In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Matteo Garrone’s Reality:The Big Brother Spectacle and Its Rupture
  • Anna Paparcone

In his 1967 seminal work The Society of the Spectacle, Guy Debord wrote: “In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation” (thesis 1). The opening of Debord’s book aptly describes what occurs in Matteo Garrone’s 2012 film Reality whose protagonist, an exuberant fishmonger by the name of Luciano Ciotola, becomes obsessed with his participation in the reality TV show Big Brother to the point that his entire life turns into a spectacle. The spectator witnesses and experiences an overlapping and, ultimately, a (con)fusion between Luciano’s everyday reality and his life as a (potential) member of the reality TV show.

Luciano, who lives with his family in the outskirts of Naples, in “an incredible Neapolitan building, baroque, crumbling and magnificent” (C.G. 57), plods on with their fish shop and the illegal selling of kitchen electrical appliances. At first encouraged by his capricious daughter and lively family,1 and then by his own wish to change his life and become financially stable, Luciano auditions to be a member of the reality show Big Brother. While awaiting a response from the [End Page 270] show jury, he becomes increasingly entranced by the glow of television and absorbed by the idea of being secretly watched and evaluated by the show’s producers. Consequently, Luciano’s usual behavior starts changing, he begins to live as if he were already in the show, losing sight of his family responsibilities and jeopardizing his marriage. The intertwining and confusion between his everyday life and the reality show increase and culminate in Luciano’s physical entrance into the Big Brother household. Sitting in the courtyard on a white chair spotlighted by a white light, Luciano appears as if he has finally reached his paradise. The film ends with Luciano’s uncanny laughter. Such a finale leaves the spectator perplexed about Luciano’s experience in the Big Brother house. Does Luciano laugh because he is happy to have fulfilled his dream? Or, maybe, because, after all the difficulties, he is finally free to be fully himself? Or does he laugh because he has realized how foolish he has been? His laughter may well be echoing the words of Wanda, one of the main characters in Fellini’s Lo sceicco bianco (The White Sheik), who, near the end of the picture, says, “Our real life is in our dreams, but sometimes dreams are a fatal abyss.” There may also be legitimate doubts that Luciano has indeed entered the house. Perhaps he is just dreaming of doing it.

The impossibility of making sense of Luciano’s uncanny laughter suggests, I argue, the potential for experiencing, here and elsewhere in the film, the rupture of the spectacle, a breach in the indistinguishable sameness between reality and fiction. In the first section of this study (“The Diegesis: Luciano’s Reality vis-à-vis the Construction and Persistence of the Spectacle”), I will show how the film offers a painstaking representation of the pervasiveness and alluring quality of the spectacle that takes over Luciano’s life and identity. Such an identity is strictly connected to his family bonds, his work and, overall, to Neapolitan cultural traditions. However, in the second section of this essay (“Formal Choices: the Rupture of the Spectacle”), starting from Luciano’s final uncanny laughter, I will pinpoint crucial moments in which the film deploys specific estranging techniques (camera movements, crane shots, and music score) that breach the apparently seamless spectacle and reveal the possibility of distinguishing the spectacle from reality. On the one hand, as we identify with Luciano’s story, the spectacle pervades every moment of his (and our) life, and reality and fiction overlap becoming hardly distinguishable; on the other hand, however, the rupture of the spectacle occurs partially within the film’s diegesis (through the presence of Luciano’s family members) and is brought to full completion by resorting to the aforementioned formal [End Page 271] techniques. In other words, the film conveys the idea that, although subtle and often...

pdf

Share