fastidium

Kind of a weird thought, eh? Probably something that you’ve never thought about. Well, I have.

When I talk about comics, I mean those flimsy little periodicals that feature characters such as Superman, Spiderman, Spawn, The Incredible Hulk, and the Flash. Many, many, many of them have been (recently) turned into major motion pictures. Any fan of comics will be able to tell you why they exist. The characters are an exaggeration of human strengths, weaknesses, and human emotions. The storylines are taken from life and death situations that human beings have had to grapple with and made fanciful with science fiction or alternative realities. Sometimes the characters are trying to correct a wrong that they themselves are responsible for. What’s universal about them is their purpose to illustrate real struggles of good versus evil. They are our modern day mythology.

We have this rather new genre of television shows called reality television. There have been instances of unscripted television in the past, such as Candid Camera, but what I have in mind are shows like The Real World, Miami Ink, American Idol, Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, and Big Brother. These shows are purported to be unscripted and the people who are in them are not actors (or at least, weren’t hired to be for the show). They can be humorous, they can be political, and they can include a bit of self-improvement for the people involved, but what they cannot be, contrary to the name of the genre, is reality.

They can’t be reality because they are condensed snippets of alleged real events in a 30 or 60 minute timeframe. So what if they made the shows longer? They still can’t be real. They can’t be real because the people involved know that they are on television, so no matter how long the show is, as soon as the camera roles the very idea of “real” vanishes. The people involved know it, the viewer (subconsciously) knows it. Ask yourself this, if you were being recorded while you worked, would you act differently? If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll answer yes. The camera changes everything.

So, let’s compare the two: comic books and reality television. On the one hand, in a comic book, there’s usually a storyline wherein at some point the character has to make a moral, ethical, or life-changing decision. They will exemplify what is the right (or wrong) within an exaggerated world that’s meant to mirror our own. They will show us something about ourselves and the world that matters around us. On the other hand, reality television is there to get ratings and the more bizarre or outlandish the better. If the mundane world of the participants were being recorded without their knowing it, no one would watch. But what does get people to watch is when those participants do the unusual. We watch them because they are based upon the can you believe they did that kind of reactions. They are, in essence, unreal.

Yet, its all about entertainment, right? Both comic books and reality television are entertaining, no one’s disagreeing with that idea. It just seems like the names got mixed up. We call something “comic” and its really non-comical. We call another thing “reality” and its really non-reality. Something to think about.