Hey guys, before we get started, I wanted
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to the publication or click up here to get taken to the page. Thanks everyone, and now, on with the show. What's up guys? Jared again. Media has a huge effect on the way we view
the world. Jaws made everyone afraid of sharks. It made everyone afraid of clowns. Big made everybody afraid of being rapidly
aged by a weird fortune telling machine. But what about when media actually portrays
the real world in all of its whale abusers, duck hunters, and baby beauty queens? If imaginary house elves can make us more
sympathetic to inequality what does watching actual factual humans do to us? We’re in the midst of a nonfiction media
boom - both documentary and reality TV. There were 750 reality shows in 2015, leading
some critics to say that it’s even remade television culture entirely. Similarly, documentary has been cinema's unlikely
Cinderella in recent years, with three documentaries in 2018 cracking the list of top 30 highest-grossing
documentaries since 1982, and that’s not even counting the insane proliferation of
documentary filmmaking happening on streaming sites. If fictional media changes the way we view
the world, how does nonfiction media contribute to or inform our worldview? In short, what might documentaries and reality
TV be doing to our brainy parts? Let’s find out in this week’s Wisecrack
Edition on The Philosophy of Documentaries and Reality TV. And spoilers ahead for some documentaries. To figure out how documentaries and reality
TV affect us, we first need to understand what this stuff is. Documenting reality is literally as old as
filmmaking itself. The earliest films, made around the end of
the 19th century, were pretty much all super short visual accounts of real life events,
like workers peacing out from their factory or an elephant being cruelly tortured for
our entertainment, which you can thank your favorite lightbulb inventing scoundrel, Thomas
Edison for. Yes, this elephant is about to be electrocuted
and no we’re not going to show you cause fuck that! But the term documentary has always implied
more than just taking a camera and shooting whatever goes down in the life of your local
yodeling community, though, by all means, go for it! The word “documentary” was first used
by Scottish filmmaker John Grierson in the 1920s, and he described it as “the creative
treatment of actuality.” Even this definition says a lot. Applying creativity to actuality already suggests
that it's distinct from actual actuality. Rather than showing neutral uncut footage
of an event, a documentarian will use a variety of tools, including editing, to string together
a compelling story. Since its early days, documentary has had
a complicated relationship with the truth. Take the 1922 documentary Nanook of the North,
which depicted the life of a man from the Inuk tribe. The film is definitely misleading - for starters,
Nanook wasn’t even named Nanook - His real name was Allakariallak, but the director,
Robert J Flaherty, thought that was unmarketable. Flaherty also staged several scenes which
were historically inaccurate, showing Inuk life the way it would have been a century
prior. For instance, though Nanook typically hunted
walruses with a simple gun, Flaherty asked him to use a harpoon for the sake of drama. The film’s various elements compound to
present Nanook and his family as childish, primitive and a bit silly. It helps here to think about a different definition
of documentary, as an “imaginative representation of an actual historical reality.” Documentary is supposed to have fidelity to
a particular historical reality - whether its showing an Inuk tribe in the 1920s or
a wealthy Florida Housewife in 2012. Flaherty distorted that reality by depicting
historically inaccurate customs. As we move forward to the 1930s and 40s, the
way documentary bends the truth is perhaps most glaringly apparent, when just about every
major country put out its own form of propaganda trying to get people jazzed about war and
whatnot. Most notably, Triumph of the Will solidified
Hitler’s power and public persona. Now, we seem to talk about this movie more
often than a 1930s German soldier at a dive bar, but I swear its relevant. In this film, we see the way subtle choices
in cinematography can drastically alter a documentary’s meaning and fidelity to the
truth: Look at the way Hitler appears on camera, from a low-angle shot, he seems taller, almost
larger than life, and certainly more powerful. Gross. Anyway, that same year, the “talking head”
or the interview style in which an often boring person stares at the screen and talks for
awhile, would be introduced via the documentary Housing Problems, as an attempt to let individuals
tell their own story, rather than having it dictated by a “voice of god” narrator. This was an honest attempt to make storytelling
more truthful. In the 1960s, cameras became smaller, allowing
film crews to become more mobile. This facilitated a new form of documentary
practiced by filmmakers like the Maysles Brothers. It was called “cinema verite,” which translates
to “truthful cinema” or “cinema of truth.” Functionally, cinema verite filmmakers will
follow their subject around, passively observing their lives without interfering, as the subject
ignores the camera, all in an attempt to more accurately capture the truth. Of course, that caused problems of its own. Because the camera movements imply honesty,
we assume that we’re watching actual reality. Some filmmakers, such as Richard Pennebaker
who made the Bob Dylan documentary Don’t Look Back were sensitive to this, and purposely
kept aesthetically unpleasing cinematography flourishes to argue for the film’s truthfulness
- showing the audience the camera eye focusing, or keeping awkward zooms. Filmmakers began experimenting further with
