Real Life (1979)

 

Real Life

Over the past 30 years we have seen the rise and fall of reality TV. From Big Brother over Survivor to, well, anything really. I say fall, because I sense the genre has gotten tired and the shows I used to watch are either cancelled or degraded beyond what I care to watch. But there was a time where reality TV was something of the future and the idea trying to film real life was novel and even futuristic. Early attempts was made with Cinema Verité, but the first reality shows as we would recognize it appeared in the seventies and the movie “Real Life” is very much a response to this novel idea.

The question “Real Life” asks is how real is reality TV really when you consider how intrusive it is to be filmed and how conscious the subjects are of being filmed. Then there is the obvious agenda of those producing the show. They need good TV, something the average viewer will want to watch and is reality interesting enough in itself or does it need a bit of… encouragement.

“Real Life” is a comedy so of course it gets pretty extreme. The director of this project to film a family throughout a year is comedian Albert Brooks as himself. I was not familiar with him, but apparently he was a name on Saturday Night Live. His agenda is to make a fun show, but he has very little understanding of anything else including the alleged scientific angle on this “experiment”. This they make a lot out of: involving a famous research institute and assigning psychologists to follow the family is supposed to lend credibility to the experiment, but because this is a spoof movie, we see a straight faced selection process that is entirely ludicrous. The researchers are not much better than the director.

The Yeager family appears like a standard family of four, but it is soon clear that each of them has their own idea of why they are in this project and this is not at all coordinated.   

So, with a director out of sync with his own project, a consulting partner disconnected from reality and a family that is highly conscious of being filmed, this can only go one way and it does so… fast.

Knowing what we do today about reality TV it is difficult not to see this movie as prescient. When we laugh at it today, it is because it gets so much right, 20-30 years ahead of its time, not unlike “Network”. These are all the things that are wrong with reality TV and also why people see it anyway. The total meltdown, conflicts on set and setups that just have to have been artificially introduced. I think most of us are convinced by now that there is not much reality left.

If we take away this hindsight and try to watch this with 1979 glasses on, I am not so certain it is working as well. Sure it is hilariously funny that the director sends his crew with the father for a horse operation rather than film the daughters communion because it has more drama, and to watch Brooks displaying his complete lack of understanding for the researchers work, but the tone gets a bit shrill at times and there may be a little too much slapstick here for the basic idea to truly work. Certainly, the illusion that this is seriously meant is quickly lost when Brooks ends his introduction speech to the local community with a song and a big band. Or to say this in other words, I love the idea here but I was not laughing as much as I think I was supposed to.

Perhaps its value today is mostly that the real world caught up with what was intended as a spoof and maybe that is enough.

In any case, I love that there is room for comedies on the List.