Tuesday, October 18, 2011

CHAPTER 6 AND 7

In chapter 7, Ronson meets up with Adam Curtis, a friend who is also a documentary maker, at a bar in North London after his visit in Florida with Al Dunlap.  He told Curtis about his visit and that Al Dunlap had a "crazy sculpture collection of predatory animals" and also that he had "oil paintings of himself". Ronson gets upset at Curtis because he was critiquing him and also criticizes journalists in saying that all that they do is travel far away to get bits of "craziness" from all over the place and just "stitch it all together" and make a story out of it. Basically, Curtis is saying that journalists have the desire and need to seek out the negativity and "craziness" in someone to have an interesting story. After his visit with Curtis, Ronson meets up with Charlotte Scott, a woman who had a job with TV corporations talking to people on hotlines who had family crisis and wanted to be on TV.  Some of the shows that she had dealt with in putting people on the reality show were Jerry Springer, The X Factor, American Idol, and Extreme Makeover. These shows wanted the flaws of people to make it interesting for the audience to watch. In her job, she looked for people who were "just made enough" and not "too mad to come on the show".  In working on the hotline and bring "mad" people on the show, it started to dehumanize her and other workers to "find ways to eradicate empathy and remorse from their day jobs" so that they can do better on their jobs. Charlotte then goes on and talks about a woman, Deleese, who was put on the Extreme Makeover show and she was denied the surgery to make her look pretty.  Before this incident, the family had told the truth about their feelings toward Deleese and that she was ugly.  In Charlotte not going through the surgery and making her look pretty had caused a lot of traumatic events in the family from telling the truth about their feelings towards her.  This caused her sister to die from overdosing on pills and alcohol.  

My reaction to both the chapters were that it really showed the crazy in people and reality shows.  I thought that it was really interesting to hear about the events of Al Dunlap and his house filled with predators and that reality shows did only seek out to people with major problems, but it is very sad to hear about these things and that they are actually happening.  Chapter 6 really did go in depth with one person's life and how his psychopath behaviors had reflected on how he lived and Chapter 7 had shown the psycho behaviors being put on reality shows. Everything in both the chapters were very well described and Chapter 7 on the reality shows really gave my a great insight on why the reality shows are so interesting to watch because they consists of people who are already crazy, so it already makes it interesting.

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