Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [99]
The nineties might have been the decade when the whole criminal-celebrity-asshole nexus really gelled sociologically because, at the same time that Axl Rose was hurling epithets at audience members and stalking off with their cameras, there was a big pileup of talk shows (Donahue, Geraldo, Sally Jessy Raphael, Jerry Springer, Maury Povich, early Oprah) whose main purpose was giving the spotlight to ill-mannered people who would have had no place on TV in any previous decade. Suddenly we were seeing, at center stage, a stream of regular people who did nothing else to distinguish themselves besides confess to behaving badly.
We had, in one spectacular cultural moment, celebrities coming out onstage and in public life as the real-life assholes they may have always been in private and regular hard-core board-certified real-life assholes coming into a new life as celebrities in a kind of asshole version of the Hindu Wheel of Life. By the mid-nineties, grotesque, aberrant behavior in all areas had become as important a piece of the entertainment pie as juggling, magic, and unexceptional singing. It seemed to ring just the right zeitgeisty bell in the United States.
Here, for the first time, were men and women whose sole reason for appearing on national television was to voluntarily admit to something that, in the fifties, they would have spent their life trying to hide (for example, infidelity, incest, hateful family interrelationships, shoplifting and prostitution, personality disorders). A troubled history with substance abuse or the law was now offering a clearer path to a television appearance than an acting workshop or a degree in communications.
During that time, I became interested in the motives of these people. Why, I wondered, did anyone want to be seen on national TV insulting their relatives and looking like an asshole? In 1996, I worked as a reporter on a television series for Michael Moore where we investigated weird pop cultural inconsistencies. I anchored a piece that would send me to Mississippi to meet some people who had done this very thing. The show’s researchers connected me to five adult relatives of a family who had all been on The Jerry Springer Show, calling each other vile names. They lived down a country road in a mobile home that sat on a hillside behind the bait shop where some of them also worked. The heavyset sister-in-law seemed to have been the original instigator, so I turned to her for answers.
“Why did you want to be seen on television screaming at your family?” I asked.
Her first level of explanation was full of platitudes about therapy and needing the family to heal. But right underneath that layer, something else lurked: she felt she was “as funny as Roseanne” and that once she had climbed onto the platform of any sort of national television show, talent scouts and producers nationwide would spot her natural ability and give her a show of her own. That she had done nothing at all to prepare for this new career besides call the people closest to her horrible names didn’t occur to her or even matter. It was a small price to pay for a chance at a bigger stage, now that fame was apparently having a one-cent sale. Although the woman I talked to hadn’t done anything that could be considered criminal—besides emotionally extorting her loved ones—I believe that she and the other people from this glittering cultural moment laid much of the all-important “asshole who demands the public eye