Jim Jividen reflects on a recent Real World fistfight and concludes that what once shocked now barely registers.
Do you know Daniel Patrick Moynihan?
He was a US Senator from New York, one of those wise old men who was part of the backdrop of American politics forever. Twenty years ago, he coined the phrase “defining deviancy down” to discuss how previously stigmatized criminal conduct was becoming normalized; an example was the level of media coverage of the 1929 St Valentine’s Day massacre in which only four men were killed compared to contemporary acceptance of similarly sized homicides.
I thought about Moynihan when watching the season finale of Real World Portland.
There’s an accepted wisdom about violence in professional wrestling that repeated use of violent “garbage matches” will desensitize a crowd, who will then, given diminishing returns, require more and more violence in order to be satiated.
|
To sum up for those of you who were otherwise occupied, there was a fistfight between two of the housemates, Nia (who later in that episode appeared to set up a hit on one of her roommates, and then explained to another that retribution was going to occur with the most evocative reality phrase of the year “my dogs are gonna eat”. My sincerest hope is the next Dodgers/Diamondbacks series is previewed by a still fuming Zack Greinke answering a question about any residual bad blood over his head getting thrown at by Ian Kennedy by responding “my dogs are gonna eat”. Then he sucks his thumb) and Averey (with some assistance from her showmance, Johnny). It was easily the most physically violent confrontation in the history of the franchise (Portland is the 28th cycle of Real World and probably its lowest rated; certainly the one which aired the fewest episodes. Presumably those two metrics are not unrelated) ending with what could only be described as a Nia sucker punch.
No action was taken.
If you’ve aged out of the Real World demographic, this is probably a surprise. You recall Stephen’s light slap of Irene in Seattle (yes you do dammit; she told the pretty obviously closeted Stephen that he was gay, he threw her stuffed animal into the water – you remember). Stephen had to take anger management classes to remain on the show. Trisha shoved Parisa down in Sydney (a season with double the episode total of Portland) and got sent home. Gladys punched Abe on the sister show, Road Rules (Latin America) and got bounced out of the series.
This fight was all of those fights put together. And nothing occurred.
If we hermetically seal off the Real World from the rest of the reality universe, there isn’t a good way for prior reality to lead to that result. If Real World were a novel, Chapter 28 doesn’t logically follow from the authorial choices made prior.
But in this world, the fight wasn’t startling at all, because this is a world that includes The Bad Girls Club, a show (also from the Real World producers) that fosters an almost prison yard ethos; fighting is a part of nearly every episode and is treated as a part of the experience. Survival is the goal of BGC, with dominant cliques looking to intimidate the weaker housemates. There’s a good deal of turnover in each season, with “replacements” immediately hazed by the “originals” who look to protect their positions. I watch Bad Girls Club…it can be challenging to find the line between when we’re seeing reality show performers looking to generate story and when it’s largely corporate exploitation of women on the economic margins in a country without much social mobility.
Nia’s fight with Averey could have occurred before the first commercial break in a Bad Girls Club season and would have just been part of the tapestry of violence that isn’t complete until the last frame of the multi-part reunion show.
There’s an accepted wisdom about violence in professional wrestling that goes something like this – a well-timed chair shot, a bump through a table, some juice, either by blade or hardway (that’s lots of carny speak, I apologize – juice is blood and those other terms mean what you think they mean) can pop a crowd, drive up audience interest, lead to a bigger house – but repeated use of “garbage matches” will desensitize a crowd, who will then, given diminishing returns, require more and more violence in order to be satiated.
That’s what’s happened here, right? Has Bunim-Murray burned out the territory? What once shocked now barely registers. One could, perhaps, make the same claim about the lack of outrage toward revelations about NSA surveillance. But that’s going to take me too far afield.
Ideally, I’d be able to cast some moral disapproval about this; it makes for a stronger piece. Were I of a different political persuasion I’d reference that on Real World Portland, Jessica is seen by her roommates as a little prudish for not having sex in the house with temporary boyfriend Tyler, reflecting a level of comfort with public sex in view of cameras that would not have occurred in prior generations, and, more significantly, the ease with which the roommates accepted former Texas Tech football player Marlon’s admission to having sex with a man (Marlon’s also an African-American Christian without any stereotypical identifying gay markers; his seeming nonchalance about his sexual orientation makes him a character I’m not certain we’ve ever seen on reality television, making his emergence the one most likely to have legs)
But while that’s reflective of a changing culture, I can’t muster up enough interest in what other adults do with their genitals to lump changing sexual mores into a discussion of the ease with which we accept violence, and I’d view the rapidity that a group more marginalized than any in the US for most of my life, homosexuals, has gained acceptance in the last several years as entirely positive. The good old days weren’t always good, Billy Joel sang in his worst ever song. I’m nostalgic for mid- century America’s top marginal tax rates and robust unionization, not so much for the cultural repression.
So – where does that leave us? Has deviancy been defined down?
What I do know, for myself at least, is that the level of accepted violence on a show like the Bad Girls Club has decreased my ability to empathize with the performers. I care more about what happens to Sally Draper than Natalie Nunn. The stated ethos of the Real World was for 7 strangers (and by extension, us) to be forced to see the world through each other’s eyes. It could be that, as Google Glass nears, we’ve each decided that our own field of vision is all that really matters. Or it could just be that we’re in the death throws of a pioneering reality franchise whose formula no longer works in a world which it helped create.
Photo–Wikipedia