Page 188 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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Banality TV: the democratization of celebrity 173
disbelief in the clearly fictional porn fantasy are here foreshortened
through the grammar of subjective identification created by the
video text 10 (Dovey 2000: 68).
The radical suggestion here is that at least in conventional
pornography the viewer willingly suspends his/her belief, whereas
the cultural danger of Banality TV is that their apparently naturalistic
forms tend to suppress our critical awareness of the removal of the
stage itself. Just as people are increasingly distanced from the
seductive properties of a non-mediated reality, television provides its
own ersatz and enervated version: ‘As people cook less and less, they
ogle cooking shows more and more … Unlike home cooking, TV
cooking builds to an unending succession of physical ecstasies, never
a pile of dirty dishes’ (Kaufman 2005: 56). A lifestyle unobtainable in
the reality of a commodity culture is presented as consumable in the
image-only form of Reality TV – a neat, almost literal, trope for
Adorno’s previously cited quip that the culture industry requires the
diner to be satisfied with the menu.

Sensation and sociality: Big Brother and the Loft Story

Bending over a pool of water, Narcissus quenches his thirst. His
image is no longer ‘other’; it is a surface that absorbs and
seduces him, which he can approach but never pass beyond.
For there is no beyond, just as there is no reflexive distance
between him and his image. The mirror of water is not a
surface of reflection, but of absorption.
(Baudrillard 1990a: 67)
In some of his last work, Baudrillard’s examined Banality TV in
relation to France’s version of Big Brother – The Loft. His analysis
further illuminates both the contemporary fate of Benjamin’s con-
ception of distraction and McLuhan’s allusion to the narcotic effects
of screen culture. Rather than seeing the rise of Reality TV as
evidence of the rude health of contemporary cultural life (the
cultural populism model), Baudrillard sees it in terms of a ‘synthetic
conviviality and telegenically modified sociability’ (Baudrillard 2005:
181) that has become so prominent only because there is so little
left of any authentic social interaction. The repetitive qualities
already discussed in relation to the homogeneity of the culture
industry’s products and its close alignment with pornographic cam-
era techniques (whether pointed at people or food) are, according
to Baudrillard, an essential part of the deep underlying social
processes of which Reality TV is but a cultural reflection. Banality TV
thus partakes of a general social ethos of excessive revelation that
Baudrillard approaches in a similar manner to Kracauer. For exam-
ple, a comparison of the following quotations provides a striking

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