The Politics of Schlock: Rock of Love, Escapism, and Reality Television after 9/11
After the dust settled in the streets of New York in the early afternoon of September 11th, 2001, America — and by proxy, the world — was inexorably changed. I can still remember being picked up from grade school by my mom and watching the live broadcast of the South Tower, smoking like a roman candle, only to see a second plane collide with the North Tower a few moments later. Everything changed after that day — politics, the economy, and, in the context of this course, entertainment. The live broadcasts of these attacks still remains as Nielson’s “Number one most impactful televised moment.”1, an impact that was felt throughout the decade. Through the combination of this mass consumption of “unscripted” “real-life” drama/trauma and the desire for TV viewers to escape reality through entertainment, the American TV-scape became fertile grounds for the reality television boom of the 2000s. Through the analysis of “bad” reality television shows such as VH1’s Rock of Love (2007), we are presented with a seminal post-9/11 media text that facilitates the kind of media escapism that confounds Bourdieuian concepts of taste. Mass viewership of shows such as Rock of Love, despite their problematic depictions of gender and race, persisted during the 2000s because they created a liminal space of surreality that allowed viewers to both escape to and to criticize.
To begin, we need to contextualize the post-9/11 media climate with a few key facts and changes that the industry saw immediately after the attack. As I just stated, Nielsen, the independent organization that measures TV ratings and metrics announced in a 2016 ranking that the 9/11 television broadcast was “the number one most impactful moment in televised history”[1]. The News ticker — the scrawling live feed of news headlines that is now a mainstay in nighttime news broadcasts — was here first utilized in a fox news broadcast of 9/11 coverage, and hasn’t stopped scrawling since. Nighttime TV viewership doubled during the week, and there was 96 continuous hours of live coverage across the multiple American news stations that covered the attacks and the aftermath. These statistics are significant because they brought about a paradigm shift in the way Americans consume media. We have been reprogrammed to consume “unscripted”, “real-life” drama/trauma, we have the desire, as TV viewers in this post-9/11 context, to want to escape the xenophobic reality of every-day life, and reality television provided this escapist fantasy.
Media Scholar Lynn Spigel in her article entitled, “Entertainment Wars: television Culture after 9/11” helps to further contextualize the types of media that spurred from this time period as being a result of a, “Mobilization of a moral binary: good versus evil.”[2] President George W Bush’s address to the American people in the immediate aftermath of the attacks “often spoke of the eternal and essential ‘goodness’ of the American people — a line of rhetoric that often evoked the “selective histories” like that of World War II and Nazi Germany. The political and discursive implementation of these comparisons engendered a sense of moral superiority in the American people — a sense that positioned Americans and America as victims of a crime without causality. Beyond anything else, the construction of this moral binary created a need for television programming to make American audiences, “feel like they were in a moral position”. 2 One way this was achieved was through the mass production of reality television programming. Not only did these shows offer a pacing that mirrored the “live-action,” frenetic pacing that had been normalized during the 9/11 broadcasts, they also presented a version of reality that American audiences could place themselves in diametric moral opposite to. With this point in particular in mind, let us turn to a 9/11-era reality show that I believe embodies all of elements of an essential post-9/11 media text: VH1’s Rock of Love with Bret Michaels.
Rock of Love with Bret Michaels was a Reality Television dating show that premiered on VH1 in 2007 and ran for 3 seasons (though this essay is primarily concerned with the program’s first season). Each season, 20 girls are invited to a mansion in Southern California where former lead singer of the band Poison, Bret Michaels, weeds through the women in an attempt to find his soul mate. Each episode follows the same structure popularized by the Bachelor (2002) — there is “mingling time” in which the girls are encouraged to confront Bret in the house in an attempt to make a connection, Challenges, where the girls break off into teams or as individuals and compete in challenges themed around Bret’s rock-and-roll lifestyle with the winner receiving a one-on-one date with Bret, and finally eliminations, where each week one girl is eliminated from the house, and the others are rewarded with a “VIP” pass that allows them to stay on the show for another episode. This process then repeats each week until the finale where Bret must decide which of the two remaining girls will be his girlfriend. The fact that the show itself ran for multiple seasons implies the obvious, hollowness of these interactions — a point summed up by Bret himself in the season two premier, “we had a lot of rock of like, some rock of lust, but not rock of love.”[3] It is through these characters, Bret’s actions (or inactions) towards them and the editing used to portray them that the show, as a media text, establishes itself as morally inept.
This ineptitude is significant, not because it categorizes the program as “bad television”, but because it provided an outlet, a pressure release valve for an American audience that sought out immorality in their programming so that their own lives could be internalized as “morally superior” in comparison. In an article entitled, “Simply Irresistible: Reality Television Consumption Patterns” Lisa Lundy et al performed an ethnography of college-aged reality television viewers in 2008 and found a number of crucial responses from viewers in the target demographic of Rock of Love with Bret Michaels. Among the responses recorded in the article, one participant noted of her reality television viewing habits that, “reality television is reality television because as a viewer you can see yourself in that situation and you can say to yourself, if I was on that show this is what I would do. It is reality because you can see yourself in it.”[4] Lundy then expands upon this form of media escapism; “…most participants projected their lives onto the characters of the shows, trying to determine what better decisions could have been made and what they would have done differently.”4 This finding is significant because — in our post 9/11 context — there was a desire for American audiences to view themselves as morally superior to the types of characters they saw on television as part of a cycle of self-vindicating victim-hood. Lundy’s respondents and her own findings concur with this statement because they both seem to suggest a desire amongst reality television viewers to escape what one participants called, “the depressing stuff [i.e. the war, the economy, etc.] and escape to a fictionalized world where the viewer has both agency and the moral high-ground.
