Page 176 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 161
tautological explicitness. Similarly, we have also seen how Kracauer
took pains to emphasize photography’s privileging of contingent
detail over substantive meaning. These analyses of photographic
grammar serve to highlight some of the underlying factors within
docudramas as illustrated by Dovey’s comment about the docu-soap
of life on board a luxury liner – The Cruise:
we are not called upon to agree or disagree with the proposi-
tion that ‘This is life cruise ship’ … There is no argument
about the world being advanced here – there is just its
narrativisation. Each docu-soap is its own ‘spectacle of particu-
larity’; its referencing of the public world does not extend
beyond its denotation. The docu-soap is inert as public form.
(2000: 151)
Dovey and Langer’s criticisms can be reinterpreted as a response to
the deep imbrication of television’s fragmented visual grammar with
the similarly decontextualized nature of the culture industry. We see
here how Debord’s concept of the spectacle comes together with
Adorno’s notion of the removal of the tension between the general
and the particular to produce a deracinated ‘spectacle of particular-
ity’ – particularity that can only be experienced as a spectacle
divorced from any wider social meaning. The context and meaning
that does exist in Reality TV formats, like commodities, comes in a
highly packaged form – in this case through close editing. As we saw
in Adorno’s analysis of the culture industry’s production of com-
modities, media content is made for short-term consumption so that
fresh consumption can be stimulated for further profitability. Dovey
highlights two crucial aspects of this approach. First, there is little
for the audience to discover that is not already presented by the
omniscient narrator. Secondly, the editing’s constant pace and
democratic focus means that all the content tends to appear of equal
value – this marks a radical (but not in any political sense)
departure from documentary’s previous strong moral element: the
demand for narrative action overrides the competing claims of any
ethical frameworks or moral messages.

Banality TV and symbolic loss
Reality TV always flirts with disaster, both in the sense that
danger, contingency, the randomness of violence, and the
precariousness of life are its staples and in the sense that what
it represents may prompt or demand a response that exceeds
its frame … Many natural catastrophes seem to fit perfectly
within the tele-frame; sympathy and charity are the best we can
do, we may as well let them be tele-mediated. But those among

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