life in mokievision

The next time I decide that the perfect sick day activity is watching scary videos, just say, "Slenderman."

I watched up to Entry #17 of Marble Hornets, noted the water bottle and Jay's coughing, and feeling cold, decided to give it up and go to bed. Except I was up all night, cold, coughing and incoherent, slinking through the dark house to the bathroom for a drink of water.

Happy fun heart attack time!

So here's the problem with reality TV, all wrapped up in one nice little scene from Oxygen's Tori & Dean.

Very pregnant Tori is at the beach with her husband. He's going into the water to dive when suddenly, she gets a call announcing that there's another bidder on the house they want! Oh no! Hubby's down in the bubbly, and she must make this call on her own, but the reception cuts out! Oh no! So she must run off and find a spot where she can talk to her real estate agent! Alone!

But then hubby comes out, and finds his pregnant wifey missing. Her companions--sorry, 'her gays', meaning the random gay men she had just met and yet had latched onto because gay men are fabulously interchangeable that way--can't tell her where she went, because despite her making a big huge dramatic deal out of what was going on and needing to make a call, they were not listening or paying any attention to which way the panic stricken pregnant woman waddled off. Ah, her gays, they care so much.

So between the talking head scenes of Tori explaining how she was panicking over this house, and Dean explaining how he was panicking over his missing wife, and the filmed scenes of Tori running around squealing into a phone and Dean wandering around in scuba gear shouting, "T?", guess what perfectly logical thing we did not see. Go on, I'll give you a minute.

If you guessed it was the panic-stricken husband turning to the goddamn camera crew standing around on dry land and filming his family's every move to ask them where she went, you'd be right.

Pretending the cameras aren't there is barely plausible when you're only sitting around pretending to have a casual conversation about this week's villain, or whining about the rigged challenge for the rigged show that you're paid to appear on whether you win or not. Not that there's much of a distinction between competitive reality shows and voyeuristic reality shows these days--always a pre-assigned villain, always a pre-assigned winner.

It's just plain creepy the way consumers are encouraged to believe that we have to know, need to know, deserve to know, every little detail of a celebrity's life, that they somehow transcend their chosen medium and become in and of themselves public entertainment and thus have no right to a private life. It's creepier still to see celebrities duck the cameras and cry for privacy one week only to turn around the next week and use the paparazzi as cheap PR. (Say, don't those Brad/Angie/Jen spats very conveniently pop up when the three have films coming out the following week? Yes, yes they do.)

But it's nigh on perverse to take that a step further and support that consumer delusion by selling us ridiculously fictionalized versions of lives we have no right to know about, and wouldn't consider wanting to know about except that random famewhores had been picked out of the LA (and New Jersey) background in an attempt to create a product, a bargain basement celebrity, just for the reality show sale. What the fuck has a Kardashian ever done that we should even be curious about their day?

And here's the problem with early morning television: I can watch reality repeats trying to sell me someone's dignity, an infomercial trying to sell me cheap crap, or the morning news which is full of targeted pharmaceutical advertisements masquerading as research information. Isn't that a lovely thought to start the day with?

Or Spongebob Squarepants, but I'm not that big a masochist.