Eddie, Zizek

Slavoj Zizek talks of “the thrill of the real.” He states that images have exposed us to ever more realistic fears and pain, buying our attention with shock of horror while we, in our haze, are ever more removed from the fact of horror. An excellent illustration of his idea would be in television.

Traditional fiction on TV is, well, fiction. Fiction is reality made dramatic, and consists of what we recognize from life but are distorted to unfamiliar extremes. It is either too good to be true or too bad to be plausible. Fiction in this form is engaging, but never stresses to be real. “It’s just TV, dear, don’t be silly” we have all been told. When we are done watching TV, we cross that boarder at the edge of the screen and return to our own world. Everything that happens on the screen stays on the screen and we are allowed to put down those events until we choose to return at a future day.

Now, with TV that mimics reality, things are no longer simple and tame. When viewers could choose to never return to the world of the television or even forget about it completely, television found realism. When things are real, they matter, and people’s attention returned once again. Yet something is now different. Because shows are “real,” the outcomes hold consequences beyond a storyline. The TV is no longer a simple container of self-contained worlds, but is now a window for a glimpse of real people put into situations of humanistic and moralistic conflict. Sure, we have had similar struggles all along on TV, but now, when we turn off the TV, the show lives on as an ominous truth somewhere beyond the four walls of our homes. Suddenly, the show is never over.

Realistic television exploits the limited reach of our perceptions in the world so that fiction can no longer be disapproved and separated from real life. TV seeks to persuade us that the shocking events must exist somewhere out there, so we are now always engaged in the show. Over time, we become weary of TV’s endless turmoil and constant intensity.

Intense and extreme experiences in life are supposed to be of the minority. We are supposed to recognize their rarity as being unusual and realize the need for our concern or action. Yet with the current feed of mock battles and staged disasters at such scale and frequency, we are exhausted. We have not been made into heartless demons by TV, but rather run to the ground and tired to the point of indifference.

The meteor in Deep Impact, nuclear threats in 24 and phantom diseases in House are all shocking, but are all ultimately inconsequential. We are ruffled, unsettled and deeply disturbed, but at the same time, any alarm awaken within ourselves is false and temporary. It will then take a bigger bomb or a deeper mutilation to call our alert the next time, and even then we will have already learnt to fall back into normality in moments. If Zizek is right, that is what we need to fear – a pacified, or even crippled, sense of danger in real life.