What is realism, really?

Realism initially appears to be a straightforward concept, and yet people use this single word to describe a dizzying array of media. When I ask my students to list films and television programs that they consider to be realistic, I elicit an enormous range of suggestions, including animation (such as King of the Hill), sitcoms (The Office), reality television (from Jackass to The Apprentice), Oscar-winning blockbusters (Saving Private Ryan), low budget independent fiction films (Paranormal Activity), “based on a true story” TV movies, 24-hour news channels (CNN), and documentaries (from Animal Planet to Capturing the Friedmans). How can all these different programs be “realistic” in the same way? What can “realism” possibly mean if applies to all these different media? Like many commonsense words we will cover in this book, “realism”

needs to be broken down into more precise terms if the concept is going to give you insight into film and television programs. Understanding realism better is not simply a matter of learning new terminology. This chapter will pay attention to the different nuances of what we mean by “realism.” Behind those shades of meaning, various assumptions are lurking concerning the relationship between media and the real world. This chapter articulates those multiple assumptions so that you can examine them more closely. Here at the beginning of the chapter, I will ask you to set aside the

loosest way to think about realism. To judge whether a media text is realistic, it would seem obvious to compare the film/television program with reality. Simple enough, yes? And yet I would argue that film and television always end up on the losing side of that comparison. If you compare any film or television program to “reality” (however you define that elusive concept), the media are always found lacking. Film and television always condense. An event that unfolds over hours, days, or even years gets compressed into a 90-minute documentary, and a film “based on a true story” may merge several real-life people into a single

character. Mediamakers select which things to include, which necessarily means they also leave things out. Even filmmakers who pay strict attention to historical details cannot possibly hope to capture the full range of everyone’s experience of even one significant event. Reality occurs 24 hours a day with an enormous “cast” of characters, each with his/her own perceptions. There is no way that film and television can compare favorably to the breadth, depth, and complexity of the real world. And so I believe that a simple comparison between film/television

and reality is not very useful because it always arrives at the same conclusion: media simplify (or “distort”) the truth about the real world. I wish to move our discussion past the notion of whether a film or television program is telling the “truth.” Instead I will discuss realism as a set of techniques that mediamakers can choose to adopt. What these techniques do is encourage us to believe that the media are being truthful. This is not exactly the same as “telling the truth” (if such a thing is possible), but it is a powerful effect that both fiction and nonfiction mediamakers can aspire to achieve. We can recognize when television feels “true to its subject,” even if the television program is fictional, and that recognition changes the way we think and feel about the media text. Of course, no film or television program has total power to convince everyone that it is realistic. Individual viewers may raise doubts, and no media can fully override or anticipate this. But certain techniques tend to encourage our belief in the medium’s realism, and these techniques are part of the toolkit available to every mediamaker. Realism is not “natural”; it is something people do. In this chapter I will argue that it is useful to think of realism as being

composed of many different things, not just a single concept. Although we use the same word to describe a wide range of media, realism comes in many forms, constructed by a mediamaker’s techniques, interpreted by audiences based on their assumptions. There are many realisms. The many forms of realism are variations and recombinations of two

broad trends that John Caughie calls the “dramatic look” and the “documentary look” of realism. The “dramatic look” of realism is what you know as the “invisible” Hollywood style. The goal is to get you involved in the characters’ lives without becoming too aware of the filmmaking process, whether in a standard sitcom or in a made-for-TV movie. The camera and editing work together seamlessly to give the audience a clear view of any important story moment. The dramatic look offers us the pleasure of being an invisible observer eavesdropping on another world. Our expectations about the “documentary look” of realism, on the other hand, have developed from watching documentaries where a limited number of cameras capture events that often cannot be

repeated (if you are capturing a real-life riot on video, it’s hard to yell “Cut!” and ask the rioters to do it again). Unpredictable occurrences make it difficult for documentary mediamakers to convey events with the clarity of the dramatic look. The documentary look is not as smooth as the dramatic look, but it captures more of a visceral pleasure of “being there.” These two “looks” (one developed in fiction filmmaking, the other developed in nonfiction) are now familiar enough that they can be used in either fiction or documentary mediamaking. They are two broad “flavors” of realism, but (as we will see) they are composed of multiple components that can be mixed into a variety of concoctions that we still recognize as “realisms.”