Reality Is It’s Profitable to Be Unreal

The Calendar cover story on “The Death of Reality” (Dec. 13) listed riveting examples of how fiction in movies and TV has become intertwined with fact-telling, but it failed to examine why U.S. society is so obsessed with unreality. Nor did it explain why unreality is quickly replacing reality.

Unreality has taken hold because it is an extremely profitable business. It soothes a populace increasingly conditioned to prefer illusion over complexity, and it is part of our perennial fixation with technology as the ultimate solution to all our problems.

If the “Death of Reality” article had probed beneath the surface, it would have exposed and attacked the principle arguments that all those in the “business” use again and again to defend TV in general and unreality in particular:

* People can differentiate between “hard news” and entertainment.

* People deserve what they get because of their stupidity.

* We give viewers what they want.

* If viewers don’t like what they see, they can turn off their sets or switch channels.

* If we don’t give people what they want, somebody else will.

The argument that viewers can differentiate between news and entertainment is dubious at best. A poll by the Times-Mirror organization revealed that up to 50% of those watching crime re-creation shows, such as “Rescue 911,” felt they were watching the “real thing” even when there was a clear message at the bottom of the screen that the scene was a re-enactment.

As for people getting what they deserve, it is undoubtedly true that the public must accept a large part of the blame for the dreadful state of American TV. TV could not survive, let alone prosper, if there was not a significant audience for it.

However, even if this argument was entirely true, it does not relieve the media from its responsibilities. The media conveniently ignores that it is fundamentally responsible not only for feeding on “stupidity” but also for encouraging it, to the benefit of its own profits. There is a symbiotic relationship between those who are supposedly “stupid” and those who feed and profit from it.

It may be comforting to believe that by physically turning off a dial or changing channels, one still has freedom of thought, but such actions are largely symbolic. TV has insinuated itself so thoroughly throughout our culture that it is virtually impossible to distinguish between where TV leaves off and our general culture begins.

The odds are stacked against the individual viewer by the collective power that the media industry wields. The media pursue a deliberate business strategy as part of an organized industry. Against this is allayed the sporadic efforts of a largely unorganized, passive collection of viewers.

The significant question remains, why is Western culture such a fertile dumping ground for the development of unreality?

In many senses, unreality is the natural end-result of the American experiment. The Founding Fathers came to America with the explicit notion that we were to be a moral beacon to the rest of the world. Our charter was to remake history by redefining the very nature of man. We have now taken that notion to its ultimate extreme as a moral license to remake all of reality, including ourselves.

It has been pointed out that the United States has more theme parks per capita than any other people on the face of the planet. And it has been observed that the “real purpose” of Disneyland is to obscure the fact that all of America has now become the “true” Disneyland.

The con and the showman have always been part of our makeup. Out of our unique cultural makeup and the natural human desire to control reality, we now pursue unreality with a vengeance.

Besides, what better way to control reality than by inventing a new one, especially if the “real thing” is increasingly uncontrollable.