After years of collecting the unsightly flotsam and jetsam of reality show atrocities, the PMMF has long since concluded that many of those who appear on reality shows are, in fact, psychologically impaired.So, it's not a big surprise for us to see from this TheWrap.com article that 11 former reality show players have killed themselves, and at least two others have attempted suicide.
It is our conclusion that reality shows are inherent magnets for the mentally unstable and insecure, as are the so-called "trash talk shows," the progenitor of today's vapid reality show onslaught.
When reality show consumers and producers are finally bored with the players and the show is over, the participants are often reduced to media-mangled shells of confused identity and resulting depression. The media spotlight is a powerful drug, with bad trips and potentially fatal withdrawals for those in its shine. Reality show producers don't care about these folks, who are seduced by celebrity-quest, scripted by handlers, and manipulated for mass consumption like human cheese puffs, then garbage heaped when they go stale.
From the excellent book, Reality TV: Realism and Revelation, by Anita Biressi and Heather Nunn, I present these fascinating conclusions:
“It (Reality TV) is attentive to individual aspiration and competitive individualism within frequently fake or highly proscribed micro-communities and attends to social mobility within an increasingly mediated social/public realm. This emphasis on the individual, their ambitions, fears and interpersonal relations with fellow contestants, neighbors, family or workmates brings pressure to bear on the filmic subject to reveal all on television.
The increasingly destabilized and permeable borders between the media and the social realm facilitates this and, in doing so, radically alters the cultural landscape within which we all have to abide.
Moreover, as noted throughout, the increasing presence of cameras in our lives, their incursion into public spaces and their apparent widespread acceptability is, in itself, altering the ground of our self-presentation and self-fashioning. To borrow an observation from Jon Dovey, ‘We are all learning to live in the Freak Show, it is our new public space.’ The question is how we choose to navigate this space and make it our own."
Indeed. The Great Platypus encourages you to navigate this space in a free-thinking and scrupulously non-comformist manner, such as the inscrutably principled way in which He tunnels his 3,300-light-year-long warp between Freaky's Cat Eye Nebula and Earth.
Take a stand. Refuse to watch these carnival "reality" sideshows, one of Earth's lowest life forms.
