Life is elsewhere

Actor Robert De Niro was eyewitness to one of the most sensational terrorist attacks in modern history when commandeered civilian airplanes slammed into the World Trade Centre in New York on September 11, 2001. With a pair of binoculars and a video camera, he watched transfixed from his upmarket New York apartment as the South Tower went down in a colossal heap of dust. But the sight, he recalled years later, was so unreal — “like watching the moon fall” — that he needed it to be validated. And how did he secure that authentication? “By immediately looking at the television screen!” he noted. “CNN was on… And that was the only way to make it real.”

It isn’t often that one turns to television to certify as real what one’s own lying eyes can see. But in De Niro’s defence, the slice of history he bore witness to was so extraordinarily rare and inconceivable that making sense of it in real time would have required a curious mind-bend not normally given even to the best of us. It was also an era when ‘reality TV’ was still in its infancy, and when the line between prime-time reality and the bizarreness of Big Brother (or his desi chhota bhai Bigg Boss) hadn’t been blurred to the point where they’d become indistinguishable. 

Today, though, we turn to television, not so much with the expectation that it will validate — or even just reflect — reality, but that it will offer us a cocooned parallel universe, an alternative reality, where we’re well-shielded from the harshness of our own understanding of an imperfect world. That happens not just on ‘reality TV’ shows where, for instance, yesteryear bimbettes mock-pick their fake grooms for our weekly wide-eyed amusement — or, worse, mock the manhood of emotionally insecure participants enough to send them over the edge of life. It also happens when news channels shelter us from the nuanced minutiae of news, and package even the narrative of news to max its entertainment value.

In his 2007 book News As Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment, professor Daya Kishan Thussu at the University of Westminster points to the “tabloidization of television news” in India as reflective of a tendency towards “infotainment” that’s seen elsewhere around the world as well.  Thus, for instance, we get ‘exclusive’ reports on a man who “came back from the dead” — followed by a two-hour studio discussion on the ‘supernatural phenomenon’. Style takes precedence over substance, and even news anchors are chosen not for their journalistic skills but for how well they come across on camera. As for content, Thussu sees an excessive focus on the three Cs — cinema, crime and cricket — and an “obsession” with “celebrity culture” — which in an Indian context inevitably revolves around Bollywood. 

Sociologists will tell you that our societal obsession with unreal ‘reality TV’ and our willing embrace of the ‘celebrity culture’ are just symptoms of a larger affliction: that we live life vicariously — and voyeuristically — through the experiences of others. And that our natural curiosity about those around us is amplified manifold by the wonders of modern technology, with gadgets and gizmos and social media platforms where the participants’ willing suspension of privacy, albeit in a controlled setting, offers us a peephole into their daily lives and unfiltered thoughts in a way that wasn’t possible earlier. Or in ways that don’t always enrich our own lives.

As an antidote to such ‘vicarious’ living, these pop-sociologists will recommend ‘experiential’ living by doing things yourself, rather than passively piggybacking on proxy pleasures. Life isn’t elsewhere, they will tell you: it’s here and now.

It’s true, of course, that some of us may derive greater joy from enrolling for a cookery course in our neighbourhood than passively tuning into gourmet cookery programs on TV. Going for a hike on a Sunday perhaps beats watching re-runs of Michael Palin’s Pole to Pole.  But it’s just as true that a doctrinaire approach to experiential living — to the exclusion of all things ‘vicarious’ — would vastly shrink the horizons of our lives and abridge them to certain provincialism.

It’s worth recalling that in an earlier time, much the same pop-sociological criticism was made of our mass patronage of Bollywood films: that we seek solace in their hyperbole and excess and extravaganza as a foil against the drab ordinariness of our daily lives. Now that Bollywood has upped its game and occasionally reflects — and even satirises — societal reality, we’ve discovered new ‘dream merchants’ for venting our vicariousness. If anything, however, ‘reality TV’ occasionally acts as another kind of foil as well — by reinforcing the comforting ordinariness of our lives, as opposed to the over-the-top theatricality that characterises the ‘unshining’, silicone-enhanced stars of these shows.

The difference between fiction and reality, the writer Tom Clancy noted once, was that “fiction has to make sense.” That golden rule about fiction may well be honoured more in the breach than in observance, but, as De Niro’s eyewitness experience testifies, dealing with reality occasionally requires us to change the template of what makes sense.

Pan the camera around and you’ll realise that — in an era of WikiLeaks and Radia tapes — we live in the nearest thing to a surveillance society, a panopticon world where everything we say and do could, in a manner of speaking, be on record or on film somewhere.  Today, in the US, there’s even an iPhone app — called, somewhat grandiosely, Patriot App — that turns everyone with a smartphone into a ‘surveillance agent’, and report back to the government on ‘suspicious activities’. It’s a tool that could let your friendly neighbour get his daily adrenaline rush — by snooping on you…  

In that sense, we’re not at all “passive” or “vicarious” observers of the reality TV show of life, but active participants therein. We’re all in lockdown in a house on Bigg Boss, and the cameras are tracking us wherever we go. As professor David Bell at the University of Leeds notes in Surveillance Is Sexy, “even if we don’t partake of the offerings of ‘reality porn’ (or even reality TV), our embeddedness in surveillance makes part of its algebra.”
Of course, if you can’t bear the glare, you could ask to leave the Bigg Boss house and return to the desolate ordinariness of your daily life. You could try and resist the panopticon surveillance through evasion, secrecy — and trying to become invisible.

Or you could embrace the experience, savour your fifteen minutes of fame, become ‘surveillance-savvy’ — and ‘manage’ the image you give out of yourself.  But do remember to smile, please: you’re on camera…