1 WHY I LOVE TRASH
One can only imagine what this constant attention to the fringes of society, to those who break rules, is doing to our societyâs ability to define and constrain deviance. One thing seems fairly certain: law-abiding, privacy-loving, ordinary people who have had reasonably happy childhoods and are satisfied with their lives, probably wonât get to tell their stories on Phil, Sally, or OprahâŠ. Television talk shows are not interested in adequately reflecting or representing social reality, but in highlighting and trivializing its underside for fun and profit.
PROFESSORS VICKI ABT AND MEL SEESHOLTZ1
Nobody wants to watch anything thatâs smarmy or tabloid or silly or unseemlyâexcept the audience.
TALK SHOW HOST SALLY JESSY RAPHAEL2
Doesnât she look like a weird, scary drag queen?
FILMMAKER GREGG ARAKI, ON TALK SHOW HOST SALLY JESSY RAPHAEL3
Letâs begin here: talk shows are bad for you, so bad you could catch a cold. Turn them off, a womenâs magazine suggested in 1995, and turn on Mother Teresa, since watching her âcaring feelingsâ radiate from the screen, according to psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, has been shown to raise the level of an antibody that fights colds. âIt stands to reason,â reasons the First magazine writer, âthat viewing threatening, confrontational images could create an opposite reaction.â In fact, given that talk shows âcreate feelings of frustrationâ and fear, âshatter our trust and faithâ in our expectations of peopleâs behavior, and âgive us a false perception of reality,â it is perhaps best to watch game shows or soaps while nursing that cold. Watching daytime talk shows could conceivably send you into a decline into pathologies of all sorts: scared, angry, disgusted, convinced that you are abnormal for not fitting in with the âcast of misfits and perverts,â susceptible to both perversion and more colds.
While the Mother Teresa versus Jerry Springer matchup is out there enough to be camp, the hand-wringing it represents is only an exaggerated version of the many criticisms and political rallying cries aimed at talk shows over the last few years. Experts of all sorts can be found issuing warnings about talk show dangers. Before bringing out Dr. McClelland, for instance, the First article quotes George Gerbner, dean emeritus of the Annenberg School for Communication (âThese shows are virtually destroying the goodness of Americaâ), Harvard psychiatrist Alvin Poussaint (âIt does not bode well for the future generation of young people growing up on a steady diet of this drivelâ), and Fred Strassberger, once chair of the media task force of the American Psychological Association (âItâs now becoming alarmingly clear that talk shows are adding greatly to the fear, tensions and stress in our societyâ); later, TV critic Tom Shales joins in (âThese shows are portraying Americans as shallow monstersâ), along with psychologist Robert Simmermon (âcruel exploitation of peopleâs deepest wounds to entertain viewers who could very well wind up believing such aberrant behavior is normalâ).4 Goodness, normality, and stability, if we buy these arguments, are all threatened by the drivel, exploitation, and monstrosities of daytime TV talk shows.
One personâs trash, though, is another personâs gold mine. Sure, I sometimes hate these shows. Whatâs not to hate? They can be among the most shrill, mean, embarrassing, fingernails-on-the-blackboard, one-note, pointless jabber. But I canât help it, I love them just the same. In part, I love them because they are so peculiar, so American, filled with fun stuff like ârelationship expertsâ (who are not actually required to have any credentialed expertise; itâs almost enough just to declare âIâm a people personâ) and huge emotions, and hosts who wear their hypocrisies on their tailored sleeves, shedding tears for the people whose secrets they extract for profit while attacking them for revealing secrets on national television, riling up their guests and then scolding them for being so malicious. Silly as they can be, daytime TV talk shows are filled with information about the American environment in which they take root, in which expertise and authenticity and rationality are increasingly problematic, and in which the lines between public and private are shifting so strangely. And they embody that information with Barnumesque gusto. I like what talk shows make us think about.
But thereâs more to my affinity. Although you might not know it from looking at me, and although in many ways my behaviors and tastes are embarrassingly conventionalâa good story, a comfortable pair of jeans, hugsâI identify with the misfits, monsters, trash, and perverts. From that perspective, talk shows look rather different. If you are lesbian, bisexual, gay, or transgendered, watching daytime TV talk shows is pretty spooky. (Indeed, it must be unnerving and exciting for pretty much anyone whose behavior or identity does not conform to the dominant conventions of goodness, decency, and normality.) While you might get a few minutes on national news every once in a while, or a spot on a sitcom looking normal as can be, almost everywhere else in media culture you are either unwelcome, written by somebody else, or heavily edited.
