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Reality TV seems unreal
By Carl Heintze
There's some kind of a message in a week which saw the launching of a new Harry Potter book and a television show in which real (!) people are confined to a house and spied on by television cameras. Although the two events don't seem related, I think in some ways they are.
It seems inconceivable that there is a person anywhere in the world who doesn't know about Harry Potter, the boy wizard who is now in the fourth book of his adventures. Perhaps there are fewer who know about the television show in which a group of people are confined to a house and spied upon morning, noon and night by television cameras.
For the story of how Harry Potter came into being is probably as good as the story of its author. Harry Potter's creator is a young single mother who started the Potter books as an unemployed teacher on what's called the dole in England, writing in a coffee shop in longhand, nursing a cup of coffee all day long.
Today she's worth more than $33 million, one of the richest women in England (aside from Queen Elizabeth, of course) and presumably on her way to becoming even richer if she can keep the plot of Harry Potter books going.
Meantime, we have the latest version of I Spy, the folks in the television house. It is an idea apparently spawned by the several webcam-Internet sites where one can watch someone, usually a young and pretty woman day and night, with clothes and without, eating, sleeping and eliminating. I, for one, can't imagine why this is very interesting, but what do I know?
The alternative version is the show in which 10 people are marooned on an island and one by one voted off it by the others. (I'd have voted them all off the island and off television the first week.)
This strange unreal reality seems to be a part of the network trend to what might be called virtual unreality--making what's bizarre real. It goes along with Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, another part of television which I fail to understand. (I know this places me in outer darkness and exile, but that's okay. I'm used to it.)
Or, how about the family recruited by BBC to spend three weeks in a Victorian house in uncomfortable clothes, using medicines, food and appliances of Victorian times (except, of course, when the kids go to school. Wouldn't want them to appear peculiar.)
Why, for heaven's sake? What's the point? Certainly everyone can agree that things were different in Victorian times; hardly, despite Charles Dickens, the "best of times, the worst of times."
It all boggles the mind. Which, I guess, is what it is supposed to do.
What we have here, it seems to me, is a world that is bored out of its gourd by real life. Daily we contend with traffic which seems the height of unreality--one car, one driver, one gridlock--with a summer which is more like winter; with dotcom companies that generate no income and which exist mostly as imaginary sites in cyberspace, living off the bounty of venture capitalists; and of housing prices which bear no real relationship to worth and similar unreal realities.
It's not exactly as if the world has gone mad. It's more as if things have simply gotten out of hand.
Reality exists, but it's off center. The staid sense of what we were, especially in California, no longer is what's happening. No one is quite sure what is happening.
One longs for the good old days when excitement was something as plain as homemade ice cream.
Those days may come again, but, I fear, not for a while.
Meantime, check out Harry Potter. He, at least, seems to know where he is. Where it's really unreal.
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Sunnyvale, California Since 1994
