Gawk Shows

Nicols Fox

I remember the dusty heat of late summer, the yellow and white tent, and the barker strutting on the platform. His voice rose above the sounds of the carnival, hinting of the wonders within the tent, wonders painted in cheap colors on the cracked backdrop: The two-headed baby, the world's fattest man, the bearded woman. I remember the sideshows. I thought they were long behind us.

I turn on the television and see an astonishing sight: A woman. Her soul is beautiful. It penetrates the atmosphere, even across airwaves. Her body is not. It is covered with the lumps and bumps of Elephant Man disease. Sally Jessy Raphael, wearing her trademark red spectacles, cocks her blond head and asks what the woman's life is like. A window is opened into pain. There are more victims of the disease sitting in the audience. We are treated to its various manifestations. We are horrified and amazed: We gawk.

Phil Donahue interviews tiny, wizened children. They have progeria, "the aging disease." With their outsize, hairless heads and huge eyes imparting solemnity and even wisdom, they offer us themselves as a sacrifice to our curiosity. We are compelled into silence, fascinated. We are back in the tent.

While I was living in Europe in the late sixties and early sev­enties, friends often asked me to tell them what to expect when they visited America. "Think of America as a carnival," I would tell them. "An unending carnival." This was the only way I knew to explain my country. Not just the quality of light and landscape but the excess, the enthusiasm, the love of excitement. We want no limitations on what we can have, on what we can do. We deny ourselves nothing—no objects, no sensations. "The pursuit of hap­piness": What other nation has made it an absolute right?

The carnival plays on, and we have returned to the sideshows—minus the honesty that made no pretense about what lay behind the curtain, the honesty that divided the world into those who were able to resist satisfying their curiosity at the ex­pense of others and those who were not. Gawking is painted in shades of solicitude now. We justify much in the name of compas­sion, but we are in fact being entertained in the same ancient tra­dition. Gawk shows sell.

"I offer no apology," says Donahue. "These children have been unmercifully pressured by their very distinctive appear­ance." The purpose of the show? "To humanize people who have suffered. It becomes a vehicle for examining our prejudices. Just because it may be true that this kind of show draws a crowd does not condemn it," he says.

For Sally Jessy Raphael the rationale is the same: "Teaching the lessons of compassion. Man's triumph over adversity."

These are noble thoughts, and not entirely hypocritical. Com­passion and understanding are always in short supply. There is an outside chance that some of each might be spread around in this exercise. We may also be witnessing exploitation. "These children are risking their lives to be here," says Sally, introducing children who will die if exposed to light. What may she be risking if they don't appear? As Donahue says, "If I don't draw a crowd, I could be parking cars for a living."

Donahue is open about the dilemma: "Americans are more in­terested in Madonna than Managua. The country suffers, in my opinion, from the diminished interest in serious news. Whichever way you look at it we have a culture of decay." It's tricky playing two sides at once. "It's like walking on eggs. I don't want to be a dead hero," he says.

We watch our cultural demise in living color.

Do you find yourself addicted to sex with prostitutes? Tell Oprah Winfrey and her audience all about it. Did you engage in an affair with your priest? Have your breast implants started slip­ping? Geraldo Rivera wants to know. Do you wish you could re­verse your sex-change operation? Are you a celebrity subject to di­arrhea at odd moments? Does your mother keep stealing your boyfriends? We care, we are interested. Whatever your problem, there's a television talk show that will accommodate you.

Donahue, Oprah, Sally, Geraldo: They are the virtuosos of voyeurism, lifting the skirts of our culture, peering into the clos­ets, airing the national soiled linen. Sally thinks of her program as a kind of updated town meeting—the modem version of some­thing we no longer have. Electronic gossip, in other words—the, national back fence. Wishful thinking.

As Americans we've been indulging in an orgy of self-analysis and self-revelation—coupled with a natural curiosity now totally unbridled. We've become a society hooked on the bizarre and the astonishing—living in a perpetual state of "Can you top this?" Transvestite men marry women on Sally's show, thus proving an important point, one we all needed to know: Sixty-five percent of all transvestites are not homosexual.

Nothing is sacred. There are no memories, no mysteries too precious to reveal. A woman discusses her husband's sexual ad­diction. Geraldo asks the husband for details—and gets them. There is nothing we won't share, or watch someone else share, with a million strangers.

We have invented a new social contract on the talk shows: Lay bare your body, your bed, your soul, your emotions, your worst fears, your innermost secrets, and we will give you a mo­ment or two of fame. Every sacrifice can and should be made to the video god.

Are there topics too hot to talk about?

"How to blow up your local post office," says Donahue. He'd draw the line there.

There is no topic Sally wouldn't consider if it "concerns the human condition." She draws the line only at being boring. We have to want to watch it. So we set the agenda.

Donahue, a man obviously in conflict between his natural honesty and better instincts and his ambition, admits that his au­dience calls the shots. Devoting a recent show to strippers—both male and female—he says, "It must be ratings week. I don't want to do these shows . . . they make me." Sure they do. But who is making us watch?

Freedom of expression is not the issue here. Nobody's sug­gesting censorship or even paternalistic decisions based on what someone else thinks is good for us. The issue is honesty—honesty about why we watch. The talk shows are merely giving us what we want. The question is, Why do we want it?

In some cultures it was thought that illness or bad luck could be transferred from one person to another by magic. James G. Frazer, in his classic work The Golden Bough, told of one example: "To get rid of warts, take a string and make as many knots in it as you have warts. Then lay the string under a stone. Whoever treads upon the stone will get the warts, and you will be rid of them." Something like that draws us to the tent. We confirm our own nor­malcy because our worst fears have been manifested in someone else—the visual equivalent of burying the string. Or, if we see our­selves in someone who has survived our common plight, we are reassured; we are not alone.

There is no slouching into the tent today. We walk in shame­lessly, casting off inhibitions in the name of openness.

The new openness has, in fact, turned out to be an empty promise. Are things any better than they were two decades ago? Has drug abuse or wife abuse or child abuse declined as we have

learned more? Are we any happier thinking that a friend who takes a drink is a potential alcoholic, that every stranger is a child- snatcher?

24. How has this new compassion we are teaching been made evident? Ask the parents who have three HIV-positive sons and found their house burned down because of it. Ask the people who cluster over the grates of subways in our largest cities. If you were a trapped whale or a little girl down a well, solicitude would flow your way in great waves. It still helps to be cute or little or white or furry or totally nonthreatening when you're looking for compassion—or pretty, when you want a bone mar­row transplant.

25. The potential is there on the TV talk shows for real entertain­ment—and for service. Oprah scored with a terrific show on fe­male comics. Programs on health matters or economic questions are valuable. During the first days of the war in the Persian Gulf, Donahue aired shows that were serious and important contribu­tions to our understanding of the conflict. "I do have a con­science," he says.

26. Geraldo, however, ever subject to the temptations of the flesh, spoiled what could have been a serious discussion of breast im­plants by having Jessica Hahn as the honored guest and by fondling examples of the implants interminably. Does he have it right? Are we a people who need to watch breast implants being fondled?

27. What happens when we set aside our last taboo? What hap­pens when we've finally been titillated to a terminal numbness, in­capable of shock, on the prowl for a new high? What manner of stimulation will we need next? Are we addicted? Talk show code­pendent?

28. Which topic affects us more: the discussion of the S & L crisis Donahue did last summer or the interviews with the strippers? Which do you think got the better ratings?

29. In a free society we get what we want. We shouldn't be sur­prised when we end up with what we deserve. But we can't trans­fer blame. It's not the hosts' fault—it's the viewers'.

1991