Almost flipping through the channels, I ran into and watched the movie "Click" (2006) again, with an unskilled acting Adam Sandler, and that comedy, however, is not a failure, because it essentially explains how life itself, caught up in the pace of capital, becomes reality, what is designed as a TV format to - deliver the most interesting version of reality in the course of a few hours: hysterical quarrels, physical conflict and sex, the emotional breakdown of the participants, a public confession in front of an audience of millions, therefore: a shortened, rewound reality directed in such a way as to remove all the remnants from reality itself. Like a movie: in one hour and forty-five minutes we get a story from the defense of Stalingrad, a romance that ends with the death of a loved one from cancer, the Matrix program which is a simulation of reality in order to explode the human species like a battery. What, in fact, the movie "Click" does without perhaps even knowing it: it reduces life to a few moments which, if you believe it, happens at the moment of death (when every man is a prophet, he claims Sokrat), when only those moments that marked earthly humiliation are experienced. (The fact that the genre of the film is a comedy and the main character is Adam Sandler should be interpreted in the light of pure subversion...)
Reality is the realism of reality, what is always already happening in reality but in a suppressed way, especially in those "houses of cameras" everything must be manifested, the participants are obliged - to create reality - in the state of its peak, the execution of reality itself. Just like a party: only those who have fun, who enjoy themselves excessively, who indulge in the realm of the senses, feast and a kind of irony, hedonism without limits, body exposed to the ``fundamentalist show'' of Las Vegas are invited. Therefore, there is no stopping by the fact that there is no meaning, everything is one - synthetic happiness, ecstasy expansion, artificial experience of total emptying. (Since he is a rational animal, man is the most hideous animal, which all the more tries to cover it up with the glaze of culture.)
Architect Michael Newman (Adam Sandler), leads a typical life of a middle-class family with a wife and son, parents who visit him often, and as an architect pressured by his boss and constantly under stress, in order to give his maximum due to the increasingly accumulated obligations, he simply decides rewind those routinized everyday things: talking to his wife at the end of the day, devoting himself to the son he needs to raise, there are too boring parents to listen to, etc., and everything is fine until the moment when the remote control itself takes over his life and starts rewinding some things he wouldn't want to skip, including sexual intercourse with a woman. Yes: it is, in essence, like an advertisement for a coffee that has the message that - we always have time for the right things (avoiding to add: except for life.) Because, Fredrik Begbede, that French aristocrat and overall mediocre writer, gave a good aphorism: "An ungrateful age lasts a lifetime" ("Dam on the Atlantic"). However, outside of everyday life, which is made up of schedules and small rituals (a short break with a glass of wine before going to bed: a picture of a modern man who can set aside so much for himself), life is nothing but an escape into phantasm, on our part an eternal struggle and resistance reality (only a sage and an animal are equipped to bear reality), in which, of course, we always capitulate, and that's why lacan expressly emphasizes that an ethical relationship must be maintained as desired.
If the theory digs a hole and waits for reality to fall into it (as it says somewhere). Baudrillard), then the reality show managed to capture reality, to show it in its entirety, because it is enough just to look at one "review of the day" in those houses with cameras, in those cages with cameras, and we will already be overwhelmed by the creepy question: is this reality , that is: reality can only be this and nothing more, with a fantasy that, again, like death, can always happen only and only in it? That knowledge (which comes from a lucid attack) is the time to start a germ in us from which manic depression then develops, or what happens to the hero of the novel "Nausea". (Why do planetary popular icons suffer, if not for the reason that they have exhausted the reservoir of desires that are always and only an unlimited form of entertainment, and exposure to the false love of millions who only have an image of them. When they become a phenomenon and an object of worship, which is to say - general place - then only emptiness and illusion is revealed in oneself.)
In contrast to the modern man structured by global capitalism, the product of the totalitarian system is extremely realistic, he has fought over desires and fantasies, he has seen existence as work, organization and discipline. What Michael Newman fantasizes about would never be done, for example, by an engineer from North Korea who, without even knowing it, proves in practice Kierkegaard the hypothesis according to which "the very principle of reality is ethically grounded." The fact that the movie "Click" reminds us that we must never and never neglect the family is a pure ideology of late capitalism that tries to create guilt in us, because the one who founded the family knows that he must always be at the disposal of the company, that he has no working time, that work is equal to life, of course, if we are so lucky, we are in employment, since unemployment is constantly increasing, as a result of which interpersonal relations are deteriorating, everywhere there is an explosion of intolerance, huge dissatisfaction, politics of radicalism, movements that are extremely extreme, abandoned and disheartened people looking for any kind of community, that's where the backlash came from Oliver Anthony, a song dedicated to workers that was listened to by millions and that was apparently quite enough for them, which means that "The Rich North of Richmond" won for the umpteenth time because of the left, which becomes a lyric of resistance, a pastiche of lamentation over itself.
In order to endure the regime of reality in which everything is designed a priori and we just need to jump into our everyday roles as extras-subjects, millions of viewers find true relief in reality shows, where they completely identify with their favorites, live their lives on this side of the screen, constantly texting and voting. Television creates the illusion in the audience that it is the chief and responsible editor of the program that is created in response to their desire. In addition to this, one more thing should be emphasized, which turns out to be extremely important: "Big Brother", the first reality show in the Balkans, was met with moralizing reactions such as: the participants will be constantly filmed, this is the end of privacy and the beginning of television that abolishes the private/public distinction, everything becomes visible and illuminated, etc. However, in the meantime, what happened, what knowledge did we actually get? So that only continuously monitored at one moment the participants become truly spontaneous, what they are, extremely authentic. (Aren't we constantly being recorded by cameras at work, as a result of which we create tension for ourselves as we do not work enough, and hence we not only have to finish, but also create additional work for ourselves. It is an extreme exploitation that controls our mental, emotional, and physical state, crushing it and turning into something mechanical and less and less human.)
“In Beverly Hills, people don't throw their trash. They make a television show out of him" (Woody Allen). The most successful example of how one family - sold the story of the family - they did The Kardashians, who played a family, the way an American family should be, while others in that play experienced all the things they cannot do in their own family. If we had rewound this show, maybe today's families would be different! Because what we failed to see: that family is what no one is, nor can be, it is about - a project called family.
Bonus video:
