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NOW THAT'S REALITY!
by Daren Foster

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DAREN FOSTER PODCAST about his recent columns - July 21 2009!

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NOW THAT'S REALITY!
by Daren Foster

***Real life seldom involves a camera.***

You want to know why I hate reality programming? Watch the video on the RIGHT (the real action starts at about the 1’42” mark) and I’ll tell you. Go ahead. Click away, sit back. I’ll wait until you’re done watching and come back in about 10 minutes. Maybe go and make myself sandwich. No rush. I’ve got other things to do. Enjoy.

. . . . .

Finished? Great. Now, that’s what I call a reality show. From the 1970 production of Norman Mailer’s film, Maidstone, actor Rip Torn and novelist/director/actor Norman Mailer go mano-a-mano, completely unscripted in footage that eventually found its way into the final version of the movie. They clutch. They grab. They swear. Torn hits Mailer in the head with a hammer. Miller takes a bite out of Torn’s ear decades before Mike Tyson thought of it as a tactical approach. Women scream. Children cry.

It is a little slice of reality that even the best documentarian would have trouble matching. In comparison, what is passed off today as “reality” is so painfully manufactured and clearly fake that to call it “reality” is to change the definition of the word entirely to mean something more akin to ‘badly unscripted’ or ‘piss poor improvisation pieced together by a producer in the editing room in order to come close to anything resembling interesting and usually failing that task miserably’. Reality programming isn’t giving us real life. It’s just bad TV.

Back in the early-90s, the late, great comic Bill Hicks did a bit about a reality show he wanted to pitch. It was called Let’s Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus, who was then a chart-busting pseudo-country singer who plagued the airwaves with his novelty song hit Achy Breaky Heart. Not only funny but a truly great idea as it would’ve subsequently spared us from the dreck that was Doc and, later still, the creepy rise to fame of the Cyrus spawn, Miley. Let’s Hunt and Kill Billy Ray Cyrus is a reality show I would watch religiously, right to its gloriously grisly conclusion after which I’d be anxiously awaiting the next instalment. Let’s Hunt and Kill DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince with its bonus benefit of stopping The Fresh Prince of Bel Air and I, Robot, Hitch, The Pursuit of Happyness, I Am Legend, Hancock, 7 Pounds all before they started. Let’s Hunt and Kill Justin Timberlake.. you do the math from there.

Reality programming and social consciousness, is all I’m saying. Imagine rather than 6 squirm inducing seasons of The Apprentice, there was just a single, most excellent season of Let’s Hunt and Kill Donald Trump? Now there’s TV that’s worth watching.

Taking in cold-blooded murder not really your cup of tea? Then we could emulate the Rip Torn-Norman Mailer video above and churn out a series featuring unstable actors and award winning writers slugging it out in extreme fighting fashion. Crispin Glover and Cormac McCarthy. Who’s going to get their hands on that whip first?! Tom Cruise and J.M. Coetzee, stripped down to their waists, left wrists tied together, trying to slice each other open with paring knives. You loved hearing Christian Bale’s on set meltdown at a cameraman in what turned out to be the most interesting aspect of Terminator: Salvation? Imagine him rolling around on the grass in a death embrace with author and boxing aficionado Joyce Carol Oates.

Unfortunately, no matter how hard we tried, we could never recapture the true spontaneity of the Torn-Mailer grudge match. These days, we’re all too attuned to the constant presence of the camera amongst us. With cell phones equipped with instant photo taking capabilities, everyone’s always on the ready for our close up, Mr. DeMille. Capturing actual reality in the digital age is like trying to grab smoke or punch water.

Of course, it’s always been bogus, the claim of depicting truth or reality on film. Albert Brooks made that crystal clear way back in 1979 with his film, Real Life. People simply donot behave normally when they’re in front of a camera and I’ve never bought the idea that with enough exposure they will eventually relax and simply start being themselves. We’re trained to perform for a camera from the very beginning with the instructions, Look at the camera, honey! Smile! Come on. Turn that frown upside down! Some get good at it while most of us remain awkward and self-conscious. Sadly, it’s those from the latter category who always seem to find themselves on today’s reality shows.

This is why the Rip Torn-Norman Mailer footage is so engrossing. It’s been argued that the whole segment was staged; a sly marketing sleight of hand to lure audiences into what was otherwise an unwatchable movie. I think that’s pure revisionism. Looking at it a couple times, it seems very much the real deal between two brawling guys who don’t want to really hurt each other despite the hammer blow and biting. It’s improvisation gone bad with Torn playing out his role as ne’er-do-well brother to famous movie director and Presidential candidate, Mailer, who seems caught by surprise with Torn so totally inhabiting his character’s fratricidal tendencies.

Both Mailer and Torn had pugnacious reputations. Scraps were not uncommon storylines in their bios. It was the late-60s/early-70s! Who knows what drug and/or booze fuelled testosterone itch was at work? As a Stella Adler trained actor (Robert DeNiro was another protégé), Torn may’ve been misguidedly trying to bring as much reality to the scene as possible without actually killing Mailer. If so, he was years ahead of his time.

The irony of all this is that there seems to be an inversely proportional relationship between today’s omnipresence of cameras and other recording devices and the level of actual reality brought to light. We live in total media saturation with everyone from paparazzi to celebrity gossip bloggers on the prowl for the latest, juiciest dish and yet very little of it feels real. Everything’s fabricated for easy digestion. Even Tom Cruise’s couch jumping on Oprah smacks of juvenile attention getting in order to keep him in the public eye. Joaquin Phoenix’s bizarre appearance on Letterman earlier this year seems destined to be coming soon to a movie theatre near you.

Performance art as a commercial product. By its very nature, mere fakery. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that. Let’s just stop calling it reality. Reality’s unplanned and unguarded like a hammer attack on a barrel-chested novelist by an overzealous actor. Real life exactly as it should be.