On television talk shows, you are more than welcome. You are begged and coached and asked to tell, tell, tell, in an absurd, hyper enactment of what Michel Foucault called the âincitement to discourse,â that incessant modern demand that we voice every this-and-that of sexuality.5 Here you are testifying, dating, getting laughs, being made over, screaming, performing, crying, not just talking but talking back, and you are doing these things in front of millions of people. The last few years have seen shows on âlipstick lesbians,â gay teens, gay cops, lesbian cops, cross-dressing hookers, transsexual call girls, gay and lesbian gang members, straight go-go dancers pretending to be gay, people who want their relatives to stop cross-dressing, lesbian and gay comedians, gay people in love with straight ones, women who love gay men, same-sex marriage, drag queen makeovers, drag kings, same-sex sexual harassment, homophobia, lesbian mothers, gay twins, gay beauty pageants, transsexual beauty pageants, people who are fired for not being gay, gay men reuniting with their high school sweethearts, bisexual teens, bisexual couples, bisexuals in general, gays in the military, same-sex crushes, hermaphrodites, boys who want to be girls, female-to-male transsexuals, male-to-female transsexuals and their boyfriends, and gay talk showsâto mention just a few. Watching all this, be it tap-dancing drag queens or married gay bodybuilders or self-possessed bisexual teenagers, I sometimes get choked up. For people whose life experience is so heavily tilted toward invisibility, whose nonconformity, even when it looks very much like conformity, discredits them and disenfranchises them, daytime TV talk shows are a big shot of visibility and media accreditation. It looks, for a moment, like you own this place.
Indeed, listening closely to the perspectives and experiences of sex and gender nonconformistsâpeople who live, in one way or another, outside the boundaries of heterosexual norms and gender conventionsâsheds a different kind of light on talk shows.6 Dangers begin to look like opportunities, spotlights start to feel like theyâre burning your flesh. Exploiting the need for visibility and voice, talk shows provide them, in distorted but real, hollow but gratifying, ways. They have much to tell about those needs and those contradictions, about the weird and changing public sphere in which people are talking. Just as important for my purposes, talk shows shed a different kind of light on sex and gender conformity. They are spots not only of visibility but of the subsequent redrawing of the lines between the normal and the abnormal. They are, in a very real sense, battlegrounds over what sexuality and gender can be in this country: in them we can see most clearly the kinds of strategies, casualties, and wounds involved, and we can think most clearly about what winning these kinds of battles might really mean. These battles over media space allow us to get a grip on the ways sex and gender conformity is filtered through the daily interactions between commercial cultural industries and those making their lives within and around media culture. I watch talk shows for a laugh and a jolt of recognition, but also for what they can tell me about a society that funnels such large questionsâindeed, that funnels entire populations nearly wholesaleâinto the small, loopy spectacle of daytime talk.
Defecating in public
It is a long, twisted road that takes us toward insight, but the controversy over the talk show genre in generalâa genre itself largely composed of controversy and conflictâis a promising first step. On the one side, cultural critics, both popular and scholarly, point adamantly toward the dangers of exploitation, voyeurism, pseudotherapy, and the âdefining downâ of deviance, in which the strange and unacceptable are made to seem ordinary and fine. On the other side, defenders both within and outside the television industry argue that talk shows are democracy at workâflawed democracy but democracy nonethelessâgiving voice to the socially marginalized and ordinary folks, providing rowdy commonsense counterpoints to elite authority in mass-mediated culture. Beneath each position, and in the space between them, is a piece of the puzzle with which this book is playing.
The list of dangers is well worth considering. There is, to begin with, concern for the people who go on the shows, who are offered and accept a deal with the devil. They are manipulated, sometimes lied to, seduced, used, and discarded; pick âem up in a limo, producers joke, send âem home in a cab. They are sometimes set up and surprisedââambushed,â as critics like to call itâwhich can be extremely damaging, even to the point of triggering lawsuits and murderous impulses, as in the case of Scott Amedure, who revealed his secret crush for Jonathan Schmitz on a never-aired Jenny Jones Show, including his fantasy of tying Schmitz up in a hammock and spraying him with whipped cream and champagne. Amedure was murdered several days later by Schmitz, who, after receiving an anonymous love note, went to his admirerâs trailer home near Detroit and shot him at close range with a 12-gauge shotgun. Schmitz complained that the show had set him up to be humiliated. âThere was no ambush,â a spokeswoman for Jenny Jones owner Warner Brothers said; âthatâs not our style.â Amedure, Schmitz proclaimed, had âfucked me on national TV.â7
Although most survive without bodily harm, guests often do considerable damage to themselves and others. They are offered airfare and a hotel room in New York, Los Angeles, or Chicago, a bit of television exposure, a shot of attention and a microphone, some free âtherapy.â In exchange, guests publicly air their relationship troubles, deep secrets, and intimate life experiences, usually in the manners most likely to grab ratings: exaggerated, loud, simplified, and so on. Even more disturbing, perhaps, it is those who typically do not feel entitled to speak, or who cannot afford or imagine therapy, who are most vulnerable to the seduction of television. This is, critics suggest, not a great âdeal for the guests, since telling problems and secrets in front of millions of people is a poor substitute for actually working them out. Not to mention, critics often add, a bit undignified. âTherapy is not a spectator sport,â says sociologist and talk show critic-at-Iarge Vicki Abt. Telling secrets on television is âlike defecating in public.â8
While it is worth challenging the equation of talking and defecating, all this, we will see, is basically the case. But it is also the easy part: talk shows are show business, and it is their mission to exploit. They commodify and use talkers to build an entertainment product, which is then used to attract audiences, who then are sold to advertisers, which results in a profit for the producers. Exploitation thus ought to be the starting point for analysis and not, as it so often is, its conclusion. The puzzling thing is not the logic of commercial television, which is well documented, well understood, and extremely powerful, but why so many people, many of them fully aware of whatâs expected of them on a talk show, make the deal.
