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A Fine Line
Fictional Nurse Betty speaks the truth on the confusion between reality and fantasy
Wishing to illustrate the diversity of their student body for a recruiting brochure, the University of Wisconsin recently doctored a photo of football fans so that an African-American student could be seen in the crowd. Unfortunately, that student was not at the game and therefore not in the original photo. The University publications director called it an error of judgment. It may be better understood as an increasingly common problem in modern technological cultures. We are living in a world in which the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy, between the real and artificial, is being systematically driven to the margins, sometimes consciously, sometimes not. Nurse Betty, a film directed by Neil LaBute and written by John Richards and James Flamberg, offers a cautionary tale about the consequences of this breakdown of barriers between these worlds. An intriguing dark comedy, it focuses on two people who live out their fantasies in the midst of a drug deal gone awry that results in a violent climax. Betty (Renee Zellweger) is a waitress and soap opera fan who becomes totally obsessed with the soap and goes inside of it to escape the realities of her rather dismal life with an abusive and insensitive husband. Traumatized by his murder, Nurse Betty disappears into her fantasy, following it to California and onto the set of the soap opera. Along the way she spouts lines of dialogue, and elaborates her fantasy love affair with Dr. David Ravell (Greg Kinnear), the doctor-star who exploits Nurse Betty in his own mini-fantasy. He too seems to have more than a little difficulty separating his soap role and reality. Charlie (Morgan Freeman), the hit man who kills Nurse Betty’s husband, develops a fantasy life of his own in which he transcends his violent profession and becomes obsessed with Betty. In a nice little double cut, Charlie cannot believe that Nurse Betty could possibly get caught up in some silly soap opera fantasy. Charlie is also dismayed by his son, Wesley (Chris Rock), who models his criminal behavior more on media imagery than the career of his father. Video games and virtual reality have become pop culture toys in our techno-driven world offering fantasy and reality in a potent mix. Television this past summer offered a plethora of "reality programming" which had little to do with reality. Contrived situations were presented to the viewing public as exercises in reality. Real people were placed in faux universes and this was labeled "reality." To call something "real" is apparently all that is necessary to establish reality in a world where the real is often indistinguishable from the artificial. Disney has been the master purveyor of fantasy for more than a half-century now. Those "imagineers" who design the Worlds and Lands of Disney Planet take as their basic premise the proposition that guests must never be allowed to differentiate between what is real and what is not. This is the goal, and to a great extent its achievement is what makes the Worlds of Disney so successful. Sport has been reduced to marketing technique and entertainment. The Olympic games, once the golden showcase of sport, have been re-invented by NBC. The events have been deconstructed and repackaged to be presented as mini-dramas having the same connection to reality as Survivor or Nurse Betty. All events are turned into struggles and triumphs by the highly worthy, especially those who happen to be American and who have overcome major obstacles and tragedies. Vince McMahon has built an entertainment empire by creating a sport in which almost nothing is real, and which is one of the most popular forms of entertainment for pre-adolescent boys and girls. The unreality of the World Wrestling Federation’s "Raslin" does not prevent emulation by children with, at times, very real and disastrous consequences. WWF World has saturated the market place with toys, comic books, and merchandise built around its sexual fantasies and faux violence. Nor is the fantasy only for children. Fantasies are not new to American culture. Through several centuries Americans have taken sex, perhaps the most powerful of human drives, and turned it into a fantasy using it both as a commodity and a means to sell everything imaginable. As R.P. Blackmur once wrote, we are a culture that uses "the drum-majorette of 14 as a means of showing sex as a force without having to take account of it." We are masters at distorting reality by presenting it as fantasy. Advertising is another arena in which fantasy has superceded reality for more than a century. The scenarios and characters of the advertising medium, be it print or video, are highly sophisticated dream makers spinning out tales to titillate and motivate. There are few Americans who would admit that they are fooled by such advertising, but many an adman can tell you the number who are taken in and precisely how it is done. What Nurse Betty demonstrates, among many other things, is the consequences of a world in which reality and fantasy become indistinguishable. It plays out the consequences for the individual and is also suggestive about the society. In the end, the inability to make the fundamental distinction between what is real and what is not produces tragedy and a loss of contact with one’s humanity. The self, which is ostensibly served by fantasy, is ultimately extinguished by it, as all substance is drained from it. The filmmaker puts a vaguely happy face on Nurse Betty by making it very funny and by creating a Hollywood happy ending. Betty is sent off into the sunset to turn at least part of her fantasy into reality and perform the very American act of reinventing herself. I suspect the ending was contrived to allow the larger movie going public to swallow the darkness within the story. However, few will be able to walk away from Nurse Betty without at least some sense of disturbance. This makes Nurse Betty film-making as social commentary of a very high order.
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