Aisling O’Gara lambasts the current reality TV culture by comparing Tallafornia to the critically-acclaimed satire Black Mirror…
Aisling O’Gara
Staff Writer
Charlie Brooker’s 2011 satirical triptych Black Mirror is a bleak examination of the role of television, technology and social media in contemporary (and future) society. Its central episode, Fifteen Million Merits, is set in a dystopian future world in which fame is the only escape. Like Brave New World, its society is rigidly stratified: the upper castes are allowed to wear their own clothes and go outside; the middle castes wear grey uniforms, and are confined indoors, spending their nights caged in cube-rooms whose walls are screens. They spend their lives on stationary bikes, generating electricity and simultaneously earning ‘merits’ which are spent mainly on food and virtual items for their ‘doppels’, avatars similar to those the Wii currently uses. The lower castes wear yellow, for which they are referred to as lemons, and perform menial tasks like cleaning. A worker becomes a lemon when they become too old, or fat, to generate enough electricity on a bike.
The workers cycle bikes before screens; wash before mirrors which double as screens; sleep surrounded by screens. Attempting to skip commercials or mute entertainment incurs a penalty. The main three programmes they watch are Hot Shot, an X-Factor style talent show; Wraith Babes (“The hottest girls in the nastiest situations”), and Botherguts. We’re only shown a few seconds of Botherguts, when the protagonist’s obnoxious work-neighbour watches it, but it’s immediately obvious what the show’s premise is: obese people, dressed in lower- caste yellow, gorge themselves on donuts and cakes in an attempt to win prizes, while the well- dressed (and therefore famous and upper-caste) mock them. The camera bounces around wackily. The fat people are stripped and covered in slop, or shown writhing like animals on the floor, covered in food. Everyone laughs.
One of Black Mirror’s primary themes is the dehumanising effect the television screen has, both on the people who become objects for our entertainment, and the people who view them. With Botherguts, this dehumanisation is conveyed in only a few seconds of screen-time, but it’s a shrewd observation of the intersection, in reality TV, of class tourism and groups of people we still feel fairly comfortable about mocking – fat people. The fat people are marked by their conspicuously yellow uniforms. They’re acceptable targets because the audience is allowed to feel itself better than them: richer and more attractive. The perceived gap, aided by the distancing a screen creates, allows the audience to view the people as deserving of their contempt: they couldn’t take the biking, and therefore it’s their own fault they’re both fat and poor. They deserve mockery.
Which is, of course, the implicit message of the dozens of fat-person documentaries out there. Botherguts is a great little detail in Black Mirror because it’s only a slightly exaggerated example of something that already exists. Fat people are a group we, as a society, feel good about criticising: the evidence of their supposed sins of gluttony and sloth are, after all, their bodies. The majority of these ‘documentaries’ about twenty-ton teenagers are little better than obvious excuses to tune in and immediately feel better about ourselves: we may be overweight, or unattractive, but we’re better than them. Mocking the ugly is mean, after all, because they can’t help it, but mocking the fat (frequently under the guise of concern) is totally acceptable.
Which is also where the class-tourism element comes in: the people in these documentaries are rarely, if ever, middle-class. The Chawner family make good viewing because we can sneer at them for being fat and poor. They inspire our disdain, in the way that a show about, say, how Fionnuala just can’t make time for the gym between cello and extracurricular Russian, wouldn’t. Class-tourism, of course, also works the other way: we feel entitled to disdain, or even hate, the stars of Made in Chelsea or My Super Sweet Sixteen because they’re rich and spoiled and they deserve it.
Which is where Tallafornia comes in. David Norris described the show’s latest episode as “both compulsive and repulsive viewing.” The usual accusations of moral laxity, debauchery, and contributing-to-the-downfall-of-society have been thrown at it. It’s held up, as is SOP with these shows, as a mirror of how stupid and boorish society has become. We watch delightedly as its stars get pissed and act as badly as we expect them to, and then we loudly disapprove of them and mock their stupidity and boorishness. We can do this because we’re doubly removed from them: they’re behind a screen, and therefore public objects we feel comfortable about mocking, and from working class backgrounds, so the average middle-class viewer can have their prejudices confirmed for them as they disapprove. They’re an example of how dreadful a certain section of society has become, and because they’re not (the middle-class) Us, it’s therefore acceptable to ridicule and despise them. The illusion, of course, is that this outrage is an organic reaction to what we’re being shown. That these shows aren’t designed to create this very outrage; that the creators aren’t counting on the enjoyment we get from sneering at what we’re shown. That the voyeurism of the class-tourist isn’t being appealed to.
We’re aware, of course, that the ‘reality’ element is spurious at best, but we still seem to subscribe to objectivity of the camera itself. That is, we don’t question how the shot is framed, or chosen, or eventually edited, and are accordingly disgusted by the girl on screen, and not the camera posed to show us her underwear. We notice situations which are obviously false, but will willingly accept that these people are just as terrible as the show needs them to be in order to guarantee its success. We claim that they deserve our disgust — they signed up for it, after all — but choose not to the acknowledge the complete lack of control the participants have over how they’re eventually represented. Norris’s contention that Tallafornia’s stars are being exploited is a fairly obvious one, but the truth is that the audience is being exploited too — namely, our willingness to hate the objects of our gaze, once a suitable distance (be it weight, or class, or even just the glass of the television screen itself) has been established. The enjoyment we get from mocking these people, and our sure conviction that they deserve it. Our belief that we are morally superior to them, and that they deserve whatever treatment they get, because they’re on the other side of the screen.
Many appraisals of reality TV tend to end with similar conclusions: this is bad, and you should feel bad for watching this. But the multiple dynamics which inform this kind of television — voyeurism, schadenfreude, class tourism, the relationship between subject/viewer and object/viewed — are far too complex to be reduced in this way. People have always been fascinated by the behaviour of others, particularly those at a cultural or social distance, and the argument could certainly be made that reality TV is just a vehicle to facilitate this natural aspect of human nature. If people are going to be stupid in front of a camera, they should simply accept the consequences. But I would like to end by posing the reader a question: which is ultimately more repulsive, a drunken girl simulating sex on screen, or thousands of people watching her, comfortable in their smug disdain for the object of entertainment they’ve been asking for all along?
