Milli Vanilli Condition, The

Essays on Culture in the New Millennium

Espina, Eduardo, Sorenson, Travis

• Publisher: Arte Público Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781611929669
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

"Few times in history has the art of pretending enjoyed so much continuity and led to so few consequences as during the hinge-like period between the 20th century and the beginning of the next, " Eduardo Espina asserts in this collection of 13 essays. He laments the serial falsification of events, as when the German pop duo Milli Vanilli won a Grammy for songs they did not sing.

Urguayan-born poet Espina ponders the paradoxes of modern-day life in these essays on a wide variety of subjects, including the proliferation of flags after 9/11, serial killers, nostalgia and even the Olympics.

These pieces are always thoughtful and frequently humorous. He writers tongue-in-cheek that some supermarkets are better than museums. Espina would rather visit a Kroger than the MOMA, where at least there's a bigger collection and no admission fee! Espina remembers Montevideo, Uruguay's very first supermarket, where his grandfather worked, and another one in Paris, where he spent five hours as "a tourist among cereals and sausages."

This serious but entertaining collection is a must-read for anyone interested in recent history, pop culture, language and everything in between.

PANIC IN THE PANOPTIC SCENES

I (The home of a devalued ego)

THE DROP IN VIEWERSHIP RATINGS of “traditional” television programs, meaning of those still structurally based on a situation plot with a resolution and on the orchestrating work of a screenwriter, gave rise to the proliferation of reality shows. These shows enjoyed their moment of glory during the 1990s on network television and with the turn of the new century have found an apparently unending niche on cable. The alibi (and strategy) of this type of television format seeks to make us believe that humans are actually and unbearably like that, all the time, precisely as they are portrayed by their own acts in front of the camera.

Behavior that is too implausible to be implausible passes before our eyes, to the unbelief of reason and the satisfaction of the yearning for entertainment, but only when the expectations do not go beyond mere nosiness into a nothingness in full swing. We stand before a mirror where the reflected image is that of all of us acting collectively. And for far too long, more than a decade now, a large part of humanity has accepted being reflected in this mirror, which is at once both concave and convex; the perspective matters little or not at all. Given the circumstances, there is something at first glance that forces one to reflect, but from a point of view of skepticism. This much reality desiring to pass as reality cannot be true. It is, furthermore, a reality that has set out, it would seem, to force us to believe it.

The tastes and preferences on the entertainment scene changed radically as the door closed on the 20th century and opened on the new one, though few were capable of foreseeing the shifting of priorities that would put these preferences at the top of the share and ratings charts. The ratings, as we know, make no demands and allow for an existence free from responsibility. If the numbers go up, as they did, it means life has found an order to adhere to. Success depends on figures, with no one and nothing to decipher. Reality TV proliferates because a winning excuse was needed during prime time, when traditional programs—comedies, series, and soaps—had ceased to possess the power of attraction.

“Generalist” television was in crisis, and the zigzag of impulses foretold a collapse of the traditional way of doing things, as well as a surge in new expectations identified with the immediacy of the product. Like a last-minute fill-in, almost as a transitional vehicle, there arrived on the scene an audiovisual experiment without any known precedent in the world of television. With its massive reach, the idea turned out to be a novel one and immediately fostered a diversifying marketing supply. A defective but very effective style was established. In keeping with the days in which we live, television changed because people no longer watch it the same way: the Internet and the proliferation of cable channels altered the dimensions of the supply of instantaneous entertainment, spurring the collective desire to want to see ourselves on a screen with our entire range of emotional weaknesses.

In an era that appears new, when the talk of the world is that of genes (due to the Human Genome Project), there appeared a new television gen(e)(re): reality shows. The globalization of expectations led to an ill-advised example, one comprised of sleep-inducing time devoid of narration, one that invites weariness. The majority of reality shows attempt, with varying degrees of success, to impose a dangerous and deceptive premise of inclusiveness. This type of television is a bastardized species of television docudrama in which boring people try to be fun and aspire to celebrity through their persistence in superficiality. The protagonists are people who feel comfortable in the observed setting, since no talent is necessary there. They are not as insects that must pull off an unbeatable show while under the microscope. They must only be as they are the rest of the time, when no one is watching them. The program’s formula seeks to appear in nature as a completed act, but it inevitably remains unfinished.

