41. Interference

The producers of "The Real World" were not unlike Elon Musk and other billionaires who have the ability to control reality because money is power.

A few days before the 2024 election I went to bed convinced that I should give up on this project and woke up with the following sentence in my head: “Those who controlled the cameras then ≅ Those who control the money now.” Hand to God—congruence symbol and everything.

I’d fallen asleep with Cue the Sun, Emily Nussbaum’s history of reality television, open to p. 126. That’s about a third of the way through the book and about halfway through her chapter on the genesis of the MTV series The Real World. It’s also the chapter in which the conflict that’s been hovering in the background of the narrative really comes into focus, namely whether or not it’s ethical to manipulate reality in order to make the depiction of reality more interesting and palatable to a viewing audience.

Pages 126 and 127 describe a big show-down between the producers of The Real World and the “cast” of young creative types who have been set up in a SoHo loft with cameras rolling. At issue is an object the producers had planted in the loft hoping that it would provoke a conflict among the cast. “According to several people who were present,” Nussbaum writes, “the conversation  turned into a shouting match as cast members…insisted that they needed to understand the rules of the show.”

Nowadays, of course, viewers of reality tv and those who take part in its creation all know that what’s being presented as “reality” is something between the spontaneous and the contrived. We all know that show runners do manipulative things that they hope will provoke a dramatic response from the people being filmed. What justifies this is the idea that whatever happens as a result of the producers’ interventions will be authentic—i.e. “real”— because it’s spontaneous.

But back when the first season of The Real World was being shot, the form was apparently still embryonic enough that the cast had believed the show would be shot in true cinéma vérité style, with the cameras just picking up whatever happened naturally.

Nussbaum’s chapter on The Real World shows us the disillusionment of that naivete. At the point in the book where I fell asleep—not because I was bored but because I was thinking—the producers have just assured the cast members that there won’t be any more interference on their part.

The thought I woke up with, not having finished the chapter but knowing where this was all leading, was that from then on the producers could do whatever they liked. They could abide by the promise they had made the cast or not. They had all the power because they controlled the cameras.

In this the producers of The Real World were not unlike Elon Musk and the other billionaires whose interference in the coming election may determine its outcome. They too have the ability to control reality because money is power.

I’d initially bought Nussbaum’s book because I wanted to see what she would have to say about Cops, which is regarded as one of the earliest examples of reality tv and which I’ve drawn a certain amount of attention to here. Initially, I’d really only meant to look Cops up in the index and read the parts of the book where it’s mentioned or discussed. But a glance at the chapter on An American Family, the early 70s PBS  “documentary” series that gave all of sophisticated, educated America a chance to feel superior to the vulgar, grasping-at-fame Louds of Santa Barbara, sucked me in and made me want to start from the beginning.

Anyone old enough to remember An American Family knows that the series raised the issue of what if anything is truly authentic once cameras start rolling. But one of the things Nussbaum’s reporting uncovers is how contrived that controversy was itself, conceived and packaged, as it was, as part of the press material.

That may be why it was only later, while I was reading the chapter on The Real World, that it occurred to me how similar the issues surrounding reality tv are to those I’ve been touching on here with regard to acting and theater.

It’s all about questions of what is being made to look authentic or real by those who control our perception.

To a comparatively young me, convinced in her twenties that American audiences were being fed a line about what looks phony and what looks real, David Mamet and William H. Macy seemed like heroes because they presided over acting classes that appeared to be acknowledging and rejecting the power an acting instructor has to determine and redefine notions of realism and authenticity.

That they were really only a tiny force in what was a wholesale movement against Strasbergian method acting is probably closer to the truth. Once Strasberg was dead, people all over the country gradually began migrating toward a place where it felt safe to say what they really thought without fear of either compromising their own careers or offending the living.

If I thought Mamet and Macy were doing something revolutionary that’s because they were what I was aware of. They were doing something revolutionary but they weren’t the only people who were.

I’m still only halfway through Nussbaum’s book, but I think she’s going to provide at least a partial answer to something that’s had me stymied.

Looking back on my own youthful excesses and fanaticisms, I’ve been tempted to see a connection between what seemed to me an apotheosis of mediocre acting and Trumpism, to say that a culture that had trained generations of Americans to accept something phony as something real has led to the current political climate. That would be sort of vindicating.

But it would be ahistorical, I think. Not that many people go to the theater, for one thing. For another, my sense is that right around the time I stopped writing about theater, things started getting a whole lot better. There’s tons more truth in American acting now than there was back then. What tends to get produced seems exponentially better as well.

I have my own theories about why that is, but it leaves open the question of how we arrived at a point where huge segments of society are unable to perceive what’s true and what isn’t.

Nussbaum’s final chapter focuses on “The Apprentice,” the show that force fed the American public an image of Trump that endowed him with a competence and authority one might expect in a President. But it’s the chapter that follows the one on “The Real World” where everything began to crystallize for me. That one—it’s entitled “The Con”—is about Fox in the years when the X Files craze gave rise to a fashion for hoax programming, shows like “Alien Autopsy” that packaged bullshit as “documentary.”  

The show’s tone (high camp, low tabloid) and its subject matter (the spirit world, conspiracy theories) let its creators merge the serious and the silly in a way that made it hard to criticize. If the show you were watching was a joke, who cared if it was also a fake. Marketed correctly, these productions managed to be simultaneously authentic and phony, news and anti-news, without that feeling like any kind of contradiction.

What Nussbaum seems to be heading toward is the emergence of a viewing public that can’t distinguish between a Presidential candidate and a game show host because it doesn’t care whether something is real or not. Everything is just entertainment.