The Dynamics Between Performers, Performances and Audience
During an episode of Smosh Reads Reddit Stories, the cast was talking about the possibility of dating a fan of theirs, to which Shayne said,
I think where I would would've had an issue with it is that I'm like, "Oh, you know an idea of me." Reading Reddit Stories
And that line has been living in my head ever since, for many reasons, but mainly because, here's the thing, the Smosh people aren't characters, they aren't putting up a fiction, they're themselves. The motto of the channels is comedy rooted in friendship, you watch these people real relationships and chemistry with one another and you listen to them share their actual opinions when they do these conversational shows. But it still is a performance. They're comedians performing to a camera, to an audience, putting on their A game. In the back of their head, during all their interactions, there's a need to entertain, to observe a situation to seize the biggest laugh, and traits, characteristics and emotions get amplified due to it, essentially turning them into characters.
None of that makes it fake, it's all rooted in who they actually are and what their chemistry is, but it does make it a performance and there's always going to be distance and dissonance from how the performers normally are like outside the stage. All we see as the audience is just a selective, small, curated part of their whole persons, an image, an idea.
And I think that's something important to always keep in mind as an audience member, of anything.
Smosh is not an example of reality-bending media, or fictional reality as I like to call it, but it does have the authentic performance element that permeates the "genre" and makes discussing it a bit frustrating.
For a proper example, nirvana the band the show follows best friends Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, played by real life BFFs Matt Johnson and Jay McCarrol, as they try to become famous by trying to book a show at a place called Rivoli.
As you can see, there's a clear connection between the characters and the performers, they share the same names and relationship. And that connection is absolutely intentional, it's not only an expression of the many ways the show blends reality and fiction, it serves as a creative tool, a resource, taking what they already have, a good dynamic together, and using it to create a dramatic narrative and make a comedy show.
While, yeah, this makes for very blurred lines between where the characters end and performers begin, these lines still absolutely do exist. Matt and Jay are fictional characters with fictional goals, they have a band together and their lives essentially revolve around each other, whereas the real Matt and Jay are a director and a composer, respectively, that aren't trying to book a show and, hopefully, don't share the same degree of alienation and obsession with one another as their characters do.
Matt and Jay fictionalize themselves to create their show. Naturally, there is a whole bunch of emotional truth about who they are and what their relationship is in that fiction, — In interviews they often remark how similar they are to the characters — but, the thing is, they always refer to the characters as characters, they are aware of the lines that separates them and the audience should be too.
Because, otherwise, you end up with this horrible idea that the emotional truths that inform the characters makes them so interchangeable from the real people that you can't interpret or engage with the show as a well-crafted narrative with themes and subtext or go beyond surface level because "these are real people", which does a total disservice to the work the real Matt and Jay put into creating the show, and just straight up completely cheapens it.
Oftentimes that, like, finding resonance between reality and what you're shooting is worth its weight in gold. In gold, it's crazy. Because then as you just said anything you shoot is usable. [...] like those things are so approximate that anything you would say is real and it takes a lot of the pressure off your ability to improvise or act, because... what's happening on screen is so close to what's happening off screen. And that's why it's like with Jay and I acting together or with Owen and I acting together, like, we're trying to play out the themes within our own relationships so that we don't need to come up with stuff, right? We don't need to make stuff up. Um, it's- it's very, very, very useful. Criminally Underrated Podcast #5 - Matt Johnson
Matt and Jay are the characters and Matt and Jay are not the characters.
And this gets into what made me want to write this whole thing in the first place: Nathan Fielder and his show, The Rehearsal.
Nathan Fielder is an interesting case because no one is under any illusion he's playing a character, even though said character is also named Nathan Fielder. Instead, people focus on character breaks or moments where The Real Nathan™ shows up.
(And that creates this bizarre space where everything Nathan does and all the people he works with are put into this scrutiny of finding out whether or not they are real or not, which is weird and often invasive.)
Then, come season two of The Rehearsal and Nathan stars showing a much more real and vulnerable side, revealing things about himself and his past. That lead to a lot of people to consider that to be The Real Nathan™ (I believed it too!), when, really, the person you're seeing on screen is still a character.
Now, once again, this doesn't mean that the things revealed are fake, or that there's no truth to who Nathan actually is in the show, it just means that, one, there's much more to the real person and, two, in the process of making the show, truth will always get bend and re-framed to better fit the narrative and the story they want to tell.
I sometimes find it amusing. Whenever people tell me about how I am, I think it’s interesting. People are evaluating me through a TV show that’s edited. And as much as you try to control things about yourself and your image, certain things seep through that you can’t control. But you’re also trying to control things with how you shape a story and all that. Nathan Fielder on Making ‘The Rehearsal’ Season 2
I think what you eventually end up understanding about reality-bending media, the more you get into it, is that the lines that separate reality from fiction, performer and performance are always blurry and never clearly defined, yet they do exist. I think people focus too much on wanting to neatly categorize it all in individual enclosed boxes instead of engaging with that ambiguity and the meanings it brings.
You can't work with defined lines and strict boxes when it comes to this kind of stuff, so don't be biphobic, they can't pick a side! It is real and it is fictional, it's authentic and it's performative, at the same time, they are mutually influencing each other. You can get an understanding of who the real people are from the characters they play, the truths they give and the stories they tell, but the characters are still characters, it's still a narrative and you can have interpretations and analysis about it without needing to involve the performers themselves, because otherwise you are essentially shitting on the entire effort that went into making piece of art and taking a lot of value away from people’s art (‘cuz let’s be real, the truths and creations don’t come only from the performer on screen).
None of this is exclusive to reality-bending, I've come to realize, it just happens to be the format that makes it all explicit and thus the more interesting to discuss.
At the end of the day, you never truly know somebody if you're only seeing them perform. That's the truth regardless of weather or not somebody is playing a character, playing an exaggerated version of themselves, actually being themselves or a mix of any or all of these (Heck, you never truly know somebody even if u know them personally.). But you do know some things. In fact, there's a ton of truth that most people think in literally any piece of media, it's just that the need for clear-cut real/fictional makes people miss it.
It's good to keep in mind that, as long as there's a component of performance involved, like a camera or an audience, what you're seeing is always, to some degree, a performance, regardless of how authentic or sincere someone is or may present themselves to be. This doesn't mean it's fake, there's always truth to it, it's rooted in truth and no matter how performative, fictional and artificial it can be, truth will always slip through, it just always will be an incomplete truth, and you gotta be comfortable staying in the uncertainties and the unknowns and not obsess over figuring what's real and what's fiction.
The Rehearsal has a lot more value beyond how real or not it is, Nirvana the band The show does way more interesting things with it's reality-bending than just being real; the Smosh cast is very talented beyond just being authentic people with good chemisty.
When you look at any of what they do as just entirely truthful or fictional and leave it at that you were losing an entire word of richness and engagement with really good art and artists.
It's natural to want to search for the truth, to find the real individual, to categorize it all, but there's no single truth when it comes to this, there's no single real Nathan to be found in his work or even his interviews, every single one of his selves holds truths, pieces that you as an observer can use to attempt to connect to construct a whole, but no single one will ever fill it fully, so let's enjoy good media and good performers for what they are, let’s judge them, let's engage with the media itself, allow ourselves to believe and feel things, appreciate the work and effort that goes into it, and analyze it, if we feel like it, it's fun!
[Fielder] We’re trying to make the person watching a TV screen and probably on their phone at the same time feel something. And if you can do any of that, that feels like a win these days.