It is, I believe, as new and as significant as the invention

of drama or the novel… a new way in which people can

learn to look at life, by seeing the real life of others

interpreted by the camera.

Margaret Mead on An American Family

In 1979 the comedian Albert Brooks directed Real Life, a parody based on PBS’s An American Family (9.9). In the opening seconds of the film we see the laudatory commentary by the famous anthropologist Margaret Mead that serves as an epigraph to this item.

Mead, who had worked with Craig Gilbert, creator and producer of An American Family, enthusiastically embraced the new reality television format, perhaps viewing it from a purely anthropological point of view. What she did not see—although by then anyone could have seen it coming—was that the entertainment value of the series would surpass any scientific pretensions. Brooks, aware of the debacle that the show meant for the Louds, took Margaret Mead’s praise and turned it into the cornerstone of his parody of the reality television genre. Real Life and An American Family recreated family disasters precisely because life, when interpreted by the camera, ceases to be such to become a bland “realistic” fiction.

The genre chosen by Brooks, the mockumentary, has a long history that goes back to Luis Buñuel (Land Without Bread), Federico Fellini (The Clowns), Woody Allen (Take the Money and Run and Zelig) and Luis Ospina (Paper Tiger), and is characterized by using the documentary style to narrate false or fictitious facts, criticize historical or current events, or simply mock the realistic pretensions of the documentary genre. Something interesting happens within its bounds: it stabilizes the threshold between reality and fiction for humorous purposes.

I can't help but wonder: if the indistinction between reality and fiction usually results in a parody, isn’t our world becoming a parody of itself?