So many questions come to mind. If Amy loves her husband and wants to win him back, why has she taken her plea to the sleazy Jerry Springer Show? Does she hope the moral force of the audience will somehow impress her wayward husband to fly back into her arms or does she believe that the titillation of appearing on TV with her will be too strong an aphrodisiac to resist? Or perhaps Amy’s motivation is more subtle. Perhaps she does not want her husband back at all, but wants to affect his humiliation in some way and do so before millions of people on video, recorded forever. 

Until we’ve seen the episode we can only speculate. But let’s face it, we’re interested. There is an inherent fascination with a story like this. Lost love, a mistress and the chorus cries of the studio audience only add to our satisfaction. And we know, even if we are alone in our home, that we are not alone in our attraction to this lurid tale.

The “Springer Cam,” a film crew that follows guests in outside-the-studio escapades, is our mechanism to invade the lives of individuals willing to sacrifice their privacy for fame, however fleeting. Film theory speaks of ‘the gaze” — what is filmed represents the view of the individual in control of the camera. In his seminal work on representations of women, Ways of Seeing (Penguin, 1972), art critic John Berger notes that ‘the way we see things is affected by what we know or what we believe,” and consequently we can extrapolate a person’s ideology by taking stock of what they choose to ’see” or film. We learn about Jerry Springer, as a result, by examining his “gaze” and where it chooses to alight.

This is, of course, complicated by the fact that once a show like Springer has been on the air for a certain amount of time, the guests on the show know what is expected of them. Their behavior is no more spontaneous than the pans and zooms of the Springer Cam.

In the show in question, the Springer Cam was in the home of the parents of Amy’s husband, Jimmy, because she’s living there. Jimmy, who is about 19, arrives to pick up his clothes to discover Amy dressed in a sexy bathrobe. She didn’t have enough money to provide her husband with a proper meal, we are told, so she put out some Slim Jims, Hostess Cupcakes and a few tortilla chips with a little melted cheese. These subtle details are recorded; we are privy to the most intimate habits of Springer’s guests. The camera then catches a cockroach scurrying across the small, round coffee table. Amy makes several attempts to flick it off the table, at which point Jimmy comes to the door. The dog takes advantage of Amy’s momentary absence to eat some of the chips and cheese.

When Amy and Jimmy enter the room, Amy tells her husband to look at the food she has provided for him. He calls it garbage. She shows him that it is good by eating the same chips the dog had been munching; this gets the audience laughing. The camera laps up the humiliation.

Since the food hasn’t enticed Jimmy, Amy takes a peacock feather(!) and wipes it across her face, inviting him to have ’something else.” He’s not interested; he says he loves the woman he is living with now. More humiliation for the camera.

Jimmy he goes upstairs to get the clothes he left seven months ago. Amy follows. The camera picks up details like a big hole in the wall on the way. In the bedroom, Amy sits on the bed and again invites her husband to have sex. But he’s just gathering his clothing. This makes her so mad she starts a fight over the clothes and, when she has them, she hurries downstairs to the furnace and starts stuffing all of them in! Jimmy gets mad, too, and takes off his pants (probably for the camera) and throws them in the furnace himself. Then he puts his boots back on and heads out into the snow — in his underwear — toward his car. Amy tells him that he’s never going to see his son again. And the Springer Cam departs, its story told.

Surprisingly, during the “confrontation” segment in the studio there were only a couple of attempted fist fights between Amy and Jimmy’s new girlfriend. Amy admits she tried to sleep with Jimmy’s brother. The crowd keeps calling Jimmy “Slim Shady” because he looks like Eminem — and there is a connection here that cannot be denied. 

Eminem’s roots, which he so actively promotes in his music, are working-class, as are all of the guests, most of the studio audience and probably most of the TV-viewing audience. In fact, a line from the song “The Real Slim Shady” could well be the mantra of the crowd in The Jerry Springer Show: “And there’s a million of us just like me, who cuss like me, who don’t give a fuck like me, who dress like me, who walk, talk and act like me and who just might be the Next Big Thing, but not like me.”

At some point during the shouting match it was revealed that Amy and Jimmy had been married at the sanitation department by a garbage worker who must also have been a reverend. These are ‘real people” and these are their ‘real lives.” It’s easy to forget that with all the shouting. And they volunteered to do this. They really do want to be ‘the Next Big Thing,” which in this day and age requires having your image and your story broadcast on television. 

But, transmitted through the cathode ray tube, their over-the-top behavior only perpetuates a type of classism by presenting the worst “white trash” stereotype. It also perpetuates a similar type of racism when the guests are minorities, as they frequently are. As silly and uncharacteristic of ‘real life” as it is, the constant televising of such behavior may encourage and reinforce society’s prejudices. Even though ratings for the Jerry Springer Show have dropped in recent months (he’s now in third place behind Oprah and Live with Regis and Kelly), the number of viewers is still enormous, and the stereotypes become embedded in our cultural consciousness.

When guests act particularly outrageously, their problems become fodder for dinner conversations all over America. The guests are famous, but only for their problems, their ugliness, their insanity — like circus freaks. Springer, in fact, is referred to as a circus ringmaster.

As ringmaster, Springer always makes sure that there is someone who is abused, and who learns of a betrayal and is hurt by the information. This is a key moment in every show. It’s no doubt the very formula Springer and executive producer Richard Dominick brainstormed nine years ago: Bring people in on the cusp of disaster and push them over the brink. Springer knows how hard to push, though the situations are often so volatile that they require little more than a nudge. The contestants are also clearly aware of their role, and play to the camera without self-consciousness.

All of Springer is based on a feeling of superiority to the guests, a “we are better than these freaks’ mentality. But at some point, usually at that moment when they are totally, fully screwed over, we can’t help but put ourselves in their shoes. We empathize, however briefly, with the jilted lover, the man-handled prostitute, the woman whose sister slept with her boyfriend as a sick form of revenge, the underdog. This moment is fleeting, for rarely does the underdog respond to betrayal gracefully, but it is nevertheless the only moment that elicits anything other than disgust, humor, outrage or anger.

If nothing else, Springer reminds us that human nature has not changed since the Christians were fed to the lions. We still like to watch others tormented and torn apart. Survivor, after all, is just a drawn-out battle to see who can be the last one standing — a similar story told with prettier people and set against a more luscious backdrop. Perhaps it is only a matter of time before the cruel cogs of dynamic capitalist energies bring back the bloodier entertainments.

Jeremy Russell is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in numerous publications, including San Francisco Bay Guardian, New York Press, Urban View, Spark-Online, Bad Subjects and Cyber Age Adventures. Bill Gibbons is a political activist who has worked for such groups as Project: Censored; Pacifica Radio; and a committee concerned with human rights in Peru.

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Thinking about getting tickets to Springer? USA Today columnist Whitney Matheson describes her experience as a fist-pumping audience member. "We are forbidden to curse, but the words ’skank’ and ‘whore’ are encouraged," she writes.
Eric Deggans of the St. Petersburg Times has put together a history of in-your-face television shows.