the very nature of what it meant to engage in nonfiction storytelling. Documentarian Errol Morris encorporated dramatic
reenactments to simulate a real-life murder in his 1988 film The Thin Blue Line, to some
criticism. By the early 90s, more intimate documentaries
became popular, functioning as cinematic autobiographies or a close look at an artist’s family. In recent years, films also became “voicier,”
as in the work of Michael Moore who editorializes and inserts himself into his own plots, less
documenting reality than crafting it. The 2000s were dominated by documentaries
that made strong arguments like An Inconvenient Truth, Super Size Me, and Fahrenheit 9/11. In Super Size Me, the documentarian is the
opposite of the neutral observer - he literally turns the camera on himself and his rapidly
deteriorating liver (Which, if we’re speaking about ethics, becomes a little more problematic
due to recent revelations that director Morgan Spurlok was a longtime alcoholic. So can we really blame only Fast food?) In a lot of ways, these films are more self
aware than your classic cinema verite - their artifice is right on the surface. For example, when Michael Moore storms a General
Motors shareholders meeting, we clearly know we’re not witnessing neutral reality. At the same time, modern filmmakers are also,
arguably, taking more creative license with the truth. There is perhaps no greater narrative artifice
than the satisfying, climactic ending. Many a documentarian has grappled with this,
but perhaps none more interestingly than filmmaker Ben Berman in his documentary, Untitled Amazing
Jonathan Documentary. In it, the filmmaker shadows the titular,
terminally-ill magician. The problem is: Several other people are doing
the exact same thing. Looking for a way to make his story stand
out, Berman, at one point, believes that the only satisfying conclusion would be Jonathan
dying. Waiting for your subject to die is pretty
blatantly macabre, and Jonathan even calls the guy out on it. "You're just waitin', you're just waitin'-
you're biding your time until I die and then you get that ending you want." Here, Berman confronts the inherent ethical
dilemmas of imposing requirements of a satisfying story on reality. Luckily, he finds an ending without killing
the Amazing Jonathan. But beyond imposing artificial beginnings
and ends, creatively tinkering with reality has other complications. Take the issue of characterization, or the
way that characters are constructed in a given piece of media. Scholar Carl Plantinga notes that, “in any
documentary, the images and sounds that represent the character are not neutral and transparent,
but carefully constructed and chosen to portray them in a specific way.” He adds that the process of “selection and
omission, emphasis,[plotting] and point of view” all create additional ethical dilemmas
for documentarians. The way most documentarians will deal with
this is to make characters that are, as Plantinga puts it, “flat” or simple, possessing
one or two central characteristics. For example, in a Michael Moore documentary
like Roger and Me which serves as an indictment of the very very wealthy, you’re not going
to see General Motors CEO Roger Smith patting his son on the back, or giving a dollar to
a homeless man, because the message of the film is that he’s an evil asshole. Forming “round” or complex characters,
according to Plantinga, is much more difficult. And so, for the most part, every aspect of
filmmaking and editing will serve to emphasize a central quality of any given character. (Now, this is also true of fiction… but
that’s part of what makes it fiction.) Flat characters seems like as good a segway
to reality TV as we could ask for. Now, reality TV has always been documentary’s
bastard son. But we just want to say here: Most documentarians
struggle deeply with the ethics of their craft. Reality TV? Not so much. It’s less respected and taken less seriously. It’s also frequently charged with taking
a giant Nerf gun to reality. But the truth is more complicated. Some of the earliest iterations of “televisual
reality" fall somewhere between the categories of documentary and reality TV. This includes Candid Camera, which used a
hidden camera to film normal people reacting to practical jokes on and off from 1948 to
2014. Similarly, An American Family used what television
scholar Misha Kavka calls a “live-in camera” to chronicle the oftentimes boring pursuits
of one upper middle class American family to the delight of millions. Kavka goes on to separate the history of “real”
reality tv into three distinct categories. The first is the camcorder generation which
hit a stride in 1989 with a boom of crime and emergency programmes that offer an “ultra
verite” experience through the use of shaky ride-along footage. These shows were super real, but they also
vacillated between being very exciting and very, very boring. So reality TV regrouped. The second generation began in 1999, and that’s
when things get gnarly. We start seeing competition shows like Survivor,
The Amazing Race, American Idol and America’s Next Top Model, along with surveillance shows
like Big Brother and The Real World. As Kavka notes, the genre began developing
“its own format rules, production practices and audience expectations” such as confessional
interviews, elimination ceremonies, and plenty of ugly crying. Kavka notes that this era of reality tv “found
its place in the millennial culture imaginary by openly combining actuality and artifice
in ways that broke ratings records and caused wide-scale debate.” Intriguingly enough, every twenty-two minute
episode of the Real World was the result of seventy hours worth of raw footage, meaning
this version of reality is… has to be... Cherry-picked and skewed. These shows frequently insert their casts
into artificially constructed situations that generate lots of stress. Then, they actively facilitate the social