This type of escapism helped to facilitate the reality television boom of the 2000s and established the highly formulaic RT empire of Cris Abrego and Mark Cronin: Flavor of Love, Daisy of Love, I Love New York, etc. Each of these shows — including rock of love — took the same pacing, editing and concept and made slight alterations to them in order to appeal to a target audience that was being missed out on by another Abrego-Cronin joint. This overlapping got so monotonous that at one point in VH1’s programming, you had Rock of Love Season three, Love of Daisy (a reality show starring a contestant from Season two of Rock of Love as the main love interest), and I Love Money, a third show that drew its cast entirely from losers from other VH1 reality TV shows and pitted them against one another for a cash prize. This cluster of self-referential, inter-textual programing was so insular and overlapping that seemingly any teenager in the 2000s could find a reality TV shows that represented their identity or interests. The way in which these programs attempt this type of inclusion, however, comes at the cost of highly problematic content in terms of their treatment of gender and race, especially in the case of Rock of Love.
Rock of Love is essentially a male-centric escapist text — male viewers are invited to envy Bret Michaels’s power, his agency to choose a lover from a large group of conventionally attractive women. This male-centric approach however comes bundled with a myriad of misogynistic representations of women: The female contestants of season one of Rock of Love are portrayed as both unintelligent and hyper-sexual, while Bret is portrayed as an emotionally deep and in-control. The women on the show who show any sign of emotional weakness (such as Sam) are universally critiqued by every other girl in the house, as well as Bret, in the numerous talking head segments that bookend every scene of “live” action. Bret’s own shallow demeanor dominates the atmosphere of the house and thus invites women to aspire to what the show normalizes as ideal: hyper-sexuality and unintelligence.
Rock of Love is also highly problematic in its treatment of race, as seen through the ways in which the show portrays its two black contestant, Raven and Dallas. Raven, who is introduced in the pilot episode, is reduced to single stereotype of black women: talkativeness. As Raven approaches Bret, surrounded by a harem of white women, she launches into a monologue about her intellectual pursuits, career and growing up with an abusive mother, all while being interjected with talking head cut-aways of Bret saying, “Raven is intense and talks a lot. A lot.”[5] After the editing does fade-outs to parody the amount of talking Raven is doing, she concludes by saying, “I’m looking for someone who is interested in more than my physical aspects, I’m looking for someone who is interested in my mind” to which Bret replies, “well, you do have a nice ass.” This misogynistic and racially questionable depiction of Raven is then carried on to Dallas, the other African American contestant in episode three. In this episode, it depicts Dallas, a character who is given little screen time up until now, as violent. After being provoked by Lacey, the two get into shoving fight that almost gets Dallas kicked off the air. The selective inclusion of only the black tropes these two characters hints at the white-centric and inherently problematic nature of production and editing teams behind Rock of Love.
Despite these depictions of subtle (and not-so-subtle) racism and misogyny, the number of spin-offs and reunion shows that proliferated throughout the 2000s are testament to the critical success of reality television shows such as Rock of Love. But how does this success interact with Bourdieuian notions of taste? On taste, communications and media scholar Pierre Bourdieu wrote, “Our cultural preferences are ‘predisposed, consciously and deliberately or not, to fulfill a social function of legitimating social differences.”[6] Bourdieu’s notions of taste claim, directly and indirectly, that taste itself is a function of social differences — class. This notion, however, is seemingly confounded by a show like Rock of Love because it invites viewers from all social strata, to escape from their own reality — regardless of social position — and critique and escape to. This is especially true in the post 9/11 context because of how far-reaching the effects of the 9/11 were. Essentially, 9/11 wasn’t a problem for just the poor, or just the rich, it affected everybody unbiasedly and thus reality television facilitated an escapism that was needed by all viewers, regardless of taste, almost in spite of taste.
While the 2000s were an era of incredible change, not only in the entertainment industry, but also in seemingly every sector in the world, Reality Television can be seen as the perfect simulacrum for the transition from media innocence to an obsession in moralism in viewership. The value that this type of escapism offered and continues to offer is testament to the inherent value of programs such as Rock of Love and thus distinguish them as more than just “Bad Television”.
[1] http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/tv/9-11-terrorist-attacks-top-survey-memorable-televised-moments-article-1.1112555
[2] Spigel, Lynn. “Entertainment Wars: Television Culture after 9/11.” Accessed March 12, 2017.
[3] Rock of Love “Back to the Rocking Horse.” Directed by Cris Abrego and Mark Cronin. VH1 broadcasting, January 13 2008.
[4] Lundy, Lisa K. “Simply Irresistible: Reality TV Consumption Patterns.” Research Gate. April 2008. Accessed March 12, 2017. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/233557440_Simply_Irresistible_Reality_TV_Consumption_Patterns.
[5] Rock of Love “Don’t Threaten Me With a Good Time.” Directed by Cris Abrego and Mark Cronin. VH1 broadcasting, July 15 2007.
[6] Bourdieu, Pierre, Richard Nice, and Tony Bennett. Distinction: a social critique of the judgment of taste. London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2015.