Kraszewski's Chapter 'Country Hicks And Urban Cliques'

Response Essay Three
Race and The Real World
Kraszewski writes in his chapter, “Country Hicks and Urban Cliques,” that throughout its 20 season run, (now 30+ seasons) The Real World has brought to terms “race and reality through discursive tensions between urban and rural America, as well as liberal and conservative politics.” In class lecture on November fifth we discussed these issues more in depth, and viewed clips of some of the tensions that Kraszewski describes in the chapter. In one example, we see Mike, Coral, and Malik enjoying their breakfast when Mike speaks up and confesses that his uncle will not hire black people because of their education. Throughout the rest of the season Coral and Malik prove to Mike that his uncle’s views

are racist. The producers also make light of race through casting, editing, and the narratives of different housemates. Kraszewski also suggests that through The Real World that racism is a phenomenon located within rural conservatives, and not liberals with an “urban feel”. In the article, Kraszewski uses the phrase “urban feel” to show the audience the MTV look, that promotes an image that rural viewers in the Midwest can use to feel urban if only they buy the right clothes and have the right attitude.

Race and The Real World is significant to freakery because, The Real World, per class discussion and the readings, “constructs a reality that frees the audience of any implications in racism by blaming rural conservatives for the problem.” Yet our discussion questions show us that MTV, by using discourses about rural America and conservatism, construct racism as a problem of individual opinions. The show and the channel overlook the systematic nature of racism and the way it operates in liberal urban environments.

Survivor
According to Huff, “Survivor changed the face of television forever and became the catalyst for perhaps one of the most significant shifts in programming for decades.” Mark Burnett also states in the readings, “I had a gut feeling that I could make this great concept even greater, my Survivor would be bigger, more dramatic, more epic than any nonfiction television ever seen.” The key was that survivor was to be nonfiction in nature, and built around regular people, not actors, in key roles. As we discussed in lectures on November third and fifth and in the discussion questions, before Survivor, all but a few shows on television were scripted comedies or drama. The only other show on air at the time to use nonactors as the main cast was MTV’s The Real World, which I view as the catalyst of reality television, the true one that started it all. There were several other combinations of clip shows, such as America’s Funniest Home Videos, and games shows like, Who wants to be a Millionaire?, that CBS pit Survivor up against, as well as, Cops.

We also discussed in the lecture on November fifth that the Survivor finale rivaled the end of Seinfeld and M*A*S*H in terms of attentiveness to their finales.

Nevertheless, regardless of ratings, the finale and Survivor as a whole, ultimately altered the future of television. “In a matter of 13 weeks, CBS significantly launched the reality craze and had other producers and networks scrambling to find shows starring real people.” Network executives across Hollywood were swamped with pitches, writers, and regular people looking to make their big break on reality television. “A little show called Survivor came along and turned primetime television on its ear. Not only was the show a success, it became a cultural phenomenon. The audience has spoken and they have demonstrated that they have a huge appetite for this type of non-scripted

program.”

Survivor is significant to freakery because of the idea of the self made “freak”, although contestants may not be altering their bodies, they are altering their minds and manipulating their opponents. One contestant may find it worth it to make it to the finale and win the million-dollar prize. Jeff Probst, the host of Survivor, states in the readings, “Its all about 16 strangers, abandoned and forced to form their own society, voting someone out every three days… and here’s the kicker, it’s a really complicated social game. How do you navigate, how do you vote people out you’re living with? There’s that… sort of feeling of being lost and you combine it with being the last kid picked from a sandlot baseball game, or the last guy laid off; those are iconic, atypical moments.” Whatever the draw, viewers were hooked. It was that kind of self made freakery, the rat eating, and back stabbing that hooked the viewers and still has for its 30th season this winter. Who wouldn’t stab some backs and burn a few bridges for a millions dollars?

Interactive Gaze

The interactive gaze was born as a result of the onset of Reality television, the spectator's gaze is less controlling and more interactive. In her article, “Identity Construction and the Gaze in The Hunger Games, states that throughout this “interactive gaze,” “No mediation through a character is necessary; the spectator interacts directly with the objects on screen to change what occurs as well as who leaves the narrative.” She goes on to describe this new gaze, “In this new viewing practice, ‘interactive gazing,’ the audience and contestants gaze at and interact directly with one another. Spectators interact with contestants through voter participation, and contestants interact with spectators by taking advantage of the narrative and filming techniques of Reality TV to influence how viewers will vote.” Like on American Idol, the more a producer can get the editors to pull on their character’s heart strings for the audience the more likely the audience will vote for that character.

