Looking Into the Camera for Our Identity

Last week--as lenses zoomed in on the tics of politicians and the squirms of game show contestants and the floating shards of a plane crash--the Age of the Camera progressed onto the torsos of lawmen. The sheriff of Los Angeles County announced he’d be testing body-cams on deputies.

If the test of the chest-mounted cameras for investigations and traffic stops gets past the pilot stage, the department will lead the nation in law enforcement technology. Car cameras already are becoming standard police equipment in some areas, but car and body cameras would be novel. The sheriff noted that the tapes help settle legal arguments, notwithstanding questions of privacy.

He didn’t need to add that being ready for a close-up has also become an expectation of modern life. Cameras peep from ATMs and hotel lobbies and the walls of 7-Elevens. A whole genre of TV has sprung up around home movies and SWAT team busts.

Eyes in the sky record car chases and crash celebrity weddings. Bootleg Web sites broadcast unsuspecting people as they hit the home stretch on Disneyland’s Splash Mountain or strip in department store dressing rooms. From baptism to funeral, in public or private, there is not just the possibility but the probability that a camera will be rolling. And that we, the audience, will look.

What we’re looking for isn’t clear, though the surveillance is more intense than ever before. Gone, for example, are campaigns in which politicians assume there will be at least an occasional private moment. Some, like John McCain, have given in almost entirely, throwing open great swaths of their lives to the press corps.

An HBO show that played a prank involving a buxom woman, a naked man and an alleged “jealous husband” prompted a recent invasion-of-privacy lawsuit from a plumber who was set up to be a duped witness to the shenanigans on hidden camera in Beverly Hills. “Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?”--the show in which viewers see smart people fidget at the possibility of a bonanza--last month outdrew the viewing audience for the State of the Union address.

“The Real World,” MTV’s quasi-documentary series in which young strangers move in together for several months on camera, is now in its eighth season. More than 4 million people tuned in for the finale of its last installment in the fall. When the show solicited volunteers for its upcoming season, 37,000 applicants showed up--roughly twice the number of people who apply to Harvard each year.

The show has spun off a road-movie version of itself on MTV. Its producers say a similar show tracking the development of a Backstreet Boys-type singing group will debut on network TV next month. The Disney Channel’s “Bug Juice” spies on summer camp children. CBS has slated “Survivor,” which spies on real people who have been stranded on an island. A network bidding war recently erupted for rights to the Dutch show “Big Brother,” in which real people are moved into a special house riddled with hidden cameras. At week’s end, the audience decides who stays.

It has been only in the past decade that these real-ish versions of “The Truman Show” have proliferated, though the concept’s forebears include the 1970s documentary “An American Family.” That show, of course, was eventually condemned for the way it destroyed the Loud family, which let cameras invade its privacy.

There are certain benefits in documentation. It does enhance the public record, and not just in court. “In the old days, a political candidate could say one thing to one constituency and then go three blocks and say the opposite and get away with it,” says Joe Saltzman, associate dean of the USC-Annenberg School for Communications. “That’s not possible now.”

But this isn’t just about public records. It’s about a search for reality--in a medium that distorts what is real. Cameras make people self-conscious. Reality becomes hyper-reality. The cop wonders if he’s sufficiently cop-like; the “Real World” kid remembers how kids acted in the last “Real World”; the contestant’s significant other in the audience feels pressure to “act” nervous; the politician, in this primary season, finds himself shooting for “authenticity.”

It is a factual falsehood, the view through the camera. But it is perhaps the only place to look, now, for identity. We have no great war, no vast social schism--none of the defining crises that, in other eras, made it easier to say, “Here’s who we are and why we matter.” The only clear role now is that of “celebrity.” So we look to the camera. Is this face the “real” us? How about that one? Is this how to be? And if the camera lies, what then? Without it, who--really--are we?

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Shawn Hubler’s column appears Mondays and Thursdays. Her e-mail address is shawn.hubler@latimes.com.