Cluster

Reality TV in the Social Media Economy / Reluctant Metafiction: The fragile ideal of the ‘real’ from Adam Bede to Alone

By Ronny Litvack-Katzman
Caption: Ellen Emmet Rand. Woman before the Mirror, 1925. Oil on board, 70.8 × 54.6 cm. Chicago, IL, Art Institute Chicago.

The mirror is doubtless defective, the outlines will sometimes be disturbed, the reflection faint or confused…

—George Eliot, Adam Bede

After fifty-some days alone in the Canadian wilderness, Mikey Helton has had enough. Face pressed into the camera, the sordid facts of his existence take inescapable form. He is sick; he is tired; he needs a bath. Picking up his satellite phone, he dials it in. Suddenly, the point of view changes. Mikey is a speck on a beach, growing larger and larger. A tech-clad production team rushes to shore and we watch them disembark from their boat and approach Mikey’s campsite. This isn’t an angle we’ve seen before. Mikey looks thinner, his clothing more unkempt, his conditions more deplorable.1

Nearly every episode of Alone (2015–) ends this way—the climactic scene a compilation of these final shots, offered in near undifferentiated sequence. In Alone, ten contestants elect to live in a remote expanse of wilderness where they must build a shelter, sustain themselves on the land, and fend off predators, all for the chance of winning half a million dollars. The show’s locations—Patagonia, the Northwest Territories—are inhospitable. Filming often occurs into and over the winter. Many contestants go days with little, if any, food, dropping obscene amounts of weight in the process. On the first day, they are left with two hand-held video cameras and instructed to film their experience. 

Since Alone relies almost entirely on footage contestants film of themselves, the elimination sequences—what the show colloquially refers to as “tapping out”—stand apart. More so than most reality TV today, Alone feels real due to the prolonged absence of a camera crew. In this sense, the hand-held camcorder becomes one of Theodore Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s “empirical objects” that help to create and maintain “the illusion that the world outside is a seamless extension of the one which has been revealed.”2 Alone prides itself on, and is praised by fans for, the effectiveness of this illusion. Viewers, and particularly those on the active subreddit for the Alone, applaud the show for offering an “authentic experience as filmed by contestants.”3 And so, the tapping out scenes are all the more jarring for their visual and affective cues that signal something has shifted. Breaking with the survivalist realism that precedes it, they remind viewers of the artifice that undergirds the show’s rough exterior. Therein, the entire authorial apparatus, both on and offscreen, is revealed. Contestants are not really alone—they never were.

A literary critic might call such moments metafiction, when a narrative gestures toward its fictionality through allusion to its own constructedness. But Alone is only reluctantly metafictional, largely obscuring the means and conditions of its production until the tapping out scenes make glaringly obvious that the survivalist illusion is—always was—just that. These late metafictional turns force viewers, often uncomfortably, to confront the show’s artifice and, along with it, the beliefs that uphold its claim to reality.

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Consider this a transferable technique.

About a third of the way through George Eliot’s novel Adam Bede (1859), the narrator pauses the story and begins, instead, an imagined dialogue with one of her readers. Troubled by a benevolent clergyman’s apparent indifference to the townspeople’s plight, this illusory reader addresses the narrator directly, protesting that “you might have put into his mouth the most beautiful things” and yet here he is, nearly faithless, “little better than a pagan.”4 The reader implores the narrator to reintroduce some semblance of moral certainty to the portrait, even if that means “touch[ing] it up with a tasteful pencil, and mak[ing] believe it is not quite such a mixed entangled affair.”5 “Certainly I could,” replies the narrator, “if I held it the highest vocation of the novelist to represent things as they never have been and never will be.”6

On its face, Adam Bede is a simple sketch of country life. The eponymous Adam, a morally stalwart carpenter, is a pillar of security in the farming village of Hayslope, a place almost too beautiful to be corrupted. But surfaces are just that. Peer longer and unkindly shades begin to reveal themselves in the feathered grass. Religion, presented in the forms of an indifferent Anglican clergy and a predatory Methodism, offers little respite for the laboring classes. Love, that great equalizer, endangers rather than protects. Family links are only as strong as the waning will to maintain them and for many honesty appears a bygone virtue. Underneath its pastoral façade, that “pretty confusion of trees and thatch and dark-red tiles,” lie all those misgivings “not detected by sight.”7 To take Adam Bede for the story it is, rather than the one we might want it to be, is to find the inhabitants of Hayslope much wanting.

