ShmoopTube

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We speak student!

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[ yodeling ]

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Reality TV Part Ten

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Constructed Reality

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[ bird caws ]

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What is constructed reality?

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So...

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Construction is what happens when you take

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a bunch of different ideas and put them together to create

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a theory or a bigger idea.

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Usually, it's subjective.

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So constructed reality is when you take

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little pieces of reality,

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put them together, and you have

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a new reality which

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in the end, in this case with reality TV, isn't actually real.

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So give us an example. Walk through a construction of a reality

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and how that plays out.

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Okay, awesome.

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So let's go back to The Bachelor. That's an easy target.

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There are two people having a conversation. And the guy says

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something really intimate and how he really

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loves the person he's dating and,

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"I care so much about you." Et cetera, et cetera.

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Cut to the girl

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gasping in horror

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and being like, "[ scared noise ]".

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And you think, "Oh, well she clearly does not

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like what he's saying."

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It is true that the guy said that

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and it is true that she reacted that way,

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but they probably happened hours apart.

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The editors have taken two little bits of reality

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and put them together to create a constructed reality.

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What's happening in the house or on the show,

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sure, it probably is dramatic for the people there.

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You see people crying, they're crying for a reason.

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But it's way more dramatic for us

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because we're seeing the editors who have picked --

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Out of a week's worth of footage,

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they've gotten it down to two hours

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and they've hand-picked exactly what's gonna go in and created this reality for us.

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Got it. Very interesting.

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So in the history of the movie business,

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this was a common way to get people to come to the sequels.

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The Lone Ranger, I think is the most famous example

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where they would show the good guys

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in an impossible situation with a train about to hit them,

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and you knew the Lone Ranger was dead.

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And the question was,

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"Is the Lone Ranger dead?"

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and then the movie would end.

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Well then two weeks later,

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they've forgotten to put in a shot

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that, in fact, he jumped over the train, not in front of it

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and so he was long gone when the train went through the tunnel or whatever.

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There's a concept called closure,

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which we use to talk about comics.

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When you're reading a comic and there's, say, four panels.

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Between the first panel and the second panel,

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we don't know what happened in that space,

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but we do something in our brains

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to say, "Oh, he was here.

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If he was on the left side of the panel here

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and on the right side here, he clearly walked over."

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That's closure. That's the term we use to describe that.

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And that's kind of also what happens

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in reality TV with this kind of constructed reality.

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We see one thing and see another

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and we put it together in our heads that,

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"Oh, okay. Here's what must have happened

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and here's what the emotions must be."

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[ pen writing ]

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What is constructed reality?

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Like a building.

Full Transcript