destruction that follows, often by staging and producing scenes that “complete” the
narrative arc. Also - booze. Not exactly the kind of thing the Maysles
brothers would have been about. The third era of reality TV kind of crept
up starting in 2002 with what Kavka describes as “a gradual but noticeable change… from
an emphasis on documenting ordinary life to manufacturing celebrity out of the everyday.” The very phrase “manufacturing celebrity”
not so subtly hints at the artifice inherent in these shows, where characters seek “the
insubstantial but highly desirable commodity called ‘fame.’” People’s onscreen behavior is increasingly
motivated less by genuine emotions than by the desire to attract as much attention as
possible, a phenomenon best encapsulated by Kris Jenner, who could turn a bunion on Kim’s
big toe into an international news story, and probably already has. What we’re seeing is that, far more so than
documentary, reality TV involves deliberate departures from “truth” be it in the form
of hawk-eyed producers staging dramatic scenes, or a drunk housewife doing it herself in hopes
of scoring her own vodka brand. If the second generation of reality TV birthed
several distinctive genre tools, the third generation solidified them. As a result, certain aspects of reality tv
are so familiar to us, from the tearful confession of past trauma, to the manufactured fights,
to the words “you’re going home.” So what is the net result of watching tv and
movies that are optimized and dramatized but self-present to audiences as real? One consequence that really resonates with
us is that documentaries and reality TV make us narrativize reality, that is, see our own
lives and the lives of those around us as stories with beginnings, middles and ends. As philosopher Alex Rosenberg puts it in his
book How History Gets Things Wrong, “We humans have an insatiable appetite for stories
with identifiable heroes, the tension of a quest, obstacles overcome and a happy (or
at least emotionally satisfying) ending.” Quick note: Though Rosenberg is talking more
broadly about the way we employ historical narratives, we think it can be usefully applied
to documentary and reality TV as forms of entertainment. Rosenberg also notes that we use historical
narratives to make sense of the present and even predict the future. We may watch a makeover show and think our
lives are just one over-night transformation away from fulfillment. And how could watching hours of banal Kardashian
drama not make us think that maybe, just maybe, our lives might be interesting enough to be
chronicled for the world to snarkily enjoy? What’s more, Rosenberg argues, stories with
satisfying narratives are like aloe vera for our brains, soothing us and lulling us into
a false sense of understanding. Susan Boyle may have never been kissed, but
boy did she wow the judges on Britain's Got Talent. Here, Susan’s real-life suffering is first
used to make us care about her. Then, her objectively-excellent performance
and rousing reception offer a compelling resolution that ultimately redeems her and her suffering. It wasn’t for nothing, after all! Or, even if we’re healthily skeptical of
a Chopped narrative, - "I just feel like people find reasons to hate on me, cuz I'm definitely
different. because" - some part of us is stoked that
this girl’s suffering at the hands of bullies has been redeemed by winning Chopped Jr. All of this fundamentally limits our understanding
of the world. As scholar Ib Bondebjerg writes, summarizing
the work of neurologist Antonio Damasio, “our sense of self and our ability to interpret
the world are based on emotional and narrative structures... Narrative Structures are part of the very
fabric of our mind and imagination.” So our brains crave narrative like a unicorn
craves sparkles. And reality TV sells us that narrative as
truth. As a result, watching The Voice may subtly
makes us think that everything we do in life can be seen as us triumphing over our central
life struggle. Watching The Bachelor subtly makes us eager
to find our “happy ever after,” a term that is certainly ridiculous to anyone who's
ever been married. And watching My Super Sweet Sixteen not so
subtly informs us that absurdly wealthy adolescents are monsters which… no comment. This can be a problem because real life isn’t
made up of neat narrative arcs and clean, happy endings. It’s messy and things happen for no reason,
and not every choice you make is motivated by the fact that the neighborhood asshole
Ricky made you wear your underwear as a hat in third grade. You probably won’t have a hero’s journey,
and if you do, it probably won’t take place in three acts. But watching enough nonfiction media has a
tendency to confuse us. So what is a responsible, non-masochistic
movie-watcher supposed to do with all this information? Should you protest Chopped’s false narrativizing
or skip that super compelling documentary on Kim Jung Il impersonators, which doesn’t
exist but goddamn it should. We love documentaries just as much as the
next film nerd, and we’d never ruin The Great British Bake-off for you. We just feel like, as media fanatics, we all
should be a little more aware of the way everyday storytelling affects the way we view our own
lives and our own stories. But what do you guys think? Are documentaries and reality TV ruining the
way you understand the world? Or is narrativizing reality just a necessary
part of being human? Let us know what you think in the comments. Thanks to all our awesome patrons for supporting
the channel and our podcasts. Be sure to hit that subscribe button. And as always, thanks for watching guys. Thanks for stickin' around guys! And one last time before you go, if you want
to check out the article I wrote that inspired this video, be sure to go to medium.com/wisecrack
or click here, subscribe to the publication, share the articles, all that jazz. Thanks again guys. Peace.
