“Humankind,” in TS Eliot’s opinion, “cannot bear very much reality”, but our goggling, glutted species seems able to bear any amount of reality TV. American broadcast schedules devote fully half their time to unscripted programmes, which claim to be spying on reality, though they’re more often flagrantly surreal in their exposure of oddity, perversity and downright monstrosity. Here we have today’s equivalent to the nightmare alleys in itinerant carnivals, where customers used to titter at fat ladies, gasp at shaggy wolfmen and shudder as caged geeks bit the heads off live chickens.
In True Story, the academic sociologist Danielle J Lindemann takes a studious tour of the terrain. She finds toddlers with waxed eyebrows and spray-tanned legs competing in beauty contests: one precocious three-year-old mimics Julia Roberts playing a hooker in Pretty Woman and a seductress aged only two sports the spiky-nippled bra popularised by Madonna. Teenagers queue up to have Dr Pimple Popper squeeze little geysers of pus from their oily faces. At the Redneck Games – an Olympiad for the obese – hillbillies perform belly-flops in mud pits, bob for pigs’ trotters and loudly fart out of sheer delight. Elsewhere, a young woman snacks on the foam innards of her sofa cushions; not to be outdone, a much larger woman in a tent-size purple T-shirt consumes entire mattresses, chomping down to the box springs. A black man with elephantiasis of the testicles needs a hoodie to support his ballooning scrotum. He groans about the load he has to tote around between his bow legs, but is happy to display it to the cameras.
