uncomfortable with the self-analysis of some of his fellow diners) into revealing that his brother was stabbed to death. The first episode (10 June 2003) – in which Jamie, a gay cellist from Islington, North London threw a party to introduce his long-lost straight sister to musical friends – was followed by The Reality Check (C4) which continued the therapeutic theme. Acting coach Kate Marlow played therapist as she descended on a group of professional female footballers and asked them to play out their childhood traumas to rapidly establish an unresolved sexual tension between the male coach and players that was wrecking pre-match preparation.