Too Much Information

Not quite halfway into the second installment of Jennifer Fox’s recent documentary on PBS, “An American Love Story,” her subject, Karen Wilson, takes a long, stiff pull on a cigarette.

She exhales a plume of smoke that curls, then tangles around her face like an argument--a visual stamp of inner turmoil.

The camera hovers close. Not like a friend. It has pushed past polite “personal space” borders. She sprawls on the couch, worried--about her health. About her daughter, who floats time zones and continents away. About her husband, momentarily vanished.

Finally, there is a phone call. Baritone mumbling barely audible on the other end. She replaces the receiver. She stares pointedly into the camera: “I’ll tell you later.”

At once--for once--the unblinking eye rebuffed, reined in.

That shade drawn, that textured silence, albeit brief, is a startling moment; jarring in an age when thumb-to-the-power-button throws open the door to just about everyone’s private lives--from president to pupil.

In that era before TV dinners, before “living color,” and long, long before we could all peer in through a hole the size of a camera’s lens, there was an understood law that mightily ruled the land--”Family business is family business.” Not for public consumption.

But we now live in a society that has shifted recklessly into high, self-revelatory gear--with no safety wall in sight. Some point to Donahue’s and (early) Oprah’s roaming microphones as the beginning. Still others to carnival-barker-cum-three-ring-talk-host Jerry Springer. Still others to the rise of the harrowing confessional memoir that claim as their purview pedophilia, alcoholism, incest, just for salacious starters.

Since the Loud family, in a landmark documentary “An American Family,” had its private dramas hot-lit in front of American millions in the ‘70s, the standard has not just shifted but become more and more blurred: from MTV’s “The Real World” and the herky-jerky real-life camera beat of “Cops” to day-in-the-life vanity voyeur Web sites that follow subjects from dawn til dusk (and through various degrees of undress).

Edifying? Gratuitous? Shaping the culture? Gutting it? What does revealing it all in front of a camera--in essence to the world--provide? What do those who reveal themselves--or we who watch, for that matter--have to gain?

Of Two Minds About Privacy

To be sure, as a culture, we have a complex relationship with privacy. We both deeply value and go to great lengths to protect it, while at the same time we are wary of it and its close kin--secrets. We are of two minds about its place and import. And it shows--most dramatically in our complex history about privacy and society’s shifting personal borders.

So before waxing nostalgic about our romanced notions of the olden days and privacy’s place within them, it’s important to remember, says Stephanie J. Coontz, author of “The Way We Never Were: American Family and the Nostalgia Trap” (Basic Books) that in the past, “Families were entitled to less privacy as they were exposed to more and more intrusions.

“In the first 100 years of American settlement, there was really no privacy vis-a-vis a neighborhood. The typical adultery case, for example, would have testimony that would read this way: ‘. . . We looked through the window, couldn’t see anything . . . so we walked in . . . saw that they were in bed . . . after observing for some time . . .’ ”

Well, you get the picture.

People then were much more dependent on their local communities, says Elinor A. Accampo, an associate professor of history at USC. And that interdependence freely allowed entree into a realm we now rope off as private.

“For example, you couldn’t just marry anybody--you had to marry someone of the right age,” Accampo says. “The community had a say. And if your wife committed adultery, the husband was paraded about the town because he was cuckolded. It let everyone know he doesn’t have control over his wife.”

Nor his life. This practice of exposing--or presenting, if you will--secrets as theater-in-the-round began to shift with industrialization and urbanization.

“The family’s cut off. There is much more of a division of public and private. Domesticity is more pronounced,” Accampo says.

“Households become more elaborate and cut off from the world . . .” As private life and, more precisely, middle-class private life began to emerge in the 19th century, it did so with this familiar caveat: “You don’t reveal dirty laundry. Remember how scandalous it [once] was to see a psychiatrist or to have divorce or if your children had problems? Clearly there was a more highly developed sense of privacy.”

But it’s always been tenuous, the division between our public and private lives, a curtain instead of a heavy door closing out the world.

As Coontz says, even the en masse move to suburbs in the 1940s and 1950s found the outside world steadily intervening. “You overhead things that were going on. There were gossips and snoops who talked about you and what you were doing; you could get fired because someone made very public your private life.”