And so, by the time we arrive at the narrator’s dialogue, the reader’s entreaties are nearly laughable. Eliot’s reader, blithe and forgiving, is ready to overlook Hayslope’s deficiencies if it means they can retain an untarnished mental picture of English country life and the good, “edifying” characters who populate the landscape. Might not the narrator be so obliging as to “improve the facts a little”?8 It is not mixed, complicated reality they are looking for, but to forget it—to soften its edges and be free to admire “without the slightest disturbance of [their] prepossessions.”9 But Eliot’s narrator is unwilling to concede on this point. Such contrasts are heightened by their delivery through metafiction, predicated on not only the narrator’s proclivity for self-reflection but in the disparity between their nuanced portrait of human fallibility and the reader’s want of moral simplicity. Any such attempt, writes Felecia Bonaparte, to fuse “the real and ideal… cannot but become reflexive” for both reader and author.10 The sincere novelist must respect both the limits of their art and the nature of their subject. Although she could 

refashion life and character entirely after [her] own liking […] it happens, on the contrary, that [her] strongest effort is to avoid any such arbitrary picture, and to give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in [her] mind.11

If realism is a mirror that warps, then it is also one that turns us inward. As Eliot claims, it is the attentive reader’s job to notice and adjudicate any apparent deficiencies, be they of character or verisimilitude, and not the author’s to ignore them. Paradoxically, it is only by admitting their complete authority over the narrative—both the facts they might change and those they refuse to—that the tenuousness of the construct is revealed. 

It is thus the narrator’s pronouncement that “falsehood is so easy, truth so difficult,” might be taken as an axiom of the realist project, truth being not only difficult for an honest author to depict but equally challenging for an idealistic reader to accept.12 In gesturing to its own constructedness, Adam Bede reveals both the artifice and the art of realism, an imperfect vision, imperfectly achieved. 

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I don’t want to make everything about Victorian fiction. My friends ask me not to. But this isn’t a question of pattern matching. As Caroline Levine writes, reading forward from the nineteenth-century novel to the present allows us to chart the “portability of literary techniques” as they rear themselves across time and medium.13 It is an exercise that works in both directions. Reading backward from online-viewing communities reminds us that the effect of metafiction—to destabilize the authority of the author and, through them, the object’s claim to reality—has not changed, even if its medium of conveyance has. 

Whereas Adam Bede pauses to confront the reflexive impulse of realist fiction, Alone, as I have said, does not necessarily invite reflection. Placing the camera into the hands of contestants is a deliberate attempt to conceal the authorial apparatus, and, if Reddit is any decent register, a highly effective one. 

As the show has grown in popularity, fans have become quick to opine on why contestants are pushed to the edge. This makes the extraction scenes some of the most emotionally charged and widely discussed topics on the show’s subreddit, where fans proclaim themselves “really annoyed when a contestant taps out early.”14 Cast in the green-grey grain of camcorder night mode, contestants plead with God, writhe with hunger pains, and sob for missing their families. You really do hold your breath and wonder if Callie, a contestant on season seven, might lose her toes to frostbite after seventy-plus days in the cold. Still refusing to tap out, Callie is pulled from the show on the basis of her injuries, a choice widely debated by viewers as unfair to her efforts and skill level.15