Yet it is not really the guests, generally dismissed as dysfunctional losers on display, who concern talk show critics most centrally. It is the audience, either innocent or drawn in by appeals to their most base interests, that preoccupies critics the most. For some, the problem is the model of problem solving offered. Psychologists Jeanne Heaton and Nona Wilson argue in Tuning in Trouble, for instance, that talk shows provide âbad lessons in mental health,â offer âbad advice and no resolutions for problems,â and wind up âreinforcing stereotypes rather than defusing them.â âCredible therapeutic practice aimed at catharsis or confrontation,â they point out, âis quite different from the bastardized Talk TV version.â Indeed, they suggest that viewers avoid âthe temptation to apply other peopleâs problems or solutions to your own life,â avoid using âthe shows as a model for how to communicateâ or as tools for diagnosing friends and relatives, and so on.9 The advice is sound, if a bit elementary: talk shows are not a smart place to look for either therapy or problem solving.
Beyond the worry that audiences will adopt therapeutic technique from daytime talk, critics are even more troubled by the general social effects of talk shows. Here and there, a critic from the Left, such as Jill Nelson writing in The Nation, assails the casting of âa few pathological individualsâ as representatives of a population, distracting from social, political, and economic conditions in favor of stereotypes such as âstupid, sex-addicted, dependent, baby-makers, with an occasional castrating bitch thrown inâ (women of all colors) and âviolent predators out to get you with their penis, their gun, or bothâ (young black men).10 More commonly, though, critics make the related argument that talk shows indulge voyeuristic tendencies that, while perhaps offering the opportunity to feel superior, are ugly. âExploitation, voyeurism, peeping Toms, freak shows, all come to mind in attempting to characterize these happenings,â write Vicki Abt and Mel Seesholtz, for instance.11 âFor the audience,â Washington Post reporter Howard Kurtz adds in Hot Air, âwatching the cavalcade of deviant and dysfunctional types may serve as a kind of group therapy, a communal exercise in national voyeurism.â12 These âfairground-style freak showsâ are just a modern-day version of throwing Christians to the lions, psychologists Heaton and Wilson assert: in place of Christians we have âthe emotionally wounded or the socially outcast,â in place of lions are âpsychic demons,â in place of blood there is psychological damage, in place of crowds yelling âKill, kill, kill!â we have crowds yelling âWhy donât you cut his balls off?â13 Even if such events serve to unite the Romans among us, offering what Neal Gabler calls âthe reassurance of our superiority over the guests and over the programs themselves,â14 they do so at significant costs. âPerhaps the sight of so many people with revolting problems makes some folks feel better about their own rather humdrum lives,â Kurtz argues, but âwe become desensitized by the endless freak show.â15 Talk shows are pruriently addictive, the argument goes, like rubbernecking at car wrecks: daytime talk shows are to public information what pornography is to sexual intimacy.
I will have more to say about the ceaseless characterization of talk shows as âfreak shows,â but for now it is enough to note that the lines are drawn so starkly: between Christians and Romans, between âdeviant and dysfunctional typesâ and âsome folks,â the guests and âus,â between âthe fringes of society, those who break rulesâ and âlaw-abiding, privacy-loving, ordinary people who have had reasonably happy childhoods and are satisfied with their lives.â These are important lines, and plainly political ones, and the ones critics most fiercely act to protect. And as one who falls both within and outside the lines, I find the confidence with which critics draw them in need of as much careful consideration as the genreâs alarming exploitations.
In fact, the lines of difference and normality are the centerpiece of the arguments against talk shows: talk shows, critics repeat over and over, redefine...