And so, given that long struggle to construct safe and private spaces to either fail or thrive--it’s baffling that some have decided to blow the whistle on themselves. It’s that proclivity that speaks to our increasingly complex thinking about privacy and private lives.

“The idea of not being anonymous has made life more democratic,” says West Los Angeles-based family therapist Michael Hughes. “Some people can find an avenue to be Somebody as opposed to being unknown. Alone.”

Though the sideshow atmosphere intrinsically linked to daytime chat shows banks on the hyper-theatrical, the lasting benefit for some is that it’s a way to connect up with those who have struggled silently.

“Telling your story on camera,” Hughes says, “may be something in the context of, say, Oprah or [best-selling inspirational author] Iyanla Vanzant, can certainly be beneficial . . . if it’s handled skillfully by a therapist or specialist. Otherwise, it could be superficial.”

A Chance for Growth

With revelation comes growth, is one school of thought, and deepening awareness. From crisis, from stumbles and, most important, from not being afraid to air secrets publicly come a chance for growth. It’s shrugging out of the cloak of shame.

That is part of what fuels filmmaker Fox’s project, “An American Love Story.” Although ostensibly a film about the life and trials of an interracial couple, the film more thoroughly depicts what rises out of the intimacy, the revelations and the secrets shared.

What made the film perhaps more a reflective pool than a punishing, choppy sea is Fox’s combination of curiosity and respectful restraint.

“There was no decision before we started about what was private and what was public. It was more intuitive,” says Fox, who spent a year and a half with Wilson and Bill Sims. “To be honest, unless they told me otherwise, anything they let me see was public.

“I really wanted to make a radical statement. Because people’s lives [on TV] are reduced to 20-minute sound bites, high key and high drama. And with that, our perceptions of reality are being altered.

“What we actually live is very complex and very, very gray, yet we are told that things are black and white.

“Other than the race thing, you’re telling [in the documentary] pretty ordinary stories--first date, career, dinners, alcoholism, older daughter’s identity issues--these are stories that every family deals with . . . that we can mirror. But by opening their lives, they provide an incredible service [for others].”

Project’s Effect on the Viewer

Projects handled as carefully--and as inclusively--as Fox’s, says Michael Hughes, “can have cumulative, restorative and therapeutic value . . . for the viewer.” However, from the standpoint of the Wilson-Sims’ family, he pauses, then reflects: “What happens to this family remains to be seen.”

But it’s intended as part of a process, an ongoing collective dialogue.

“I think these shows, the Web sites, all of it,” says USC’s Accampo, “makes everybody feel a little bit more normal.”

Collectively they provide a more expansive reflection, a mirror on our world.

For Wilson and Sims, it was as an interracial couple already living life under society’s steady gaze. Life then becomes a laboratory. For the artist in Bill Sims, it’s seeing himself as part of the larger human mosaic; for Karen Wilson, it may be no more than an expanded home movie library.

But for so many who take a spin along the TV talk-show circuit, says Accampo, it might be a mix of egotism, voyeurism or deep loneliness:

“It’s difficult to know. Being a historian, I’m always looking at the past. This [revealing a private life] must be some reaction against this trend toward privacy, feeling too cut off.”

So what internal mechanism allows someone to throw their lives up for the ultimate public viewing?

Quite frankly, says Coontz, “I don’t know why. . . . But there is one little thing, a little point that contributes to putting [one’s life] in front of public scrutiny. And I think it’s the breakdown of the old rules that governed personal behavior. It makes one consider--what is a privacy worth defending and a secret worth disclosing? Wife beating was a privacy that was protected, birth control was a secret worth disclosing.”

It throws open an entirely different set of doors, Coontz says. “We turn to others for approval and support.”

“Some of this self-disclosure,” she continues, “is a direct result of this privacy. You feel so isolated that you don’t know if it’s normal or not. We’re looking for some shared norms. . . . Maybe we can see this period as a confused and transitory response. I don’t think everyone wants to go back to rigid rules, which don’t take account of personal circumstances. So that means you have to tell your story--trial by anecdote.”

Lynell George can be reached by e-mail at lynell.george@latimes.com.