Author: Manjari Majumdar

CW: Death and gore

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Scrolling through Twitter the other day, I noticed “TikTok Decapitation” was trending, and I tapped on the hashtag. Tweets described a TikTok video to look out for and report–a girl dancing and then being beheaded. I cast my phone aside; I’m not on TikTok anyways. 

Today, I noticed that same topic was trending as a Google search: “TikTok beheading Vimeo,” which suggests that people are seeking out the video, probably blocked on YouTube but uploaded to Vimeo. My question is why? 

People’s attraction to gory media is not new. TV networks like ID dedicated to true crime shows and documentaries, rogue YouTube uploads before things were more tightly monitored (i.e. Saddam Hussein’s execution as stated by Hilderbrand in the “Clip Canon”), and even unmoderated chatrooms like Omegle back in the day were frequent sites of death pranks.

Lately, it seems like every time a person is killed by the police, people eagerly wait on the body cam footage to be released under the pretense that they wish to decide whether or not the extrajudicial killing of a citizen by the authorities was warranted. I think people are so desensitized, that in reality they are waiting at the chance to watch a citizen get killed by people in power. 

I don’t know when we started commodifying the death of real people and using that to entertain ourselves, but at some point we have to remember that it is still a murder we are witnessing, despite sitting comfortably behind a screen.  

Back in 2018, mega-YouTuber Logan Paul posted a video of him trekking through Aokigahara forest in Japan–a site of frequent suicides. Paul took a video of a hanging body, joked about it, and uploaded the video to his channel. The video was subject to immense backlash, and Paul took it down before issuing an apology. And yet, three years later, he has 23 million YouTube subscribers, a net worth of $19 million, and we all had to hear about his fight against Floyd Mayweather.

It is egregious that Paul still has a platform this big after multiple transgressions, especially the one where he used someone’s unimaginable pain and suffering as a way to build his brand. Of course, Logan Paul, similarly to Armie Hammer, has been absolved because of his positionality and privilege as a rich white male. And because people seek out this genre–true crime, true murder, true “controversy”–whatever it is. 

There is a great difference between a fictional Sherlock Holmes mystery, and watching someone die on camera in real time, and we better catch ourselves forgetting about that difference soon. 

Before the start of the Unprecedented Times, I was never much of a reality TV gal. My friends in high school would talk about what happened on the Bachelor, and I’d sit there and smirk. I placed in the top 5 of a game of Survivor in my hometown that one of my fanatic friends put on to use as leverage for a Survivor casting call–I still have yet to watch an episode. 

In early 2020, I started watching Love is Blind, and that show really carried me through the initial stages of “oh shit something bad is about to happen but nobody knows what.” Fast forward to April 2020–a month I don’t remember at all, other than the shows I started watching: The Bachelor (Listen to Your Heart spinoff), Too Hot to Handle, The Circle, Love Island (Australia!). 

The thing these shows have in common is their ability to lower my brain function to zero so I can be ready to interact with the world’s 100. But I’d argue that the premise of all these shows are vastly different, and that’s why I jumped from one to the next. 

In thinking about Mittell’s “genre studies should negotiate between specificity and generality” principle, it’s clear that reality TV is a genre that has 1) recently emerged 2) rapidly changed in the short time it has existed. Back in the day, it seemed like Survivor/Big Brother, Jersey Shore, Cake Boss (and other TLC shows) were the objects of interest, and today? There are so many options that fit under the “reality TV” umbrella. Now, we are seeing a reality TV universe: think about the overlap between previous and present Bachelor (franchise) contestants; this new season of The Circle features the winner from Too Hot to Handle–completely different shows, with the same loud and obnoxious contestants. 

It goes to show a paradox in Mittell’s diagnosis that genre surpasses the bounds of any singular text. On one hand, Love Island is undoubtedly a reality TV show, but can it be categorized with Survivor? I guess both incorporate islands…but then what about Love is Blind? Or even Bachelor with singers and artists as opposed to “normies?” Should we start to further specify reality TV categories, or is the unbounded potential for different show premises precisely what makes it “reality?” Will people really do anything for a little clout? These are questions I’ll ponder as I start a show called Dating Around.

After having watched and analyzed the flow of NBC programming, I can’t help but make comparisons to what I see on Netflix and Hulu (my primary modes of entertainment). 

I watched The Voice on NBC. It was a spicy battle round with contestants and judges I do not care about–why is Blake Shelton the last judge remaining from my childhood days of watching this show? Still, the nostalgia hit, hard. I was taken back to the days when I’d come home from school and watch this with my parents. As such, it was weird when the commercial cuts happened. I went from being completely engrossed in the show, to shell shocked when the pandemic ads came on. I didn’t turn on the TV to be constantly reminded of reality. The thing about these commercials is that viewers can tell when they are coming. After 7-10 minutes, and right before something important happens on the show. I felt like I was oscillating between dread and anticipation: I felt dread when the commercial was about to come on, and was quite ready to get back to watching the show after the commercial. While the ads were taking place, I tried to go on my phone, but something about being on the phone while watching TV feels wrong.

This is a stark contrast from Hulu, in which the commercials show up randomly because of their fixed occurrences during the show. The annoying thing about that is sometimes a commercial would take place right in the middle of when things got important. Nonetheless, Hulu ads are kind of fun to watch: “Oh neat, I’m given a choice between which Chevy scenario I’d like to see” 

    When the Hulu ad doesn’t capture my attention, (or rather, when the algorithm is wrong about me) I admit that it’s a lot easier to go on my phone. I’ve caught myself tapping through twitter DURING whatever it is I was watching before. It’s concerning to reflect on how short my attention span has become now that I have the show and all the social media platforms in one place at my fingertips. I often wonder if I’m even truly getting the most of laptop TV/film, because of this constant detachment I feel that doesn’t exist when I’m watching TV. Oh well, back to my show that’s running in another tab while I write this blog.