NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Laughing at the World: Schadenfreude, Social Identity, and American Media Culture A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Radio/Television/Film By Amber Eliza Watts EVANSTON, ILLINOIS June 2008 2 Copyright by Amber Watts 2008 All rights reserved 3 Contents Abstract __________________________________________________ 4 Acknowledgements _________________________________________ 6 One Introduction: Laughing at the World___________________________ 8 Two The Reality of Schadenfreude and the Schadenfreude of Reality ___ 44 Three Misery, Transformation, and Happy Endings ___________________ 80 Four Love Hurts ______________________________________________ 134 Five Notoriety, Scandal, and Why We Love to Hate Celebrities ________ 203 Bibliograph y ____________________________________________ 259 4 ABSTRACT Laughing at the World: Schadenfreude , Social Identity, and American Media Culture Amber Watts This project explores historical questions of televisual form and cultural production, centering on the proliferation of media texts that mobilize real-life misfortune as a form of entertainment in U.S. television and culture. Specifically, it examines how a variety of “reality” formats in contemporary television stage and exploit spectacles of failure, defeat, suffering, and humiliation for the pleasure of the viewing audience. These texts speak to a wide range of emotional engagements, from pity and sympathy to pure schadenfreude . However, all encourage narrative pleasure in real-life adversity. Historically, schadenfreude has been condemned by scholars and thinkers as a “base” emotion, while reality television is often dismissed as lowly “trash” television. However, the use of real individuals’ televised trauma has larger cultural, sociological, and ethical significance beyond the texts themselves. Much like literary and stage melodrama in the nineteenth century, contemporary media’s exploitation of actual is closely tied to negotiations of status and justice— a means of working through issues of morality an ethics on a national scale. In this project, then, I examine schadenfreude and suffering as both a textual strategy and a site for exploring social identity in American culture. On the one hand, the spectacle of 5 suffering remains as one of the final “authentic” emotions available in the arsenal of reality television, a unifying textual feature that can be found across the form’s many individual subgenres. On the other hand, the very real pleasures that viewers find in these often denigrated texts speaks to the significance of this impulse’s proliferation as a wider cultural sensibility, particularly in the changing arenas of dating and relationships, fame and celebrity, and makeovers and self-presentation. The ways in which we emotionally engage with reality television thus speak to larger issues about both our relationship with media texts and our own status within American culture. 6 Acknowledgments Writing this dissertation would not have been possible without the guidance and support of many people. I would especially like to thank Jeff Sconce, who has been an invaluable mentor ever since I wrote my very first seminar paper on reality TV as a Master’s student at UCLA. His insight and feedback have helped shape this dissertation well before it ever existed, and his ready humor and constant encouragement have made my graduate school career both relatively painless and incredibly rewarding. In addition, I would like to thank Lynn Spigel and Mimi White, invaluable members of my dissertation committee, for their wealth of advice, support, and feedback given over the years. The path to the PhD may be arduous, but it is not without its rewards, since I have been lucky to work alongside and get to know many fabulous people, both at UCLA and within the Northwestern Screen Cultures community. At UCLA, Vivan Sobchack, Nick Browne, Steve Mamber, and Robert Vianello encouraged my research at its earliest stages, and Chuck Kleinhans, Scott Curtis, and Jim Webster have been extremely helpful in fostering my ideas here at Northwestern. And Mary Beltran, Michael Curtin, and Michele Hilmes, my MCS colleagues at the University of Wisconsin – Madison, have been instrumental in facilitating my transition from PhD candidate to faculty. I am also very grateful to my fellow students Erica Bochanty, Emily Carman, Max Dawson, Susan Ericsson, Hollis Griffin, Hyungshin Kim, Josh Malitsky, Margo Miller, Elizabeth Nathanson, Mary Pagano, Kirsten Pike, Linda Robinson, Meredith Ward, and Li Zeng, for their help, advice, and friendship. 7 I would like to express my deepest gratitude to TiVo, the Fox Network and Rockstar, Inc. Without them, I would have had much less to write about and much less energy with which to do so. Finally, I could not have done any of this without the love and support of my family who, thankfully, “get it.” And, chiefly, I’d like to thank Ron Extract for his special blend of wisdom, patience, beer, love, and willingness to put up with all the craziness. 