My Word's Worth: an occasional column by Marylaine Block

vol. 5, #46, October 22, 2000

REAL REALITY

Does it seem to you that "reality television" isn't all that real? Oh, the people are real enough on Survivor and Big Brother and MTV's Real World, but the situation is not. With cameras constantly turned on them, they seem to become characters playing one version of themselves that fits with the other characters. Even if they could present themselves whole, the editors have their own ideas of who these people are -- the bitch, the cut-up, the ruthless careerist -- and show us only those moments when the real people behave according to those assigned roles.

Only rarely does TV do what Studs Terkel did: allow ordinary people to tell the stories of their lives. Occasionally ABC treats us to Jay Schadler's stories of the people who gave him rides as he hitch-hikes across America (some of them available at http://www.talelights.net/), and every other Thursday CBS News' Steve Hartman randomly selects a person and invites them to tell their stories. But that's pretty much it.

Which is a pity, because it's by listening to people's story that we come to truly see them rather than the categories they belong to, and understand that they are real. The more we live and work beside people exactly like ourselves, the more we could use a better understanding of the other folks we share our country with.

Here's a program I'd enjoy seeing. Since 1904 the Carnegie Hero Fund Commission has presented medals, money and scholarships to ordinary people who risked their lives to save someone else. When people send in nominations, the Hero Fund sends investigators to learn more about the acts of heroism and decide how to honor them.

Over the years, there have been more than 74,000 nominations, more than 74,000 stories of people who dove into raging rivers, threw themselves in the way of bullets, ran into burning buildings, to save someone from certain death. This kind of greatness come in all colors and sizes -- rich and poor, educated and illiterate, men and women, muscular and out of shape, as young as ten and as old as 83. So do the victims. One mark of heroes is that they don't care who the victim is; they see only a fellow human in great need.

An equally interesting story, of course, is about the Carnegie investigators. How wonderful it must be to spend a lifetime seeking and finding human goodness.

Here's another show I'd watch, a show anybody who's ever tried to find out who their ancestors were would understand and love. Each episode would be a detective story, as is all genealogy, reconstructing someone's life, starting with the bits and pieces we all leave behind -- photographs, diaries, words on tombstones, letters, newspaper articles, a faded wedding dress or uniform, medals, old checkbooks, a family Bible with births and deaths and weddings carefully inscribed.

The narrator -- a historian, perhaps, or a great grandchild in search of her past -- would build a story from these and all the family legends -- about the gossip column grandma wrote to support her kids when grandpa died in the flu epidemic; about grandpa finding the love of his life in an orphanage, and then adopting her brothers and sisters; the funny stories they told about themselves, the songs they sang, the words of wisdom they passed along

There would be holes in the picture we end up with, for nobody tells us everything about their lives. Even if they could, it would still only be the truth as they saw it -- their stories would look very different to someone else. The show's writers could fill in those blanks with their best guesses, about who she flirted with at the prom, or why the letters suddenly stopped, or what they said as their first baby came squalling into the world. The writers could suggest that the calamity that killed all four of a family's children in the same week might have been smallpox, and show us what the parents might have done and said to help them make it through the empty time that followed.

Or the writers could leave the holes, let us fill in the blanks ourselves.

Either way, it's a show I'd love to watch, a show that would make our past a living, breathing thing. That's the hardest thing about history, you know, believing that the people were real, and had no more idea than we do now of how things would work out -- whether they'd survive the depression, whether they could make a living from their new business, whether the men they sent off to war would ever come back to them.

Another show I'd enjoy would be travelers' tales. Because the common human condition is inertia, it takes powerful motivation to leave, and the imagination to believe things might be better elsewhere. Some of us were driven by pogroms, famine, or war. For others, the propelling force was implausible dreams, a longing to be more than just our father's son, a hope that somewhere over the rainbow there's a place where troubles melt like lemondrops.

Some are driven by the passion to know, to learn about unknown continents and cultures, exotic animals, native medicines, the history of our planet. Many of us just want to see wonders, and escape ever so briefly from humdrum routine. Some may need to test themselves against gravity and mountains and human limitations to see if they are tough enough. Some of us may only feel fully conscious and alive when courting change.

How might the program link the stories up? Maybe in the office of a travel magazine. Or maybe on a train -- there's something about the enforced leisureliness of a slow train moving across a vast continent that makes storytelling possible. Every week, there'd be a different landscape, maybe even a different time, and always a different story. And no scene designer could beat the backdrop -- blue sky, red rock canyons, white-tipped mountains, green and yellow cornfields stretching to forever.

I'd watch any of these shows, because only at its rare best has television done for us what our other art forms do: show us who we are and why we matter. Everybody does have a story. Teliing them is my idea of reality TV.