COLUMN: Springer's strange spell

From Malik Wilson's, "RosZ," Fall '99 From Malik Wilson's, "RosZ," Fall '99OK, I admit. I watch it, too. But I feel bad when I watch it -- and so should you. While the circumstances on Springer are not fabricated, the action is choreographed. Not actually, but psychologically. The guests perform for the studio audience and the viewers at home. Like pugilists in the ring, it is their chance to triumph while others are watching, to experience the thrill of being loved or loathed by many. Every guest on Jerry Springer knows that regardless of whether they will go home liked, they will go home remembered. We sit in our college dorms, watching them trade insults and fists, laughing at their antics and egging them on. Ultimately, for these people, The Jerry Springer Show represents their only chance at entering our collective map of reality. Their 15 minutes of fame -- like the early Jewish, Italian, Slavic and black fighters -- exists only inasmuch as they fulfill our desire for titillation. The Jerry Springer Show eroticizes the poor, a specific form of titillation that ultimately affirms our own cultural positions. Jerry Springer has far-reaching appeal because it is so self-consciously outrageous that anybody of any class can find affirmation in it; not just the rich, but everyone else as well. The show reassures us that we are not that outrageous, that uneducated, that poor, that black or that trashy. Jerry Springer, who himself has little personality and seems out of place, is only interesting insofar as he represents the everyman of easy-going rationality. Springer is a man of simple decency and cautious generosity. He is neither Oprah Winfrey, who gently consoles her guests, nor Montell Williams, who scolds his guests for their inappropriate behavior. Springer navigates through a chaotic moral universe with hesitant patience. When events grow chaotic, the camera will sometimes catch Springer in a moment of honest bewilderment. At these times, he really does look out of place. But while this may seem odd, The Jerry Springer Show ultimately works because he is a nerd. Because he is uncomfortable. Because he cannot make the same snappy, profanity laced comebacks. He is on our side, just as shocked and incredulous as we are. In the middle of the ring, we have one of our own. Springer's "final thought" is the TV version of old-fashioned common sense. "Be nice to each other," he urges us. Respect your significant others. Tell the truth. Rules we have all heard before. Rules we don't always follow. Springer affirms our hopes that we really do treat each other fairly. That our lives are not as screwed up as some people's lives. That even our most brazen acts of indecency are nothing when compared to a transsexual clown. The Jerry Springer Show convinces us that we are not slobs. That we are decent, upright, generally moral beings. We watch it because it projects degeneracy, and moral weakness, onto others. Having been at the University of Pennsylvania for four years and having spent time around wealthy people at various points in my life, I can assure you that I have seen just as many absurd scenarios, just as many cases of love-sex triangles, of closet homosexuality, of perverted pleasures among the wealthy. The situations themselves are by and large the same. What is not the same, and what in the end we are looking at, are the guest's reactions. Our class upbringing teaches us that the educated should only trade quippy insults or sue each or shrivel their faces up. Middle-class women are not supposed to fight when they find out their husband is cheating on them. Springer allows us to say "Well at least I didn't react like that!" Why wouldn't The Jerry Springer Show ever feature a wealthy psychologist who wants to tell his wife that he has a lover? The answer is obvious: because it is not funny. Why is it not funny? Because the idea that a rich psychologist could mess up his life as quickly and easily as a poor truck driver is something no one is interested in hearing. In America, we expect wealth to raise us above our inconsistencies and weaknesses. The reality is that our own faint confidence in the ordered, stylized normalcy of our lives depends on our ability to see those whose lives seem more chaotic and disordered. I'll see you at 2 p.m. for another dose.