8 Chapter 1: Introduction: Laughing at the World The American broadcast media have long used the discomfort, humiliation, or suffering of real people for entertainment purposes, beginning with Allen Funt’s Candid Microphone (ABC, 1947-8), which became Candid Camera when it made the move to television (ABC, 1948; NBC, 1949-51; CBS, 1960-67; syndicated 1974-79 and 1991-2; CBS, 1996-2001). Postwar “audience participation” shows like Queen for a Day (Mutual, 1945-1956; NBC, 1956- 1960; ABC, 1960-1964), Strike It Rich (CBS, 1947-58), and The Big Payoff (NBC, 1951-53; CBS, 1953-59) used their subjects’ stories of personal hardship as vehicles for prize giving. The 1960s and 1970s Chuck Barris oeuvre, including shows like The Dating Game (ABC, 1965-73; syndicated 1973-74, 1978-1980, 1986-1989, and 1996-1999), The Newlywed Game (ABC, 1966- 74; syndicated 1977-80, 1985-89, 1997-2000) The Gong Show (NBC, 1976-8; syndicated 1976- 80), Three’s a Crowd (syndicated, 1979-80) and The $1.98 Beauty Show (syndicated, 1978-80) featured people humiliating themselves largely for the chance to be on television. Early prime- time “reality television” shows like Cops (Fox, 1989 - ) and Rescue 911 (CBS, 1989 – 1996) showed the arrests of actual criminals and survivors narrating (and reliving) traumatic accidents. Over the past decade, though, the American media—particularly reality television—has become increasingly focused on eliciting and showcasing the humiliation, consternation, and despair of its subjects. Consider the following examples: 9 • The premiere episode of VH1’s Celebrity Rehab (2008) featured eight celebrities with varying degrees of drug and alcohol dependencies checking themselves into a rehab facility to detox on-camera. While many of the patients arrived under the influence, none were as intoxicated as former Grease and Taxi heartthrob Jeff Conaway. After washing down a cocktail of prescription painkillers with a bottle of bourbon, Conaway arrived at the Pasadena Recovery Center passed out in the passenger seat of his girlfriend’s car. Over the course of the episode, Conaway—so drug-addled he couldn’t walk—shook, hallucinated, screamed in pain, talked incoherently about suicide, and eventually was rushed to the hospital after a series of detox-invoked seizures. Although Conaway’s rehabilitation appeared to be successful by series end, the Celebrity Rehab premiere seemed to be setting up a real-life tragedy unfolding before viewers’ eyes. • On the 2006 seventh season premiere of America’s Next Top Model (UPN, 2003 – 2006; CW 2006 - ), a panel of judges whittled down 33 semifinalists to 13 finalists after a series of one-on-one interviews. Whereas viewers saw most would-be models briefly describe themselves to the judges and show off their runway walks (in both casual clothing and bikinis), contestant Megan Morris’s interview went a bit differently. Top Model host Tyra Banks mentioned that Megan had lived through a very traumatic experience. Megan tearfully went on to elaborate that she had survived a plane crash as a small child. Her mother had died of hypothermia on top of an immobile Megan, and it was only the heat from her mother’s body that kept Megan alive until the crash was discovered the next morning. This heart-wrenching story received more airtime than any demonstration of her potential modeling abilities. When she was selected as a finalist, the show’s privileging of her personal tragedy left the impression that Megan’s suffering, more so 10 than her beauty, justified her appearance on the show. Surviving such a horrific ordeal seemed to indicate that she had earned the opportunity to compete on Top Model . • On February 25, 2008, 26-year-old hairdresser Lauren Cleri appeared on The Moment of Truth (Fox, 2008), a game show where contestants had to correctly answer a series of highly personal questions, their answers corroborated by a polygraph machine. Each “correct” answer contributed to a cash prize, but one wrong answer would send contestants home empty-handed. As she gradually built a jackpot of $200,000, Cleri admitted—in front of her parents, sister, new husband, a live studio audience, and millions of viewers—that she had stolen money from an employer, she had been in love with an ex-boyfriend on her wedding day, she believed she should be married to said ex instead of her husband, and that she had cheated on her husband. After such extreme honesty, it was difficult not to see the irony when Cleri answered “yes” to the question, “Do you think you’re a good person?” and learned that the answer was incorrect; she would be going home with nothing, save a ruined marriage. Although these moments differ significantly in scope and in tone, each exemplifies what has increasingly become a dominant in contemporary factual television: the use of real-life misfortune as a form of popular entertainment. Viewing the physical and mental toll of Jeff Conaway’s decades of drug abuse may have been difficult and painful for the Celebrity Rehab audience.