Conclusion

In Chapter Four, I examined scholarship on reality television that analyzes how viewers’ sense of a representation’s authenticity is often linked to its emotional or affective intensity. In the context of the widespread expectation that reality television (and much documentary film) is heavily staged and manipulated, moments that viewers perceive as spontaneous and undramatized may carry a distinctive and pleasurable charge. Jane Roscoe situates authenticity at the level of the onscreen performance, suggesting that moments of intense emotional display signal “flickers of authenticity,” or ruptures in the social actors’ constructed personae. ¹ I argued that Roscoe’s analysis ran the risk of essentializing these forms of emotional exhibition. Misha Kavka more insightfully analyzes how spectators experience authenticity based upon the strength of their own affective responses. In other words, as she puts it, “simulated” conditions for emotional display may “stimulate” real feeling: “[I]t must be real if we care so much.” ²