People love mistakes, especially the ones made by other people. A musician trips onstage and blogs explode with the reruns; someone’s boob slips out on the red carpet and forever has a huge red “C” for “chooch” engraved on their celebrity status. And forget about sex scandals; whenever one of those gems pops up, people hunch towards each other like twelve year-olds in a cafeteria, twiddling the tips of their fingers and snickering as if someone had just walked out of the bathroom with a wad of toilet paper glued to their feet.
Maybe, you would say, this is simply a clear example of the underlying pettiness of man, the shallow pool that only seeks to accumulate droplets of material goods and aesthetic pleasures, only stopping in an Hedonistic orgy of self-service in order to laugh at the failure of others. Maybe it is just the self-esteem’s survival tactic of seeking, searching, and destroying people more vulnerable in their state of public humiliation.
Or maybe you’re just looking for a bit of honesty.
Erving Goffman, one of the most upheld social experts of all time, made many mind-blowing anthropologic observations on the entity that is the human being, but made one key distinction in a person’s social interactions that he describes as the “front” and “back” region. Appropriately likening a person’s actions to a stage production, the “front” region (obviously) has to do with the show itself or, in other words, the way a person acts in the spotlight. The “back” region backstage, the special effects and truer personality that make the act possible. The thing is, though, whether you’re going to see a show or you’re invited to a party chockfull of friends old and yet-to-be-discovered, we all know that’s we’re going to get.
An act.
People know the show they’re seeing is all rehearsed, that the feelings emoted and the events that unfold have all been nipped and tucked to the perfection of the execution. Same thing for movies: none of it’s real, obviously, but that’s not really what it’s all about in the first place. You paid good money for phoniness and you’re damn well going to get it. It could be in entertainment or politics (although, really, the line in between the two isn’t all that fine for the most part). Everyone knows that person is just a public image superimposed on a public image, catering to people that could very well be directly under his thumb one day. Every act they make, every word they spake– everything is planned with a purpose, and the higher up the image, the more the image is to be re-examined, digitized, and over-all consuming until the original personality doesn’t really have much personality any more.
Which is why it’s so easy to doubt everything these days; everything’s so fake, the effects are so close to real, that it’s hard not to be jaded by the sheer perfections of everything posted or printed. That’s why mistakes, in a torrent of barely discernible lies, are so great.
Here’s an example: after seeing the show Wicked when it first came out, my sister and one of her friends were comparing performances. While the entire show had run smoothly for us, the friend was retelling about a scene where, when Glinda was supposed to have slapped Elphaba, the sound was off and nothing happened. I’m sure the audience went into a pregnant silence right there as about twenty stagehands scurried about pissing themselves as someone screamed at them. But the two actress, keeping their cool in what was probably a very long two seconds, played it off by “dodging” the blows Matrix-style, much to the delight and applause of the now-relieved audience.
Most important part though: they applauded.
You see, even though we pay to see the lie, we get our money’s worth with the honest foul-up. It’s why even though people see the magic show they’re dying to know the trick, or even delight when something that shouldn’t be exposed is. When that annoying, perfectly composed couple in the room who everyone knows is secretly having trouble openly unleash a heated argument over the salsa, it’s not with malice (for the most part, anyway) but probably a weird, sick gratitude that people watch thinking, “Oh, thank God, they’re being real!” Because we know— we know these people perfect aren’t perfect. They take hours to look like that; they can actually feel. So when there’s an unadulterated expression of these feelings, one not deemed okay by a PR manager, people may react positively or negatively based upon what the expression actually was (shaved head? attacking a car with a chair? or maybe just a smile?), it’s really just one thing: marveling.
We marvel at the blatant honesty; we love candid shots. We dedicate hour long YouTube videos to blooper reels that end up being extras on DVDs, and we love catching shadows of boom mikes over an actor’s head. It’s not that it ruins the reality of the moment, but reaffirms there was no realness in the first place.
So maybe it’s not with malice that we snicker but some weird bastardization of relief. In a world where anything could be fake and the power of photo-shopping is all consuming, social faux paus is welcomed. When someone trips, when those boom mikes are exposed, audiences no longer boo, but clap.