We discussed in lecture, our discussion questions, and found in our readings for November 10 that, in “Reality television the relationship between “spectator and contestant” revolves around the spectator's search for “moments of authenticity” when contestants are “really themselves in an unreal environment.” The shows producers know that the real draw of the reality television involves the interactive gaze. In the readings it’s discussed that it’s not about the structure of the game but the way the game pulls on the audience’s heart strings and the way the contestants react in stressful situations. This is significant to freakery because all three participants within this game being the producers, the audience, and the contestant have different lenses. The producers control the contestant and the editing and the audience can only sit and watch the story unfold. “While we want to know who will win the show, we watch the show week-to-week because we want to see how contestants negotiate their relationships with one another; watching their interactions allows the audience to ‘share an intimate acquaintance with the performers.’” With these notions of the show and gaze in mind, “spectator and producers turn to two key situations for the authentic intimate: lovemaking and conflict, moments during which it is assumed that a person exposes “the naked self.”” In lecture we also discussed the audiences and their desire for validation of social norms that we don are true to human nature. “When we search for “the naked self” in reality television performances, we are essentially looking for “real” people to act according to—or in opposition to—our moral codes.”

Geek Love as a postmodern text
In our discussion notes, postmodernism is described as, “.

. . A reaction to the assumed certainty of scientific, or objective, efforts to explain reality. In essence, it stems from a recognition that reality is not simply mirrored in human understanding of it, but rather, is constructed as the mind tries to understand its own particular and personal reality.” Katherine Dunn’s Geek Love as Dr. Wilson mentioned in lecture is a postmodern homage to, Tod Browning’s, Freaks, which we watched earlier in the semester. Some points made were how it reanimates many of the films most stimulating questions about agency, sexuality, and collective

identity.
Geek Love is significant in freakery because of the boundaries and binaries that Geek Love tries to complicate and transcend. The normal versus abnormal, born freaks versus constructed freaks, choice as free will versus choice as a product of culture and power. As well as the ways we view post-modern bodies. We see Arturo, who reminded me of Mat Frasier as Seal Boy, as he recites this to his spectators, “I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. They would do anything to be unique.” I find it interesting that Arturo identified normalcy as something these viewers wanted to escape instead of pitying him. He sees those who search the unique life as that of a freak show performer lack their own originality and in turn creates his own religion where anyone can become a freak. In our discussion questions it is also noted that, “The body has become an important site for rethinking such binary oppositions as masculinity and femininity, gender and sex, the public and the private, and the cultural and the natural.”

Carnivalesque performance of gender in dating shows

As discussed in our lecture, Gray, in his article “Cinderella Burps,” sees dating shows like The Bachelor as a form of carnival with a liberatory and subversive potential to expose, ridicule, and undermine traditional performances of gender. For him, female participants in these shows often use their “transgressive performance of gender as a weapon for feminist appropriation.” The performances of gender from participants in these shows is so grotesquely carnivalesque, Gray argues, that audiences are able to critically read them as camp “and thus to turn their more nightmarish depictions of women into blatantly obvious and ludicrously constructed carnivalesque figures, to be laughed at . . . and as playgrounds for evaluating gender performance.” As discussed in lecture and can be seen in this chapter, “Ultimately many dating shows follow carnivalesque rules that privilege indecorum and perform a reversal of power structures.” As explained by Michel Bakhtin in the chapter, this represents “temporary liberation from the prevailing truths and from established order, and from norms of etiquette and decency imposed at other times.”
This notion of carnivalesque is important to freakery because as discussed in our lecture, The Bachelor audience wants it to be grand fairy tale of traveling around the world to find love hoping a man chooses you , and as seen in the readings “Fifth Wheel offers itself as voyeuristic spectacle, their own distance from reality provides all the necessary ingredients for one to read them as a silly camp carnival and thus to turn their more nightmarish depictions of women into blatantly obvious and ludicrously constructed carnivalesque figures, to be laughed at and enjoyed as bad television.”