Blood and Thunder: An Open Letter to Reality Television Moguls / Features / Untitled Books

“Did you know that humans’ brainwaves are lower when watching TV than when sleeping? Did you know that the average American child has seen over 8,000 murders on TV by the time he or she has finished grade school?”

Blood and Thunder: An Open Letter to Reality Television Moguls

Charles McLeod's fiction has appeared in a multitude of publications. He received his MFA from the University of Virginia, where he was a Hoyns Fellow, and has also received fellowships from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown and San Jose State University, where he was a Steinbeck Fellow. American Weather, the savage take-down of modern America, is his first novel.

Dear Benevolent Millionaires,

Evening in The World State again: night birds and heat lightning, bats circling the pair of sycamores across the street. Two counties down, an F4 has shattered a trailer park, the remnants of homes like bits of crisps on a green plate of farmland. A handful dead amongst the spent parts and wreckage, and I imagine them, watching you while their walls shake, their ignorance strength as the cyclone approaches. In their last minutes alive, they stare at the screen, slightly bored, hoping the dolt gets the simple question wrong, hoping the mean one gets kicked off the island. The station's storm radar sits tucked in the screen's lower left corner, the supercell on the Doppler pink as Snooki's best lipstick. It will take the transformers being ripped from the ground for this small audience of the soon-dead to know something is wrong. It will take the TV turning itself off to know that they'll no longer need television.

Fifty years ago, then-FCC Chairman Newton N. Minot said this of television, in his "Television and the Public Interest" address:

"I invite each of you to sit down in front of your own television set when your station goes on the air and stay there, for a day, without a book, without a magazine, without a newspaper, without a profit and loss sheet or a rating book to distract you. Keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that what you will observe is a vast wasteland. You will see a procession of game shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And endlessly commercials - many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you'll see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, I only ask you to try it."

And as you know, America did try it, and wholeheartedly approved. We never, really, as a society, picked that book back up again. The wasteland, while arid, while both sparse and grim, we found much more fascinating. According to the A.C. Nielsen Company, in a 65-year life, the average American will spend nine years of it watching television. Compare this to a 2007 AP-Ipsos poll that found that one in four Americans didn't read a single book over the past twelve months, at the time of polling, and you can see why I am writing you - and not Jonathan Franzen - to free us.

If there's a second thing that America is good at, past watching TV, it's prisons. According to the King's College International Centre for Prison Studies, Americans - who make up just 5% of the world's population - house one-quarter of all the world's prisoners. We lock a lot of people up and we watch a lot of TV and do any of you know the novel We? A Russian wrote it in 1921. Its setting is the urban nation of One State. People's names are just a letter followed by a series of numbers. One State is made mainly from glass, in a manner quite similar to Bentham's Panopticon, that 1800s prison design that afforded an observer the ability to see every prisoner without the prisoners knowing if they were being watched. Are you watching me right now, Reality Kings? Can you see me out here, on the flatlands, waiting for your next creation? At the end of We, the protagonist is given "The Great Operation", something not too far away from what we know as a lobotomy. Afterward, he watches, with calm stability, his former lover tortured and killed. Did you know that humans' brainwaves are lower when watching TV than when sleeping? Did you know that the average American child has seen over 8,000 murders on TV by the time he or she has finished grade school?

But maybe you don't know that book, even if you are smarter than a fifth-grader. I'm sure your minions are busy travelling the world in their jets, scouting sites for your next reality television series. I am wondering if, on any of these trips, they brought with them The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood? In the novel, which was written in 1985, well before the world knew of Al-Qaeda, well before 9/11, The Great Recession or The Tea Party, a movement called Sons of Jacob stage a terrorist attack, blaming it on Islamic radicals. This movement manipulates the electronic banking system, consolidating power and ruling society as a highly militarized, hyper-Christian regime. Crazy, right? I mean, who comes up with these sorts of ideas? Anyhow, the novel's conclusion takes the form of a metafictional epilogue. (Do you know the word metaficitonal? Microsoft Word's spell checker doesn't. Are fifth-graders smarter than Microsoft Word?) And if metafiction exposes the illusionary world of a text, reality television performs, perhaps, the inverse, taking the "real" and making it staged while attempting to retain a feeling of authenticity: obviously the cast of Survivor is not really alone; obviously it's not really some breed of pygmy chinchilla perched on Donald Trump's head for each airing of The Apprentice.

But we, the purveyors of your entertainment fiefdom, we buy in. We believe the lie. We hold the lie up and we call the lie truth. We revel in it. War is Peace: America has proved this, and proves it still. We kill people who kill people because killing is wrong, and when a nation-state's code of ethics is that tough to crack, it's every man for himself, Friends, and fuck the consequences. Maybe you realized this while working odd jobs in LA during the lean years. Sunburned and broke, maybe you looked around at the spray-tanned opulence of my home state's most famous city and because it was 1984, muttered these words from Orwell: "Never again will you be capable of ordinary human feeling. Everything will be dead inside you. Never again will you be capable of love, or friendship, or joy of living, or laughter, or curiosity, or courage, or integrity. You will be hollow. We shall squeeze you empty and then we shall fill you with ourselves."

