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I have been obstinately watching the TV series Hoarders that Barry Yourgrau thinks is an absolute abomination. It is. And I am guilty of the indulgence. But the range of reactions was so intense: overwhelmed, fascinated, horrified, disgusted, outrage mixed with a sense of moral superiority, or, on the other hand, compassion, or depression, and finally a need to stop, the strong urge to turn away—it was all too much. The show turns on the spectacle of the hoarded mess, piles of things, filth, the obstinate refusal of the person to let anything go, which leads to a crisis that erupts, at which point the shrinks are called in, none of whom I can easily identify with, but whose encounter with the so-called hoarder fascinated me. Who was going to win the battle? Whose idea of value would rule the day? And finally, who would mete out the punishment best? Most often, the hoarder wins. Their refusal is unimpeachable, as is their logic-why should you determine what stays and what goes, what is clean and what is filth?
But it is not this horrific spectacle as such that I want to think about, but the way in which the spectacle of any “reality TV” show, any serial—the again and again-allows the viewer to experience the range of guttural reactions against something felt to be on the outside, over there, while hiding from them that this turns on a deep identification. I think that's the secret power of the dissociation in watching reality TV that we can easily say isn't real or isn't reality really-certainly not my reality, I'm not a hoarder. In fact, I think there is a reality on display, perhaps a different kind of reality, what Freud called psychic reality, the theater of unconscious desire. I don't pass judgment on this phenomenon. Certainly it's a spinoff of something as old as theater itself, though the word reality was never attached to theater. I will say that it wasn't until I read Barry Yourgrau's book—an object composed of words, an investigation into hoarding, a memoir