Looking for Reality in all the Wrong Places
The line between truth and fiction in media is blurrier than ever
Mathieu Weill
Issue date: 3/27/07 Section: Society
- Page 1 of 2 next >
One of the fun emails of the past summer included a picture of a billboard with a message from Emily to her (soon-to-be-ex) husband:
This immediately raised questions as to its authenticity. If you work in a place where people commute, perhaps a colleague mentioned that he or she had actually seen the sign on the side of the highway or above one of the midtown high-rises. So, the sign was real. Still, was it really real?
As it turns out, the real sign was a fake-actually a promotion for Parco P.I., a CourtTV show. The show also had a blog (thatgirlemily.blogspot.com), where Emily, the "soon-to-be-ex wife," shared with the world details of her attempts to deal with her troubled marriage, including photos of spray-painted cars.
This was not the first time that popular entertainment tries to infiltrate our daily lives and become "real," but this past year had more than its share of strange occurrences. For example, "John Tucker Must Die," a comedy about a high-school womanizer, was promoted through the main character's MySpace page (www.myspace.com/JohnTucker). There was also a curious posting of LonelyGirl15 on YouTube, which turned out to be a showcase for the talent in the video, rather than the honest sharing it pretended to be. Just to name a few.
Reality shows have now become a steady part of the TV fabric. Even game shows have made somewhat of a comeback in the last few years, piggybacking on the newly rediscovered passion of the American TV audience for competition between "real" people, as seen on Survivor or The Apprentice. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, The Weakest Link, and Deal Or No Deal are a few recent successes that come to mind.
Biopics seem to have supplanted the TV series as the easy movie plot of choice in Hollywood. Each famous person apparently deserves to have a two-hour movie made about him or her. Then, we will get to hear what a brilliant job the actor did in portraying the famous person. In all fairness, I think portraying an actual person whom the actor may have met, but at the very least had access to footage of, is easier than creating a new character. In fact, that is not really acting-it is mimicry. Sure Jamie Foxx does a great Ray Charles, Joaquin Phoenix a great Johnny Cash, Reese Witherspoon a great June Carter, Helen Mirren a great Queen Elizabeth, Philip Seymour Hoffman a great Truman Capote, and so on, but since when is that the gold standard? Where is Rich Little's Oscar?
This immediately raised questions as to its authenticity. If you work in a place where people commute, perhaps a colleague mentioned that he or she had actually seen the sign on the side of the highway or above one of the midtown high-rises. So, the sign was real. Still, was it really real?
As it turns out, the real sign was a fake-actually a promotion for Parco P.I., a CourtTV show. The show also had a blog (thatgirlemily.blogspot.com), where Emily, the "soon-to-be-ex wife," shared with the world details of her attempts to deal with her troubled marriage, including photos of spray-painted cars.
This was not the first time that popular entertainment tries to infiltrate our daily lives and become "real," but this past year had more than its share of strange occurrences. For example, "John Tucker Must Die," a comedy about a high-school womanizer, was promoted through the main character's MySpace page (www.myspace.com/JohnTucker). There was also a curious posting of LonelyGirl15 on YouTube, which turned out to be a showcase for the talent in the video, rather than the honest sharing it pretended to be. Just to name a few.
Reality shows have now become a steady part of the TV fabric. Even game shows have made somewhat of a comeback in the last few years, piggybacking on the newly rediscovered passion of the American TV audience for competition between "real" people, as seen on Survivor or The Apprentice. Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, The Weakest Link, and Deal Or No Deal are a few recent successes that come to mind.
Biopics seem to have supplanted the TV series as the easy movie plot of choice in Hollywood. Each famous person apparently deserves to have a two-hour movie made about him or her. Then, we will get to hear what a brilliant job the actor did in portraying the famous person. In all fairness, I think portraying an actual person whom the actor may have met, but at the very least had access to footage of, is easier than creating a new character. In fact, that is not really acting-it is mimicry. Sure Jamie Foxx does a great Ray Charles, Joaquin Phoenix a great Johnny Cash, Reese Witherspoon a great June Carter, Helen Mirren a great Queen Elizabeth, Philip Seymour Hoffman a great Truman Capote, and so on, but since when is that the gold standard? Where is Rich Little's Oscar?
Be the first to comment on this story