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A Cup of Decaf Reality

9 bytes added, 14:44, 12 November 2006
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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>
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