Alone benefits from a canny likeness to found footage films qua The Blair Witch Project (1999) and Paranormal Activity (2007). The found footage genre, popularized at the turn of the millennium, capitalized on the concurrent rise of reality TV for its deceptive ability to proximate the dangers they depict, rendering them with a closeness “all the more authentic and terrifying.”16 Metafiction, on the other hand, is notable for its ability to create distance between the viewer and the diegetic situation. Against the aesthetic impulse of found footage, the tapping-out scenes not only beg viewers to question the line between fiction and reality but compel them to reflect on their differences. Other comments tread much more cautiously before casting judgment. As one user writes: “I think it’s easy for the rest of us to say we’d hang in there the whole time but once you’ve seen enough people go out the same way, it’s reasonable to believe we’d unexpectedly have our perspective shifted under that strain too.”17

Shifts beget shifts. The same moment in which the reality claim comes under threat, the desire to maintain that reality becomes all the stronger. Another poster, “reflecting on the authenticity of Alone,” poses the question as one of interference. What would stop the producers, they ask, from meddling with the struggle of the contestants? Others still propose elaborate conspiracy theories rather than admit their favorite contests tap out of their own volition. These comments, nearly all defensive in tone, refuse to concede and in many cases defend the integrity of the production. I do not offer these examples to admonish viewers’ suspicions. Quite the opposite. They, similar to Eliot’s imagined reader, insist on a version of reality that they want to be true. 

Who can fault them for their desire? In recent years, contestants on Alone have gone on to achieve the status of folk heroes. Viewers look up to them, debating their skills and proclaiming favorites. A replica of season seven winner Roland Welker’s shelter, a roughly twelve-by-six-foot structure known as “Rock House,” was built in Welker’s hometown of Grampian, Pennsylvania. Two-time contestant Woniya Thibeault, one of the only women to have won the show, now offers survival courses so that dedicated viewers might replicate the Alone experience from the relative safety of the Sierra Nevada. The idealized vision of the lone survivalist, subsisting on nothing but strength, skill, and grit, is more than just a promise of human exceptionalism against the brute forces of nature. It is the dream of living off the land or that pre-industrial life is still possible in twenty-first-century America. 

Don’t get me wrong—nothing about how contestants live in the wilderness is glamorous. Still, Alone captures degrees of this longing; when one builds a handsome shelter, or lights their first fire, or manages a particularly good catch, viewers rejoice right alongside contestants. Alone longs for simplicity, for good food and warm shelter, and laments the loss of those comforts too often taken for granted. While the conditions themselves are not ideal, the possibility that those conditions still exist for Americans, largely white, largely middle-class, is nonetheless idealized. Call it what you want: survivalist masochism or agrarian escapism, there’s good reason so many want to claim Alone as unfalteringly real. 

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The comparison I am drawing between the metafictional aspects of Victorian novels and reality TV relies on a series of potentially unjust equivalencies. Narrators are not producers; characters are not contestants; readers are not viewers. How a text constructs and disrupts point of view differs substantially from how perspective is established through framing and editing. 

For these reasons, I’m not quite certain how self-aware Alone is of its metafictionality. But this uncertainty makes me question how much intent really matters to the metafictional instance. In one sense, all reality television—even highly contrived shows—walk the line of metafiction. They appeal to viewers’ want for authenticity but also a latent dependence on the security of illusion. 

Why then, dispel that illusion? Unlike the narrator in Adam Bede who self-consciously pauses to reflect on the aims of authorship, Alone does not need to show their camera crew racing to the rescue of contestants. Editors could indeed show contestants tapping out and then cut to black, but this would neither capture why some contestants leave—remember some, like frostbitten Callie, are medically evacuated—nor play into the extreme and oscillating affective registers that make for good TV. Contestants’ defeat has a dual, metafictional function that forces confrontation with the ideals upheld elsewhere in the show.

While we do not tend to think of reality TV as an especially reflexive genre, literary realism has always been an unstable category—less an attempt at faithful depiction than a confrontation between modes of representation and tenuously held social ideals. Never, as George Levine rightly suggests, did Victorian novelists feign a “solidly self-satisfied vision based in a misguided objectivity” but, rather, turned to fiction as an ongoing and self-conscious attempt to explore the changing conditions of the real.18 Might the same be said of Alone? Maybe. Maybe not. But either way, let’s be generous. If as Audrey Jaffe writes, the realist novel “desired for [a] real,” it knew was neither entirely possible to represent nor always agreeable to its readers, Alone can be characterized by its reluctancy to give up that dream.19 Just as Eliot’s imagined reader sought a more benevolent portrait of the English clergy, so do Alone’s viewers seek an anti-capitalist illusion they desperately want to be true—their valorization a thinly veiled disillusionment with the conditions of everyday life. Insome ways, Alone entices because it momentarily restores that dream to the status of possibility, that liminal space where all dreams dwell before they are abandoned. 

Alone’s reluctant metafiction complicates the oft-lobed epithet that casts reality TV as an escapist fantasy. If acknowledged for its moments of self-reflexivity, the show becomes less about contestants’ struggle to survive than the fragile ideals of its premise. Its metafictional aspects compel self-conscious reflection, even confrontation, with the instability of those ideals and how we might react when our expectations fail. Whereas Eliot’s narrator is unapologetic in denouncing the dreams of her readers, Alone’s tenuous claim to realism compels reflexivity without admonishing its viewers for buying in. Enjoyment comes not at the expense of reality nor in an attempt to escape it, but through the suspension of an ideal already under threat of imminent collapse. “Might we have this, if just for a moment?” On the bank of a lake, the speck grows larger still. 

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Endnotes

  1. Alone. Season 10, episode 11, “By Any Means.” August 17, 2023. History, 2023. 
  2. Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno, “The Culture Industry,” Media and Culture Studies: Keyworks, ed. by Meenakshi Gigi Durham and Douglas M. Kellner (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), 56. 
  3. psyclo, “Reflecting on the authenticity of Alone.” Reddit (r/Alone). August 23, 2020. https://www.reddit.com/r/Alonetv/comments/if0j7h/reflecting_on_the_authenticity_of_alone/.
  4. George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin Books, 1985), 177.
  5. Eliot, 177.
  6. Eliot, 177.
  7. Eliot, 19. 
  8. Eliot, 177.
  9. Eliot, 178.
  10. Felica Bonaparte, Poetics of Poesis (Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press, 2016), 223. With thanks to Tabitha Sparks’ excellent Victorian Metafiction (2022) for pointing me toward this equally excellent resource.
  11. Eliot, 177.
  12. Eliot, 178. 
  13. Caroline Levine, “Extraordinary Ordinariness: Realism Now and Then,” Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, no. 63 (2013), accessed December 14, 2023, https://doi.org/10.7202/1025618ar. 

  14. ump13, “Does anyone else get really annoyed when a contestant taps out early cause they get lonely?” Reddit (r/Alone). June 30, 2023. https://www.reddit.com/r/Alonetv/comments/14n619d/does_anyone_else_get_really_annoyed_when_a/

  15. Alone. Season 7, episode 11, “”Over the Edge.” August 20, 2020. History, 2020. 
  16. Jake Kring-Schreifels. “‘The Blair Witch Project’ at 20: Why It Can’t Be Replicated,” The New York Times, July 30, 2019.https://www.nytimes.com/2019/07/30/movies/blair-witch-project-1999.html.
  17. kg467, comment to ump13.
  18. George Levine, The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1981), 20-21.
  19. Audrey Jaffe, The Victorian Novel Dreams of the Real (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 2016), 5.

  • Ronny Litvack-Katzman

    Ronny Litvack-Katzman is a writer and poet currently pursuing a Ph.D. at Harvard University. His research lies at the intersection of nineteenth-century literature and the history of science, with a focus on scientific aesthetics in the Victorian novel.