Oregon Humanities

Watching Ourselves at Our Worst

Jason Openo, Salem

From Elvis to Eminem, each new wave of popular culture has been seen by established society as a herald of the decline of civilization. One of the essential roles of Art is to disturb—what Robert Hughes dubbed “The Shock of the New.” As society absorbs each shock, each new generation is forced to expand the boundaries to achieve the same shock value.

Having accepted the nature of this repetitive dance, I vowed never to be shocked by pop culture. Then, I watched Survivor for the first time and proclaimed, “The end of civilization is at hand!” All I needed for confirmation was American Idol, Joe Millionaire, Fear Factor, The Swan, The Apprentice, and Who’s Your Daddy?, doses of contrived reality each more grotesque than the last.

Andy Warhol, the pioneer of “reality television,” prophesized, “The day will come when everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” It is upon us. People don’t have to accomplish anything to be famous. For entertainment, we need only an endless stream of freakshows willing to gobble a gross amount of worms or be hacked up and recreated by plastic surgeons. Our cultural hunger to watch people suffer failure and humiliation seems insatiable. Perhaps we may yet reach the day where the number one rated show is Death Factor.

Warhol once said, “The acquisition of my tape recorder finished whatever emotional life I might have had, but I was glad to see it go. Nothing was ever a problem again, because a problem just meant a good tape. The people telling you the problems couldn’t decide any more if they were really having the problems or if they were just performing. During the ’60s, I think, people forgot what emotions were supposed to be. And I don’t think they’ve ever remembered.”

The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states that an observed subject changes knowing it is observed. So, do reality shows show us something meaningful about the essence of human nature? Or are they superficial environments where reality and performance co-mingle to the degree that neither the viewer nor the viewed can tell the difference? In our identification with the protagonists and their struggle, do we confuse our own dramas with theirs and begin to lose touch with real emotion?

The anti-establishment rapper-poet Michael Franti called TV the “drug of the nation, feeding ignorance and bleeding radiation.” Television has already eroded something crucial from human intercourse. Now, reality television encourages us to watch ourselves at our worst. Yet we cannot get enough. As Warhol put it, “Most people love watching the same basic thing, as long as the details are different. But I’m just the opposite: if I’m going to sit and watch the same thing I saw the night before, I don’t want it to be essentially the same. I want it to be exactly the same. Because the more you look at the same exact thing, the more the meaning goes away, and the better and emptier you feel.”

As we collectively empty ourselves into reali­ty television, our growing tolerance demands that any new show be more grotesque and more outlandish to generate the shock that seems to be the only authentic feeling we have any more. The Onion once ran a headline, “Lowest Common Denominator Continues to Plummet.”

But is it really worse? Or is this just the same revulsion felt by every ascending generation as they mature? Is my disgust merely a desperate bid to separate myself from the mass in an act of ego-feeding, self-protective elitism? Or is our culture really messed up?

From Spring/Summer 2005 Pop Culture