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Freakshow

Freakshow

Jon Dovey

(2000)

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Book Details

Abstract

True confessions, fake films and docu-soaps - in the last ten years factual television has been transformed by an explosion of new genres. Freakshow offers a serious look at 'reality TV' in an attempt to understand the mass media’s fascination with intimacy, deviancy, and horror.

Jon Dovey analyses reality TV in terms of the political economy of the mass media. He investigates the relationship between confessional television and our modern understanding of culture and identity. Is our fascination with the personal the only meaningful response to the complexity of our own lives? Are the politics of the self the only alternative to the defunct grand narratives of yesterday?

In concentrating not on the reception of these new television forms but on the choices, models and agendas which inform their production, Dovey reveals the relationships between social anxieties, economic pressures and their specific inflections in media texts. In a critical analysis of media industry practice, Dovey asks why directors can't stay out of range of their own cameras - and what is the role of the television of intimacy within broadcasting.
'An extremely timely discussion of the extraordinary boom in reality TV in recent years'
Joe Moran - American Studies Today
'A timely and much needed theoretical analysis of carefully contrived first person media and analyses the changing nature of factual television'
Intensities: the Journal of Cult Media

Table of Contents

Section Title Page Action Price
Contents vii
Acknowledgements viii
Introduction 1
1. Show Me the Money 5
Cheating 5
The Public Sphere? 14
Re-Scheduling - A Sample Survey 17
A Public Sphere Turned Inside Out 21
Notes 175
Chapter 1 175
Chapter 2 177
Chapter 3 178
Chapter 4 179
Chapter 5 181
Chapter 6 182
Chapter 7 183
2. Klutz Films 27
'I Don't Think Anybody Believes In Objectivity Anyway . . . 28
Downsizing the Documentary 35
Boys Fess Up 40
Nobody ’s Business - But My Own 47
Historical Contexts 50
Notes 177
3. Camcorder Cults 55
Video, Technology and Cultural Form 55
Video Virus 57
Zero Degree Simulation 62
Reality Porn 65
Video Fool for Love 71
Notes 178
4. Firestarters - Re-viewing Reality TV 78
What's Real about Reality TV? 79
Marketing Reality 81
Trash TV - Empowerment - Nightmare? 83
The Disappearance of Reality 88
Packaging Pathology 91
Leaking Genres and Magical Helpers 95
The Hollywood Ending 98
unReality TV 100
Notes 179
5. The Confessing Nation 103
Silence is Guilt 103
Opening the Box - Foucault's Confessional 105
Television's Matrix of Selfhood 108
It's Good to Talk - the Chat Show Debates 114
Postcards from Reality - the Video Nation Project 121
Notes 181
6. McDox 'R'Us - Docu-soap and the Triumph of Trivia 133
The Cuckoo in the Nest 133
Direct Cinema Goes Shopping 138
Soap Bubbles 140
The Return of the Voice of God 142
Everything is Visible but Nothing Matters 144
Flyblown Naturalism 146
Private Characters, Public Stories 149
Arguing about the World 150
An Accumulation of Naturalistic Debris 152
Notes 182
7. Squaring Circles 154
It's Only TV? 155
Public Relations 156
Superfamilial Zones Of Familiarity 162
Pleasure and Difference 164
First Person Public Service 166
Keeping It Raw 171
Notes 183
Bibliography 185
Index 189
abuse, disclosure of, 111 111
access to media 157-8 157
access to media, 4 4
accuracy, lower standards of 13 13
Airline 135 135
Airport 134