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Conclusion 205
purpose – an ideological reduction, or, as Langer terms it, a discursive
mobilization. Global capitalism brings new levels of uncertainty and
social flux for formerly stable elements – especially previously secure
groups like the middle class. Banality TV becomes a tool of ideologi-
cal containment that translates this otherwise threatening outside
world of economic migrants, job instability and the relativization of
previously strong social institutions such as the Church, into more
easily consumable (if no more ultimately understandable) visual
packages. In this manner, the inner-city ghettos from which more
young black men go to prison than college are transformed from a
material indictment of society’s failings to the source of a whole
range of Reality programming. They provide a suitably dramatic
urban backdrop for witnessing the reassuring (albeit piecemeal)
reassertion of the authorities’ control. The contingency Kracauer
and others emphasize as an intrinsic feature of the photographic
image’s content is allied within Reality TV’s presentation of a
correspondingly contingent society. The result is that instead of the
mass media providing an authentic forum for substantive political
debate over such uncomfortable social facts as the very existence of
ghettos, it is the contingent immediacy of the images from the urban
jungle in various docudrama formats which means that ‘an aesthetics
of sensation underlies reality TV’ (Nichols 1994: 59). It is claimed
that postmodernity shatters traditional meta-narratives (Lyotard
1979); in this process of fragmentation Reality TV contributes the
‘construction of an endless “now”, ‘its preference for the chronicle,
the random and the unforeseen over the order and cohesion of
historiography’ (Nichols 1994: 59)’
For Nichols, the critical tradition of documentary film opens up
‘questions of magnitude. Reality TV privileges social events that have
their political content leached from them due to the mass media’s
preference for simplistic morality plays. As we have indicated with
our example of inner-city ghettos, Reality TV does not do questions
of magnitude. For example (building further upon the notion of the
self-referential circuit): ‘Celebrating the conviction of two LAPD
officers for beating Rodney King in 1991 “ends” the story, on the
episodic level, but does nothing to address the social conditions that
underpin it structurally’ (Nichols 1994: 60). The effect of Reality
TV/Other News/Cult of Celebrity is to reduce big political questions
to the status of the personal/ity. Any strongly felt outrage at the time
of a particular spectacle is quickly channelled into the next. This
creates: ‘a reactive politics that may mirror, in disturbing ways, the
very forms of absorption and distraction that should be among its
primary targets’ (1994: 60). Once again we can see how Benjamin’s
hopes for distraction have been betrayed by its sanitized incorpora-
tion into the frame of the mediascape.

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