Hollywood's Latest: Deperately Seeking Ugliness in The Everyday.(Brief Article)

Am I the only one craving more fake TV?

From the war-record films of the '40s to television's recent "Cops" "reality"-based entertainment has always been with us--but it has proliferated at an alarming rate this past year. As "Temptation Island" celebrated big ratings and "Survivor" entered its second season, movies such as 15 Minutes and Series 7 popped up in big screen theaters to spoof the reality genre.

The resulting products are sickeningly self-aware. The "Survivor" contestants started bickering within moments of meeting each other because they knew that's what viewers wanted to see. They are also baldly conscience-free. The movie 15 Minutes, about a pair of murderers who videotape their crimes in a bid for celebrity status, sells the same grisly, voyeuristic violence it's supposedly condemning audiences for lapping up.

These shows fuel cynicism and moral numbness in the American public. At the screening of 15 Minutes I attended, a woman in the theater leapt out of her seat to give a standing ovation when one of the movie's killers took ten bullets to the chest during the climax. Either she was completely ignorant of the irony of the moment or she had completely absorbed the filmmakers' hip detachment from violence and ugliness.

Detachment is one of the keys to this new brand of reality-based entertainment. After all, how close do you want to get to a storyline that admits to its own hypocrisy, makes fun of that hypocrisy, and then proceeds to frolic energetically in the slime of the whole hypocritical production? Twisted double standards become the order of the day. On a recent CBS news program, one of the contestants from the first season of "Survivor" complained that this year's players were only concerned with getting camera time--a comment he was more than happy to register in living color on national TV.

This circus of falsity can't help but leave us hopelessly jaded. Watching "Survivor" we're meant to scoff at the banality of the participants; watching Series 7--the big-screen send-up in which the contestants of a program called "The Contenders" must kill each other to win--we're supposed to laugh at the rubes. The next logical step is to simply sneer at ourselves.