Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind
Cannot bear very much reality.
Time past and time future
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
‘Burnt Norton’ from Four Quartets, T.S. Eliot
What is reality and why can’t we bear much of it? In the past, I’ve written about the phenomenon of ‘reality’ shows; I’ve even been on one (Everyone’s A Critic) and although it was more honest than the majority of its ilk, it was still framed, constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed and served up as a digest of what its cast members said, the raw material having gone through the internal economies of its producers pretty much as impressions and experiences go through the brain of a fiction creator.
As I’ve said, EAC was one of the better ones. My husband and I, along with 22 other ‘talent’ people were treated well, fed lavishly, driven or flown to galleries from Melbourne to Sydney and lodged in decent accommodation. We were easily outnumbered by the huge production team: There were producers and their assistants, photographers, sound engineers, caterers, travel coordinators, and Uncle Tom Cobley & all. Cast and crew came to about a hundred souls, all to put on a small program that filmed people looking at art in galleries and talking about it. It must have cost millions.
Some of the field producers wanted a particular vibe from you. They’d stop you and ask for something ‘more personal’. One producer disagreed with what Rick and I were saying about a contemporary piece and wanted us to start over and say something different. Not all, though. We actually protested about that and the main production team were supportive. Most weren’t like that and were simply there to make sure you were able to see the piece properly and that you were comfortable. But when active direction happened it felt strange, because one’s response to a work of art is entirely personal, made up from what you know and what you experience in the moment of contemplation of the actual piece.
When it’s genuine response, you notice stuff and point it out. Or you don’t notice much and don’t feel much. It’s personal. You make judgements, because that’s what you do anyway when looking at art, or politics, or life. But then the editors get onto your maybe ten-to-fifteen-minute substantial conversation and clip out the twelve seconds where you happened to mention your mum – and that’s what makes it to air. They want strong reactions, but not all types of strong reaction. The contentious things we said about that piece in Sydney didn’t make it to air and I’m not surprised. (It was pretentious and crappy. Well, they said they wanted our opinions …) The editors also cut out some harsh things I said in Melbourne when looking, if I remember rightly, at a particularly strong Gordon Bennett. I slammed electoral divisions in Victoria being named after mass murderers of Aboriginal people like Angus MacMillan. I might been a tad critical of John Howard too. Naughty naughty. The producers obviously didn’t want the program to be too political or abrasive, and sometimes I suppose I am. Fair cop. (This was 2017, and Macmillan wasn’t renamed until 2019. It’s now Monash. About bloody time.)
So, when I compare this admittedly benign and mostly enjoyable experience with what I’ve seen and heard about what happens on other shows that are labelled ‘reality’, I think that EAC was a bit of a unicorn. It only tweaked and mostly didn’t attempt to script or direct us, which is a world away from the highly constructed faux-reality dramas of Married at First Sight, Big Brother, Real Housewives, Jersey Shore etc, etc. I try to watch them sometimes so that I’ve got a finger on what’s happening in media land, and indeed covered Big Brother in some detail in the distant past of Eureka Street, when I was the Watching Brief columnist.
But it’s different now. That small freckle of Sylvania Waters, the Osbournes and Big Brother has metastasised into the ever-spreading melanoma of falsity and porn-adjacency we now see. I can’t sit through five minutes of Kardashians or enjoy seeing people being forced to eat cockroaches and slimy viscera. I would not have been happy to go to the Colosseum had I been an ancient Roman. Given my views, I would probably have been the ‘talent’ anyway, short-lived food for lions and pitiless human voyeurs. At least a lion would only eat my body. The other lot want your soul.
But then, why do people want this? As King Lear said, ‘what makes these hard hearts?’ How do some people watch something happening and come to radically different views? Relativity is important, context is important. But there have to be some hard lines drawn, surely. You can’t fall back on context when someone is calling explicitly for the genocide of another group, as we saw memorably enacted in US Congress earlier this year. And strangely, egregiously, we saw this week that the contract of the UN’s special advisor on the prevention of genocide, Alice Wairimu Nderitu, was not renewed when she determined that Israel was not perpetrating genocide in Gaza. This Kenyan woman, whose entire professional career has been based on the study and prevention of genocide, failed to deliver the conclusion that was desired by the Secretary-General.
The warring points of view over what has been happening in the Middle East since October 7 only serve to make the point that what you bring to the world when you are bearing witness tells me what you are as much as what you saw. Or believed you saw. If you are getting your news only from Al Jazeera, SBS, ABC or The Guardian, you will believe one thing. If you read a bit further and from a wider variety of sources, and if you're well-versed in history, you might well believe something else.
I have a rule of thumb now: if your question enrages your listener, then you have part of your answer. If your question makes them hate you, you have another part of the answer. If your disagreement with their argument makes them want to hurt you in some way, that’s as much an answer as anything verbal.
It doesn’t make me want to stop asking questions.
Juliette Hughes is a freelance writer.