Television and Media - Is Iraq the Next Big Hit for Reality TV? Essay

Iraq The Next hulking Hit for Reality TV We went into Iraq with a heroic action moving picture playing in our heads, but the photographs from Abu Ghraib showed us an new(prenominal) movie. Not liberty Day but Kill Billand, in the deluge of unfermented photos and videotapes, Kill Bill 2.Yet for all that the photographs from the Iraqi prison gull comparability to big-budget depravity, this is to give the perpetrators too much creative credit. Ultimately, the better comparison is not to the imaginative chaos of a Quentin T arntino movie but to the unremarkable chaos of globe TV.To compare the kind of humiliation suffered by the prisoners in Abu Ghraid to reality TV may seem in bad taste. The shows track with middle-class men and women who have willingly chosen, based on almost twisted idea of celebrity, to subject themselves to mankind humiliation. The photos deal with citizens of a conquered acres whose humiliation is coerced. The prisoners are literally and figuratively a w orld out-of-door from the caterwauling TV contestants. What is similar about the two situations, however, is the underlying dynamic and the economic consumption the camera plays in both.Reality TV is the enactment, for entertainment purposes, of primal drives. These are the drives that Freud identified as libido (the drive for sex) and aggression (the drive to destroy). The two archetypal shows in the reality line-up are subsister and The Bachelor. The former favors aggression the latter, libido. new(prenominal) reality shows can be viewed as spin-offs of one or the other of these two The Apprentice, for example, is Survivor set in the corporate board fashion Extreme Make-over is The Bachelor set in a plastic surgeons office.Although in most of these shows, one drive predominates, it is impossible, as Fr... ... purging and a penanceand perhaps in some cases it does. But the normal result is to normalize the unfettered display of aggression and libido. In a culture saturate d with the exposure of primal impulses, constraint no weeklong carries any weight. The camera has given lease to the idea that everything is permitted when it is exhibited in public view.Who can blame the soldiers, then, for behaving as though they were on a reality TV show? The humiliation to which they subjected their prisoners probably seemed to them like the antics perpetrated on Survivor only a few months earlier. Because cameras were present, their behavior probably seemed more welcome rather than less. After all, if one takes a picture, it enters the culture of representation where it becomes normalized into a prank, a spectacle, or, at worst, the unfortunate consequence of losing a game.