And fill us you have, you Jersey Shore Landlords, You Catchers of Predators. You've made it; you've ascended. One of you produced the Emmys this year, the biggest circle-jerk in all of television. Your shows are status quo for the POGs, the Post-Orwellian Generation, a term I use for those born after 1984. I'm assuming that you're familiar with Orwell, at least a little bit. After all, you named a show after the dictator from Orwell's classic text, so this sort of makes you Big Brother's little brothers. And America's interest in prisons is your interest, too, as two shows you're developing - Talent Behind Bars and Dancing Behind Bars - aim to showcase (NOT exploit, don't listen to them) the bevy of future Astaires and Sinatras currently on lockdown. You get it, and I get you, too: you are creating metatelevision. You are making a reality TV show that is commentary on reality TV, and TV-watching in general. You are saying: we exist in a penal state. You are telling us we've chosen to live lives of incarceration. You are telling us that we have invited upon ourselves - and quite happily - our own death sentences.

My only concern is that Americans have watched so much television for so long that we are no longer, as a nation, smart enough to get it. Thus this letter, Friends. Thus my attempt at helping you help yourself. You've given us so much that I view each of you as something near to a real-life Guy Montag, the protagonist from Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. In that novel, (have you read it?), Montag is a "fireman", meaning he burns books; that is, he saves lives by keeping the masses de-intellectualized and hedonistic. And while I applaud your service, I advise you to keep it simple, too. I mean, you work in Hollywood - "dumb it down" is that town's Amen. If you want us to understand that we're just waiting to die, you know what you have to do: show a person dying.

And you're on your way there: getting into the US Department of Corrections is the step in the right direction. While the US is only fifth for total number of people executed in 2010 according to Amnesty International, we're in solid company: China, Iran, North Korea and Yemen are the only countries ahead of us, and my guess is that most of those places can't even get your shows on their televisions. On top of this, California is just the state you want: according to Washington DC's Death Row Information Center, as of April 1st, 2010, California had executed 710 people over the course of its history. The next closest state was Florida, with 398. And is it just coincidence, that these two states are the only two states with a Disneyland in them? And is it just coincidence that Disney owns ABC, the TV station that will air the next US reality hit, Expedition Impossible? In it, contestants cross the Sahara, solving problems in teams. Let's you and me be our own team, because I'm concerned that the ex-FCC Chairman was right, that TV really is becoming a desert. There are too few shows left that we proles can truly enjoy, shows that will allow you to add to your collection of People's Choice trophies. You could just ask a prisoner casually - hey, do you want to die on TV? You might be surprised by the number of positive responses. It's often difficult for gangs (and by extension Crime, and by extension Evil) to market so broadly. There's a niche to be filled. Just sayin'.

And maybe you're thinking: you're insane, no way. No population would simply stand by and willingly watch - if not enjoy - someone's execution. So I bring up one last little piece of prose. Have you ever read Shirley Jackson's The Lottery? If you have, then you know that Hillary Clinton was right - it does take a village. It takes the masses being accepting, being complicit. TV, Americans know, makes everything okay. If it happens on TV, it's at once fake and more attractively real than life than ever could be. So I urge you, find your Tessie Hutchinson. Become Mr Summers before someone else does. We are behind you. We are holding our rocks. You wouldn't have to do it all the time, either; perhaps just once a year, during Sweeps Week. And if my piece of paper (or one of yours!) contains the black spot, then it will be our turn to provide the ratings.

It's late at night now. I've turned the lights off. It's just me and my laptop and the flashes from off of the TV. An action movie is on: blood fills the streets. I've muted the film, substituting the sound of explosions and screams for the low groans of thunder over the prairie. And you've done something like this, too, blended the real and the ersatz on much of your programming. But we need something new and we need it from you, and it needs to be even bigger than Jeff Foxworthy's moustache. Show us something so real that it has to be fake, that keeps us invested while we toil away through summer's regime of hurricanes and tornadoes, natural events possessive of near-surreal wrath that leave behind enough carnage and human misery that there's no way for us, anymore, to change the channel. I believe in you, Fellas. You are survivors. There's no weakest link. Life is a race and you've run it amazingly. Friend me on Facebook, okay? We'll talk R&D. We'll get this ball rolling.

Charles McLeod

...............................................................................................................................................

American Weather by Charles McLeod is published by Harvill Secker.
................................................................................................................................................

Thursday, 4 August, 2011