Unreal and the Construction of Reality
The moral case for seeing the construction of reality you participate in.
Reality television is, somewhat ironically, not actually real.
While it does have real elements to it, the stories aren't necessarily as they appear. The people are real, many of the situations are real, but the stories being told about them are not. By the time the general public sees the final product, it's been edited and manipulated in a way that gives it the appearance of reality. Even if it's not in any serious sense an accurate representation of what happened. People are prodded into taking a particular action or feeling a certain way by the crew which spends its time filming them. It's done to create a heightened sense of drama that makes it compelling to watch.
Yet it's sold to the public as reality. A realistic description of what ordinary people go through in their lives. Except for what they're watching isn't very ordinary. Very few people place all their hopes in winning a single competition for their singing ability or dancing ability or whatever else they are going for. Not everyone has 8 children or 5 wives or is several hundred pounds overweight. That's what makes them ordinary. The fact that they aren't those things. They tend to be mostly average, with an average number of wives or husbands, an average number of children, and they spend decades doing whatever they can to be praised for their art.
Nothing about what reality television presents to the world has any serious connection to reality. But we accept it as such without really even thinking about it. The reason for this is rather straight forward, although most people never spend any time thinking about it. Because we usually don't think about how we all participate in creating our own reality. All of us only actually see the world from our own perspective. We only have access to our own thoughts about those things we experience. So we miss all kinds of things because we don't have access to them.
Our own reality is fundamentally constructed.
Unreal at its core is about the blurry line between what we think of as reality and what actually is. About constructing a kind of reality for an audience which will accept it as such. In doing so however, the characters themselves find it hard to separate their own lives from the thing they're constructing for other people. Nowhere is this more clear then in the character of Rachel, played brilliantly by Shiri Appleby.
She has a remarkable ability to push people in the direction she wants to go. To make them do what she wants them to do. But when it comes to her own life, she can't seem to properly turn it into the thing she wants, or at least says she wants. It comes to the point that the line between her life and the reality she creates is very, very blurry. Her job becomes who she is and who she is becomes her job. Until it's completely unclear which is which.
Explore how to construct reality by checking out Unreal as soon as you can.
Check it out on Lifetime in the United States, Hulu as well as Amazon.