Here’s an event next week that might interest some readers in New York City. Caitlin Flanagan (of The Atlantic) moderates a discussion of popular and mass culture by Jonathan Last (The Weekly Standard), Daniel Akst (Newsday), and Kay Hymowitz (City Journal), the occasion being the publication of Acculturated, a collection of short essays edited by our own Naomi Shaefer Riley and Christine Rosen.
Notices of the book bear the heading “23 Savvy Writers Find Hidden Wisdom in Reality TV, Chick Lit, Video Games, and Other Pillars of Pop Culture.” (Not every entry fits the promise—my contribution compares television programming choices for 15-year-olds in 1970 to choices in 2010 and concludes that TV has become a mirror of adolescence for adolescents, which is just about the last thing that adolescents need these days.) The volume regards the “contemporary crop of reality television shows, with the bevy of ‘real housewives,’ super-size families, and toddler beauty-pageant candidates” as 21st-century versions of previous popular culture materials (fairy tales, legends, etc.). If you “move beyond the visual excess and hyperbole,” Rosen and Riley say in the Introduction, “you will find the makings of classic morality tales. Bad characters come to disastrous ends; people struggle with unexpected hardship and either triumph or fail, depending on their strength of character. For some, hard work pays off. For others, failure is swift and cruel.”
The consumption of such shows, however, Riley and Rosen say, has changed fundamentally. In sum, the medium has been incorporated into people’s experience. Back when Michael Jackson showed up on The Dating Game just after his 14th birthday—for the editors, the show was a precursor of reality TV; you can catch the segment on YouTube—the three polite young women vying for his favor acted pretty much the same way they would have if they were at a non-TV gathering and a grown-up were introducing them to the pop star.
“Today,” Riley and Rosen say, “the girls would likely adopt a television persona to better suit our more revealing and consciously therapeutic times. One word answers would be replaced by long sentences of self-conscious observations about how excited they are to be there and how worried they are about their appearance or their answers.”
There is a perceptive passage in Rob Long’s contribution, “Public Broadcasting: The Allure of Overexposure,” that singles out one moment in The Real Housewives of New York City as excruciatingly revealing of the TV persona. (Long was a writer and producer of Cheers.) It happens when one of the women in the show, not a housewife, but a single woman, talks to her boyfriend about their relationship. He’s appeared before, but each time looks deeply uncomfortable on camera. Indeed, to Long, while the camera and editing make him appear “sullen and uncommunicative” in the fnal product, his reaction to all the equipment and dramaturgy off camera reveal him to be “perfectly well-adjusted.”
In the scene, “the nonhousewife sits her shy boyfriend down for a Serious Talk about Where This Relationship Is Going, which she’s prepared herself for—unbeknownst to him but beknownst to the viewer—by drinking seven martinis.” Long calls it “a sloppy ambush.”
She wonders whether they’ve been together long enough to consider moving in together, asking him, with “elaborate composure,” “Can we talk about where this relationship is going?” He looks away from her, registering cameras and microphones, then replies,
“Can we talk about this later?”
That’s bad TV, and she presses, “You don’t want to talk about this now?”
He says once more, “Can we talk about this later?”
Long thinks it’s a revealing moment, a teachable ethical scene. It spotlights the TV persona. He just doesn’t play well on camera; she does. She accepts the conventions of filmmaking and self-dramatizes accordingly; he doesn’t. Unintentionally, then, the show imparts an alternative to embarrassing self-display and camera-based demeanors.
That outcome fits with the aim of the volume, that is, to find moral instruction amidst the puerile trappings and traits of pop culture. Whether viewers take the lesson or not is an open question, but it certainly lends some moral complexity to reality shows. And if teachers can use such illustrations to deepen students’ consumption of pop culture, then the volume has done its work.
