Core Response #4 - Andrea

I think the earliest Reali-TV (to use Chad Raphael's term) I remember watching was America's Most Wanted. I remember being five years old and watching it with my mom around bedtime; it might have even been past bedtime, but my mom let me watch it because she wanted me to 'know the kinds of things bad people could do to me.' I suppose my mom felt like we were participating in what Raphael calls "an oxymoronic 'nationwide neighborhood watch association,'" though we also have to add Dateline and Forensic Files to my education to avoid becoming a crime victim (133). Like I said, most of these shows came on or past my bedtime, and I remember regularly hearing John Walsh or Stone Phillips's voice narrating my nightmares. These shows did keep me on guard throughout my young life, so perhaps my mom's leniency with bedtime did keep me alive longer than I would have without the paranoia, however, they never saved me from being flashed by a pedophile at five years old or almost being kidnapped at eight. My mom and I are still regular consumers of crime-time (even when I know that this education hasn't served me in many practical ways), and I can't help but think about Anna McCarthy's writing and my own voyeuristic engagement with these traumatic shows now. I found McCarthy's unpacking of the Random 1 show to be incredibly revealing and disturbing as she demonstrates the ways neoliberalism broadcasts back to us "the place of suffering in civic life" as though it were normal and necessary in order to keep the show going (21).

I like to think that beyond the consumption of survivor and/or victim's traumas, perhaps watching these shows allows me to participate in what McCarthy calls citizenship "marked by the untidiness of irresolvable pain, the unspeakable position of helplessness and abjection" (37). One of my favorite crime documentaries is Netflix's The Keepers, and the show itself has been on my mind ever since I started this class. While incredibly difficult to watch, I find the show "exposes the forms of socioeconomic inequality and disenfranchisement that reside within democratic experience," similar to how Bruce's traumatic story on Random 1 made tangible extreme institutional and ideological failures for McCarthy (37-38). The Keepers is presented as an amateur-sleuth-inspired investigation into the death of a nun, Sister Cathy, and explores how her death was related to a string of sexual assault cases from the high school she worked at. The show itself reveals the failings of the state and church; it is the incredible loss and pain of the principal cast that bring me back to the show annually. Like Bruce's story, I have "fragments, dominated by a terrible image" of Sister Cathy that remain with me even when I haven't watched the show in a long time. McCarthy's analysis of Bruce's traumatic loss of his limb resonates with my overall feelings towards The Keepers, particularly when she writes, "It is a story that speaks quite literally, and corporeally, of profound loss, loss made all the more horrific and incomprehensible because the absent human perpetrator" (24). The case of Sister Cathy's death and all the crimes linked to her death remain unsolved, and it is the absence of a perpetrator which enables me to form a strange attachment to their traumatic story.

I know this response is a little more personal than my Core responses usually are (should?) be, but it was difficult to read all of the writing this week without realizing how big a role this type of television has played throughout my entire life. It was strange to revisit shows I had once been so involved with, like watching American Idol every week and getting into an actual argument over "Clay vs Ruben," or even shouting "Move that bus!" at the climax of an Extreme Home Makeovers episode (which is cringe to think about, especially knowing how the producers wanted to milk the trauma porn). It was fun to root for people, to feel like I was participating in some "democratic" process in which talented people would get recognition for their talents, and struggling people I related to could get a house my family would never have. I feel the weight of that indoctrination heavily now. The final nail in the coffin for any romanticized nostalgia, however, was Ouellete and Hay's reading of The Apprentice's lasting influence on our political process, and it was a little too eery how their reading of the intersection between private and public spheres we keep discussing ultimately culminated in a presidency (215).