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You can’t handle my truth: Reality TV’s trompe-l’oeil effect and the (im)possible reality of its participants

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Abstract

Although reality TV’s presentation of authenticity has been contested since the genre emerged at the turn of the century, discourse dedicated to debunking its halfhearted claim to the real continues to persist. This article adopts a psychoanalytic framework to explain this compulsion in the context of a broader ideological disposition that finds enjoyment in the detection of artifice. To do this, it examines reality TV from the perspective of Lacan’s discussion of the eye and trompe-l’oeil to argue that reality TV is appealing because its depictions of authenticity can so easily be (mis)recognized as (im)possible.

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Notes

  1. I refer to reality TV’s performers as participants because textually and extra-textually their status is characterized by an everyday quality that, as McCarthy (2009) explains, originates from the genre’s social scientific ancestry. At the same time, I use the term “participant” to signify the reality-participant’s function as an element of realism.

  2. Lacan tells a story from his youth about a time in which he needed to engage in something “practical,” something “physical,” and thus took up working as a fisherman in Breton. Upon being confronted with a glittering sardine can floating on the horizon and the mockery of his fellow boatman, Petit-Jean, Lacan experienced a moment of trauma. Lacan, as a result of the distortion of light produced by the can, and his status as an interloper among these “fellows who were earning their livings with great difficulty,” saw himself from the vantage point of the floating can, from where he was constructed within the symbolic’s semiotic graphing of light (1998, p. 91).

  3. Lauren Harsley, personal interview with author, 10 April 2012.

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Curnutt, H. You can’t handle my truth: Reality TV’s trompe-l’oeil effect and the (im)possible reality of its participants. Psychoanal Cult Soc 18, 295–312 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1057/pcs.2013.5

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