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<i>The [[Real ]] Cancun</i> (2003), the first ever "[[reality ]] movie," follows sixteen [[people ]] will together for eight days in a beachfront Cancun villa for the ultimate Spring Break vacation. The movie which was advertised with "NO SCRIPTS. NO ACTORS. NO RULES. ANYTHING CAN HAPPEN ON SPRING BREAK, AND IT DID.", fared rather poorly at the box-office (earning less than 4 million dollars). It is easy to see why, in contrast to the triumph of the TV reality shows, it failed: the attempt to "let [[life ]] itself write the story" ended up in a mass of [[material ]] out of which the studio experts tried to concoct a short coherent [[narrative]]. However, more important than such [[particular ]] criticisms is the insight into the [[ideological ]] background which made such a [[film ]] possible and acceptable.From the 1950s, [[social ]] [[psychology ]] varies endlessly the motif of how, in [[public ]] life, we are all "wearing masks," adopting idenities which obfuscate our [[true ]] selves. However, wearing a mask can be a strange [[thing]]: sometimes, more often than we tend to believe, there is more [[truth ]] in the mask that in what we assume to be our "real [[self]]." [[Recall ]] the proverbial impotent shy person who, while playing the [[cyberspace ]] interactive [[game]], adopts the [[screen ]] [[identity ]] of a [[sadistic ]] murderer and irresistible seducer - it is all too simple to say that this identity is just an [[imaginary ]] [[supplement]], a temporary escape from his real life [[impotence]]. The point is rather that, since he [[knows ]] that the cyberspace interactive game is "just a game," he can "show his true self," do things he would never have done in real life interactions - in the guise of a [[fiction]], the truth [[about ]] himself is articulated.<br><br>The [[negative ]] of this wearing a mask is the strange [[prohibition ]] which till recently ruled hard-core pornography: although it did show "everything," real sex, the narrative which provided the [[frame ]] for repeated [[sexual ]] encounters was as a rule ridiculously non-realistic, stereotypical, stupidly comical, staging a kind of [[return ]] to the 18th century commedia del'arte in which actors do not play "real" individuals, but one-dimensional types - the Miser, the Cuckold Husband, the Promiscuous Wife. Is not this strange [[compulsion ]] to make the narrative ridiculous a kind of negative gesture of respect: yes, we do show everything, but precisely for that [[reason ]] we [[want ]] to make it clear that it's all a big [[joke]], that the actors are not really engaged?<br><br>Today, however, this "No trespass!" is increasingly undermined: recall [[recent ]] attempts to combine the "serious" narrative [[cinema ]] with the "hardcore" depiction of sex, i.e., to include in a "serious" film sex scenes which are played for the real (we see the erected [[penis]], fellatio, up to actual penetration); the two most conspicuous examples are Patrice Chereau's <i>Intimacy</i> and Lars von Trier's <i>Idiots</i>. And I am tempted to [[suggest ]] that the rise of "[[reality TV]]" in its different guises, from "docusoaps" to <i>Survival</i> competitor shows, relies on the same underlying trend to obfuscate the line that separates fiction from reality. Which ideological coordinates underlie this trend?<br><br>On today's [[market]], we find a [[whole ]] series of products deprived of their malignant property: coffee without caffeine, cream without fat, beer without alcohol... And the [[list ]] goes on: what about [[virtual ]] sex as sex without sex, the Colin Powell [[doctrine ]] of warfare with no casualties (on our side, of course) as warfare without warfare, the contemporary redefinition of [[politics ]] as the art of expert administration as politics without politics, up to today's tolerant [[liberal ]] [[multiculturalism ]] as an [[experience ]] of [[Other ]] deprived of its [[Otherness ]] (the idealized Other who dances fascinating dances and has an ecologically sound holistic approach to reality, while features like wife beating remain out of sightÉ)? Virtual Reality simply generalizes this procedure of offering a product deprived of its substance: it provides reality itself deprived of its substance - in the same way decaffeinated coffee smells and tastes like the real coffee without [[being ]] the real one, Virtual Reality is experienced as reality without being one. Is this not the attitude of today's hedonistic [[Last Man]]? Everything is permitted, you can [[enjoy ]] everything, BUT deprived of its substance which makes it dangerous. Today's hedonism combines [[pleasure ]] with constraint - it is no longer the old [[notion ]] of the "[[right ]] measure" between pleasure and constraint, but a kind of pseudo-[[Hegelian ]] immediate coincidence of the opposites: [[action ]] and reaction should coincide, the very thing which causes damage should already be the [[medicine]]. The ultimate example of it is arguably a "chocolate laxative," available in the US, with the paradoxical [[injunction ]] "Do you have constipation? Eat more of this chocolate!", i.e., of the very thing which causes constipation. And is not a negative proof of the [[hegemony ]] of this stance the fact that true unconstrained consumption (in all its main forms: drugs, free sex, smoking...) is emerging as the main [[danger]]? The fight against these dangers is one of the main investments of today's "[[biopolitics]]." Solutions are here desperately sought which would reproduce the [[paradox ]] of the chocolate laxative. The main contender is "safe sex" - a term which makes one appreciative of the truth of the old saying "Is having sex with a condom not like taking a shower with a raincoat on?". The ultimate [[goal ]] would be here, along the lines of decaf coffee, to invent "opium without opium": no wonder marihuana is so popular among [[liberals ]] who want to legalize it - it already IS a kind of "opium without opium".<br><br>These coordinates allow us to delineate succinctly what is [[false ]] in the reality TV shows: the "real life" we get in [[them ]] is as real as decaf coffee. In short, even if these shows are "for real," people still act in them - they simply "play themselves." The standard disclaimer in a novel ("characters in this [[text ]] are a fiction, every resemblance with the real life characters is purely [[contingent]]") holds also for the participants of the reality soaps: what we see there are fictional characters, even if they play themselves for the real. The best comment on reality TV is thus the ironic version of this disclaimer recently used by a Slovene [[author]]: "All characters in the following narrative are fictional, not real - but so are the characters of most of the people I [[know ]] in real life, so this disclaimer doesn't amount to muchÉ" So, back to "[[The Real ]] Cancun": "NO SCRIPTS. NO ACTORS. NO RULES." turned out to mean that people played themselves, that they followed the most flat rules of social interaction, and that [[nothing ]] even minimally unpredictable happened.<br><br>

* [[A Cup of Decaf Reality]] ''[[Lacan]].com''. 2004. <http://www.lacan.com/zizekdecaf.htm>