In stores, people are watched as they shop via closed-circuit television. These are individual shows with mini-intimacies. Here the eye enters another type of domain, because the circuit is open. One click with the remote control allows for the abolishment of privacy. One authorized click is all it takes. It is strange: we can turn on the television and find ourselves in the middle of someone else’s life, something that did not happen before. Private domestic affairs become collective matters with no other reason or justification than to waste time, turned into the residual expansion of time itself. What irony: the spleen trusts in the narcotic power of technology. Prose and Prozac. That is the state of things: the public is obsessed with banality, and reality TV represents the latest reward for its omnipresent superficiality. It is the cure for an insanity that does not exist.

The first format of this kind to have a worldwide impact was that of Big Brother, and the idea came from Holland. In a matter of months all humanity came to have the same pseudonym. The mass exploitation of its generalized content established easily assimilable commonalities without regard to borders, and its success caught on worldwide, Africa and Asia included. It extended from miniseries to mini-intelligences. The concept could not be more basic: 170 technicians, cameramen, producers, and directors, tracking 24 hours a day for 112 days the domestic activities of the 10 participants trying to win a determined amount of money while being shut inside a bunker under surveillance.

It is a reverse metamorphosis: the insect of Kafka awoke having been turned into 10 humans. “We created a new genre where we proved that ordinary people can be very interesting,” said the creator of the format, Dutchman John de Mol (Endemol Entertainment International), upon releasing his product. It was not an invention; it was a “discovery” (a bad fall into the freewill of a major find). From there on out it was tediousness as a hobby. In no time at all, like the result of a fast-moving and fatal virus like the many we see in actuality, television viewers felt possessed by the stupidity of others and by the desire to exist also incompletely. It is like an audiovisual anthrax. And yet there is no real comparison, because to speak of Big Brother, it is necessary to use the term “like” another way. The show is only like itself. It is the height of like-ness: how can it be like that?

A veritable taxidermy job on a collective striptease, Big Brother worked from the start as a curiosity. It brought to viewers around the world an extraordinary number of recent examples of earthly behavior for which members of the audience felt an immediate empathy, no matter where they were from. Strangely (and one of the tenets of Big Brother is that nothing in human nature should strike us as strange), viewers tuned into the program out of curiosity and remained faithful to it due to a sort of unthinkable mimetic coincidence. With its burst of dissected but active symbols, Big Brother spread the globalization of taste toward permeable spaces. The popularity on screens the world over of an imported format confirmed the cloning of a collective experience. The program’s success was unparalleled. Even the extreme south, which Charles Darwin equated to the end of the world, brought the geography of the living room out of its ostracism: television brought the same end, also as a finality, to all.

Some 20 odd versions of Big Brother were created around the world, and it is calculated that more than 1 billion people—a neighborhood or China Town as populous as China itself—saw the program at one time or another. If this says anything, it is the following: 1) people still watch television; 2) human beings can perceive an attractive additive for television programs of easy consumption that give priority to the homogenization of social behavior in exchange for their simplification; 3) Big Brother is an international fraternity that does not place excessive demands on those it accepts as new members. Furthermore, the numbers are astounding, and can even be considered alarming. An example from the South: on Saturday, June 30, 2001, when Big Brother ended in Argentina, nine of every 10 television sets were tuned to the program. This is a ratings record unequaled even by man landing on the Moon or by any World Cup soccer final.¹

An unusual scenery spoke to the sudden collective national eagerness to feel befriended by the interpersonal play of conflicts and affections: weddings postponed until the end of the final episode; parties held to celebrate the consecration of viewers’ favorite contestant to be the only occupant of the house to not be evicted; bars and restaurants who set up television sets so no one would miss the show. The decay of popular taste was populist in nature; the property of privacy took to the street: “Big Brother is watching you” (George Orwell). The participants, in the house of the watcher, did not know what was going on outside (the cameras did not act reciprocally), but the audience thought it knew what was going on both inside and outside the house: each spectator felt like a distinguished part of the eye belonging to Big Brother. A public corporation of spies facilitated the non-reciprocal game of looking without being looked at. For that we have to blame (or thank) the intransitivity of the television mirror.

In the different versions of Big Brother, or rather the same version but in different languages and with different actors, the cameras captured an average total of 5,040 hours, perpetual action that then underwent a process of editing. To manipulate viewers’ attention, the strategy was to use the falsification of artful devices. The proliferation of cameras reinvented, with notorious ease, a sure fact that was not difficult to access. In this way, the unthinking attraction to the paroxysm of the trick turned out to be tributary to a sensationalist privacy that sought to make the controversy into a subversion and which, in distorted fashion, imitated a reality with its own modes of verification.

