It's Not Real

When you watch a soap opera, you know what you see on the screen is scripted, that it isn't real, and that everything it portrays is meant to entertain.  That word, entertainment, is often assumed to be synonymous with enjoyment, that something has to be enjoyable to be entertaining.  That's not true though, when you think about the history of entertainment, one of the oldest forms is theatre, and one of the most ubiquitous symbols with theatre and the arts that are associated with it are the masks of comedy and tragedy which originate in ancient Greece associated with Thalia and Melpomene the muses of comedy and tragedy respectively.  These two muses and their masks represent both sides of one whole.  Entertainment incorporates both sides when it wants to be realistic and true to life.

When you watch movies, and play games, likewise you know just as with scripted soap operas, what you see is not real, it is there for your entertainment, to make you feel happy or make you feel sad.  I believe one of the reasons why the world can so often seem like a dark place devoid of hope is because we have much more sources of sadness readily available to us than we do sources of happiness.  Take rolling news channels, these run 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, and almost every single story they cover is focused on something bad or sad that is happening in the world.  There are no real equivalents of this for happiness.  You can argue that a comedy channel would be the antithesis but I would argue those channels are more than negated by the plenitude of channels that exist devoted to rolling news, there are for more of the latter than the former, that's before you even get to the fact that comedy channels whilst being funny are not always happy, especially in the UK we have a penchant for black humour - making jokes about death and very dark subject matter.

If you wanted to turn on your Television and find something happy to watch for the next 24 hours, you'd be hard pressed to fill those 24 hours easily.  If you wanted to be dejected by the world for 24 hours you would just switch on a news channel and sit and watch nothing else.  What's even more depressing about this fact is that the latter you are almost guaranteed to be based in truth.  Dismissing claims of fake news, the only other time you watch a news channel and see something that isn't true is when they cover an emerging story and are running with details that have not yet been fully confirmed or validated, or when you watch a news outlet that is so heavily politically biased that you can see how they spin every story to be a positive for their side or a negative for whoever their ideological opponents are.

There are TV shows however that claim to be true to life, reality TV as I have mentioned before has many problems not least of all the fact that most people who watch them believe reality means real, rather than imitation of real life.  There is an important distinction there as many reality TV shows are heavily edited to create a narrative and make entertainment out of stories which on their own wouldn't be engaging enough for people to watch.  Big Brother for example was often described as a case of the viewers being people sitting in a house watching people sitting in a house.  That descriptor however reinforces the idea that you're watching people live the way they would live their lives in general, that's patently untrue though.  If you knew there were dozens of cameras in your house watching your every move, you would act in a completely different way to the way you would if you were alone.

On the flip side there are shows that we watch which are not real, we know they are not, but they are presented in a way that they attempt to be realistic.  Perhaps the best example of this would be entertainment franchises like WWE - World Wrestling Entertainment.  The first reaction I often see people have whenever anyone talks about watching any WWE programme is "You know it's not real right?" like they are eager to be the one to tell a child Santa Claus doesn't exist and they want to see the reaction.  Those same people though are the first to ignore others when they criticize them for caring about anything that is "reality TV"; I've seen arguments between people who watch Big Brother and people who watch WWE over which one is more realistic.  I don't watch either but in the debate as to which is more realistic I would take the side of the latter as it doesn't claim to be real, the name itself tells you it's there for entertainment.  People who watch it know full well that if they smacked someone across the face with a folding chair that person wouldn't stand up again and continue like nothing happened.

The willingness to believe that everything you see is real because someone tells you it is, without questioning it, I feel is quite dangerous.  I have no surprise nor any astonishment at the state of politics around the world and the state of political discourse as a whole given this willingness.  People have become too gullible and the violent reactions that emerge are in part down to the fact that people realise they have been turned into fools.  If you treat people like idiots, you shouldn't expect logic and reason in their reactions, if you treat people like they are impulsive and easy to control, then you shouldn't be surprised when they react in unpredictable ways and fight against every measure of control that has been levied upon them.  People are angry because you gave them something to be angry about, and whether or not it was real becomes irrelevant, they believed it was, so you have to suffer the consequence.