Core Response

I was particularly struck by the article by Sconce, "See you in Hell, Johnny Bravo!" This article centered around the celebrity reality show CELEBRITY BOXING. I remember seeing advertisements for this show, but never had any interest in watching it. After reading the article, there were some interesting assertions made about the trend in reality TV to have "has been" celebrities come back for a last chance at fame. During the time of a celebrity's time at the top, they are there to fit some kind of mold or desire. Now with the increase in celebrity reality shows, these stars come back as artifacts of those past personas. The article talked about the fight between the Partridge and Brady families with the actors who played the main sons. Their fight was more than Danny and Greg fighting decades later, it was the ideas that they stood for coming back to see which would win out head to head. This semester has shown us that stars fit a certain mold at one point or another, Elvis being white trash or Marilyn become an icon of sex and blondness and so on, so this emergence of celebrity reality shows is a desire to see these molds interact directly with one another. VH1 has created the marketing term of CELEBREALITY to describe their shows like Surreal Life and Celebrity Rehab. At the end of the article Sconce quotes Todorov discussing the idea of hesitation, ration and irrational, real and hyperreal, and other pairings that cause us to stop for a second and think, what are the rules that are in play here or realizing we do not know those rules and accept that. With these shows, I think that there is a disbelief as to what is really happening, but we do not know what is real so we accept it for what it is, a hyperreal edited piece of "real" fiction.