In a pact of exhibitionism, the participants allowed the spectators into their accelerated desiring. The objects of their desires had specific names: fame, popularity, and money (some people are capable of killing for these things, or, even worse, they are capable of acting the way they really are). They trust in success and find benefits in the ruins of behavior. In front of millions of gazes, they begin to crumble ethically and aesthetically, with no compassion for themselves. Life continues to have the consent of a precarious situation and delivers itself up to this condition. Examples enter and exit the screen, tracking the ephemeral site of a story and its behavior. If television continues to function normally, as it has until now, within a very short time it will be rewarded with a more violent Big Brother, a mixture of gladiators and human fights instead of bull fighters and bull fights. It will be like kick boxing without rules. By then it will not be a bad idea to leave the participants inside, and without food; the only ones to survive will be those who behave like Hannibal Lecter. The main prize for the winner will be life, the life that he has managed to keep, while the rest will remain confined to the house forever.

In the curricular accommodation of the contents and symptoms of reality by means of polyfocalism, the farce of the avatar was established as the product underwent a pre-selection and a post-editing. It was the perfect conspiracy in the service of an imitation unlimited by a repetitiveness which, invariably, ended up rendering the surveillance banal, turning it into an episode of its consequences. The complicity—not rewarded—of watching and of feeling watched, of participating in a depersonalizing tactic from the strategic venue of the living room, captivated and reduced demands. On this shining surface (the brightness has nowhere to hide), viewers felt as if they were participating in a universal addi(c)tion of data and behavior that do not require any specific qualities to carry out their function. In this live reality show, emotion was also given short shrift. It was for this reason that no one could feel like a foreigner in this shared lack of will and the rise in instant notoriety.

From their comfortable domestic passivity, viewers shared the quick glory of people with no artistic attributes, who they celebrated for a nearly simple reason: since the emerging media star lacks talent—except for the one acquired by allowing him or herself to be sniffed and pried without reservation, all in exchange for the mere chance, with no guarantee, of winning the prize—the viewers themselves might actually be the new stars. These viewers, identifying with what they see, may say: “That’s me.” Since its appearance, this peep show has dissolved the limits of the human game preserve that is a house and of that which was considered unseemly to be shared outside the walls of the home. In these auraless hours, collective complicity with indecency was exercised with a minimum of blushing. It was not without reason that the inhabitants of the bunker acted with indifference, as if they did not feel watched, as if the cult of appearance were not a necessary evil. There they were, tending to become absorbed in themselves. And the audience looked with a magnifying glass at the center of the absent labyrinth, since there was nothing complex in that cathodic place opposed to common sense.

So then, empathy came at the level of gregarious deficiencies. We ought to speak of the solidarity of these deficiencies: the observed specimen was of the same lot as the audience. And this is worth remembering, because in this entire matter of reality TV there is an implicit pathology—or at least nearly—that is shared voluntarily. Dramatic viewing turns fellow men and women into informants of that which the spectator would like to be. In this manner, the impact of immediacy can be verified by the voyeuristic actions of the TV viewer. The lack of weightiness in the behavior seen in the Big Brother house (which was later that of The Osbornes and Jersey Shore, as well as of other productions of this type), became, in the end, a self-portrait (in no way scandalous) of the TV viewing public located outside the fake mansion, a public which was even in agreement with the brief, spasmodic condition of lesser achievement. The craving for the instantaneousness of fame lives off of unrecyclable lapses.

Just as with the emblematic recording at the beginning of Mission Impossible (“Your mission, should you choose to accept it, involves [fill in the mission], and should any member of your team be caught or killed, the Secretary will disavow all knowledge of your actions. This message will self-destruct in five seconds”), the tape of public recognition is destroyed—against its will—in a span of time that is as short and self-destructing as it is prudential. The building of low-cost celebrity need not wait long either to be activated or to be diluted. As soon as the participants begin to live life before the camera, the dividend of glory is at the mercy of its reach, as well as its final grandiosity. The key of the convening is the offer of notoriety accompanied by money.² And, since things are so bad . . . It is the multi-exploited fame that lasts only briefly, but which also takes only a short time to build, and even less to codify: it is the paradigm of a new form of exhibition included in a fleeting content.

