It was the oddest thing. I don’t know what it says about our society or psychology. All I know is it fascinated and disgusted at the same time.
On an uneventful afternoon, lying on the couch, having finished the paper and flipping through television channels, I happened to catch an episode of ‘Kardashians Take New York’ or whatever it’s called.
The not-so-pretty sister was telling her husband he would get sex when her more-famous sister went out for dinner, but on the discovery that her sibling was going to stay in and watch movies they headed off to the gym where they supposedly shagged in the bogs.
The disgusting part wasn’t the thought of them bumping uglies next to a sloshing urinal – for we only got to see them enter and exit (with feigned naughtiness expressed on their heavily made-up mugs) – but the fact that it was all so obviously staged.
Maybe I’m new to the idea of reality tv just being badly scripted and horribly acted fiction, but if so an even more disturbing revelation is that millions of people across the world tune in every week to watch a sitcom where the ‘sit-’ is boring and the ‘-com’ non-existent.
And then I thought that if life imitates art and we are all mediated beings (learning our way through the world via television et al) maybe future generations – thinking this is a kind of real-time art form – would learn their responses to situations from the worst actors.
Would future sincerity appear fake to older, less mediated generations if later generations have learnt to express their emotions from these ‘stars’?
Is it going to be harder for our kids to spot a lie if they believe the ‘reality’ on television to be just that?
If so, then I think I’d advise my kids to careers as conmen, car salesmen, or politicians.
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