Analysis

How can we understand the intensity of the viewing experience in these shows? In order to do this, we will delve further into the sensory experience that these shows offer, and what might be at stake here for devoted viewers. In his essay, “The Trouble with Wilderness; Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature,” William Cronon presents a reformulated notion of our relationship with the wilderness, and what exactly this symbolic space comes to represent. Cronon makes use of the “frontier myth” in order to bring out “the powerful sense among certain groups of Americans that wilderness was the last bastion of rugged individualism.”[1] The wilderness comes to embody a space that is anti-human, an environment that brings us back to something more pure and primitive. In this space, man can escape the clutches of refined civilization to find himself closer to his true nature. As Cronon explains, “The mythic frontier individualist was almost always masculine in gender: here, in the wilderness, a man could be a real man, the rugged individual he was meant to be before civilization sapped his energy and threatened his masculinity.”[2] These are the figures that Bear Grylls and Les Stroud come to inhabit, the “rugged individual,” in touch with nature in a way that is both threatening and comforting at the same time.

 This brings us to the paradoxical nature of these programs. In his essay, Cronon makes use of a historical concept known as the “sublime.” He explains, “In the theories of Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, William Gilpin, and others, sublime landscapes were those rare places on earth where one had more chance than elsewhere to glimpse the face of God.”[3] In Kant’s own words, “…the irresistibility of [nature's] power certainly makes us…recognize our physical powerlessness, but at the same time it reveals a capacity for judging ourselves as independent of nature and a superiority over nature…whereby the humanity in our person remains undemeaned even though the human being must submit to that dominion.”[4] The sublime then is characterized by man’s paradoxical relationship with nature (a focus of Cronon’s essay). The wilderness is sublime in that we are constantly in awe of it and terrified by its might, but simultaneously feel a certain dominion and power over it. This is the driving force of Survivorman and Man vs. Wild, as well as the source of intensity in the viewing experience – viewers are able to feel this sublimity in the vicarious experiencing of the wilderness, and yet they are not threatened by the physical reality of this space.

What these shows offer is a window into the sublime wilderness and an opportunity for viewers to experience this great adventure in rugged individualism. Many of those who comment on the shows’ discussion forums are wilderness enthusiasts themselves, people who make a hobby out of backpacking, hiking, and other kinds of outdoors activities that bring them into the wilderness. They engage with the show from personal experience, and they respect Bear Grylls and Les Stroud as part of their community. On the other hand, there are those who have little to no experience of what these shows depict. They come in with a fresh perspective, searching for something apart from their everyday lives. However, what connects these two groups is a fascination with the remote world that these shows depict and the experience of being alone in an environment that is very much inhuman. There is certainly an element of fantasy here, in which Bear Grylls and Les Stroud serve as a sort of mythic hero who is brave enough to venture out into the great unknown. As we see, it is the work of reality television to “provide settings and contexts consonant with consumers’ daydreams and imaginations.”[5]  This is a large part of the success of shows like Man vs. Wild andSurvivorman, the ability to capture the imagination while presenting reality.

Bound up in these notions of the sublime is the underlying search for authenticity. Reality television programming uses the constructs of the wilderness and the great outdoors to try to relate to their viewers on a deeper level. Although the shows are educational and entertaining, it is the nature of the experience they offer that make them so popular. In this context, the authenticity that seems to be offered is an escape from the highly mediated and tech-based framework of reality that we are used to in our everyday lives. As Anita Biressi writes in the book titled, Reality TV: Realism and Revelation, “The rise of digital culture has fostered a broader skepticism towards factual media representations and their claims. Both the mechanism of representation and the world being represented are revealed as highly managed and intangible: reality is a chimera on the techno-cultural horizon.”[6] This is getting at the paradox of reality television itself: using a technological medium that is an integral part of our “techno-culture” to remove us from this, and present us with a true “reality” that exists outside our mediated lives. The irony is that this reality, this authentic experience that is being offered in shows like Man vs. Wild and Survivorman, is a produced commodity that is owed to cameras, sound and light equipment, and editing processes which take the depiction of this great, raw wilderness and refine it into a product that is fit for consumption. Even wilderness survival shows then take part in what Minna Aslama and Mervi Pantti call the “authenticity industry.”[7]

Whether it is building a shelter high up in the trees to stay clear of roaming bears or using the burned off fat from a slaughtered pig to light a torch to explore a cave system, Bear Grylls and Les Stroud are constantly displaying their expertise in wilderness survival. Although some viewers may see a strong differentiation between the educational and entertaining parts of the shows, there is an apparent conflation of the two which gives the shows they’re unique quality. For realistically, it is highly unlikely that the average viewer of the show would ever need the skills they learn or have the opportunity to use them. We realize then, that the shows, for the most part, are an exercise of the imagination and of fantasy, and that the producers of the shows are giving viewers exactly what they desire – an experience resembling something like a daydream. What is the “authenticity” then that is sought in this so-called “reality”? As we delve deeper and deeper into the true experience of these shows, it becomes apparent that the authentic is an invention, an illusory concept that we assign to something that is other, that is different from the lives that we lead. Just, as Cronon suggests, we invented our notions of the wilderness as everything that is anti-human, so too do we look to reality television shows like Man vs. Wild and Survivorman to show us that the world isn’t all media and technology and human artifice. The irony, though, is that “reality” and “authenticity” were born of our mediated techno-culture, and we are both the creators and consumers.            

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