Week after week, movement was seen inside the panoptic human cage, a garage of behavior (not to fix it but rather to view it), a shortcut to extreme apathy along which there appeared emotionally needy people seeking attention. The effects of interference, and the harassment of others who dare confess without concealing information, crossed the instant barrier of the foreseeable. Even though the cage was as transparent as newly made glass, the bottle was thrown into the sea awaiting an answer that arrived with no signature: the television set protects busybodies at least. The screen was a balcony from which to verify destinations, but with mistakes. It was a mirror of behavior where contemporaneous civilization could be seen in a barely popular state: it was a deteriorated image. During that time, no plants grew in the populated house. What did grow was the need for fame among uncultured people brought together by the same objectives, or rather without any objective except for that of winning the prize and awarded with an ephemeral notoriety. During this agreed-upon lapse of time, they lived a transitional phrase which they never abandoned, and it never abandoned them. Since none of what they said was important, all of it had validity.

In this conversational conflict, the lingua franca of oligophrenia served to remove indifference. No one avoided a lesson in tedium when it arrived punctually with all of its elements predisposed to engaging in flattery. The noble responsibility of training (to make one forget that time passes the same for all of us) was ruined before the imperfect future came to fruition. Who can be concerned with other people’s happiness when those involved boast, without knowing it, about their lack of purpose? There is still no antidote against such inanity. No one in the viewing audience came away moved by these humans without human characteristics, and those who left (kicked out) will have a hard time experiencing the same Prodigal Son ending in reality. Once was enough.

During the time in which these people lived under the microscope, these legionnaires of banality were coherent in their deficiencies, boring language itself with their conversations. Since they no longer had anything to say, they wanted to be incomprehensible all the time. They went from a lack of captivation to disinterest, making impossible the act of words. The words were victims of nonsense adrift, and of a performance within this drifting that sought to make an impact on the most insignificant things that define this nonsense and which, in this case, were the majority of things. Faced with the evidence, doubt asked itself the following question: if they are this stupid in “intimacy,” in this intimate setting, how will they be in “extimacy,” in daily life outside? Turned into microcelebrities, with their personalities worsened by the obligation of delivering high ratings, that is to say made dopier, the protagonists of reality TV seek, first and foremost, to be considered for that which they have not yet become. It is a strange way of being in one’s being before being.

Years ago, in the apogee of the modern era, the invisibility of illusion was the victorious sign of a liberty liberated from suspicion. Being invisible meant eluding being watched. Not now. There rules an exhausting visibility, an accomplice of the obsessive manner of feeling superior in the act of public exhibition, knowing beforehand that the detectives have been detected. Unlike Truman Burbank (from The Truman Show), the participants on Big Brother “act on their own,” knowing they are being watched on the other side, where they also are.³ We witness an asymmetrical but authorized observation, which makes the observers feel more alive, exultantly alive, since they submitted to a constant and unedited observation by the public, that anonymous and collective neighbor who accepts them for that which they have not yet been able to be and yet aspire to do. Left defenseless against welcome invading forces, the ego feels accompanied, chosen to join the mutually perverse association that results from nosiness and which gets visible results.

In short, this panoply of exhibitionism is a parody of the favorite childhood game, hide-and-seek. Even if they are behind a door, or behind the mask that they invented so well for themselves, sooner or later all of them will be discovered by the omniscient gods of the remote control. Until not so long ago, in the contemporary era, individual privacy was an obligatory demand. In this post-contemporary era (or whatever post you like, including a musical one: “Wait, Mr. Postman, please, Mr. Postman”), the phenomenology of this exhibitionism swept away the atavisms and anomalies of timidity, fostering the desire for celebrity as an extreme form of exercising the survival instinct. The indifference of others is what brings discontent and causes a hierarchical rupture with the masters of self-satisfaction. Faced with this panorama of reality ruined by routine, there are those who seek to be the exception, meekly joining an unexceptional collective theater.

II (Insects close up: the camera as microscope)

We daily pass by obsessive television cameras: at work, at the supermarket, at the library, at the convenience ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prologue: A Century in the Next Century
• The Day After the Flag
• The Future of the Past: The World Capital of Nostalgia
• Please, Mr. Post(mortem)
• The Fall as Something Indigenous: Icarus, Museums, the World Trade Center
• Inclusion in Vogue
• The Xerox Syndrome
• Epically Olympic
• Disasters with an Oceanfront View
• The Music of Collecting
• Panic in the Panoptic Scenes
• Lives in the Supermarket
• Footnotes