Trapnest, 1/15

I found myself yesterday doing some reading at the kitchen table in my apartment. My roommate, let’s call her Hatchi, was on the couch, watching TV and mindlessly surfing the internet. I paid little attention to what she was doing; I like to think I’m pretty good at multi-tasking as well toning-out distractions. Eventually, she had to go to class so she got up, gathered her things, and left, the TV was still on. One of those talk shows came on, everyone knows the type, the Jerry Springer spin-off. This one in particular was Maury. Where people of, interesting, backgrounds are thrown together on a stage and everyone seems to be hoping someone gets punched in the face before the hour is up. The title of the episode caught my eye, “My 16 year old Boyfriend beats me.” Now, this is not to indicate that I am interested in 16 year-olds, or domestic violence, but the format of this show intrigued me.

Thee girls of various ages, 18 was the oldest, came onto the stage and talked about how their boyfriends would abuse them in various sexual, physical, and mental ways. Then the boyfriends walked arrogantly onto the stage, the audience boo’ed, they said a number of derogatory comments and Maury “interviewed” them, but simply fed into the audiences desires for more comments from these boys. In the end of the show the girls went off to work with a woman who had been abused, the boys spent a day in jail with a coach, and in the end everyone was “rehabilitated.”

Perhaps this was a long explanation, but this show bothered me for a number of reasons, all of which seemed to link back to the discussions in class this week. Firstly there is the issue of reinvention, where nothing is new. As I mentioned before, there are numerous shows like this, all following the same format of the shows that came before them. Nothing about them is original or new.

I also saw the concepts of Analgesia and Anesthesia. This may not make sense, since the topic was both a painful one and a disturbing one. But, I believe that it still relates, simply because the viewers are watching people that are much worse off than them (we hope at least). It makes your problems seem trivial when you see a girl discussing how her boyfriend puts his cigarettes out on her. Your life seems much better and much simpler.

The third thing I noticed, and personally concerned me the most out of everything was the fact that the answer was to do this “day of rehabilitation.” While I am not a clinical psychologist I don’t think someone who believes that all women are “Bitches” and that he “owns” his girlfriend can be “cured” in one day. It’s like cutting a leg off and trying to fix it with band-aids. There’s also the concern that these people turned to a reality-TV show as the way to fix their problems than the police, or authorities. When did reality become a place in which we turn to pop-culture to fix our problems over the institutions that have been designed, trained, and put in place to handle such problems? Furthermore, I think TV shows like this, ultimately make light of the issues, turning them into something that can be fixed with one day of work. They neglect to show the years of work that goes into becoming a person who can have a healthy relationship. As well as cutting off the future that these people have so that the show can have a “Happy Ending.”