The intensive live broadcast of the Chilean miners rescue a couple weeks ago gave us a clear notion of the broken boundaries between reality and fiction in today’s media.
Between the lies of what TV stations call “reality shows” and today’s “showrnalism” (term coined by Brazilian journalist Jose Arbex Jr.), the televised and webcasted rescue was the apex of a stream of events that were perfectly built up for television and — as we will shortly see — books and movies.
More than the story itself, opportunists of all kinds   — especially self-improvement gurus and religious freaks — are already jumping on the corniest considerations possible in a market that rests mainly on the fragility of human emotions.
“Los 33” — what the surviving miners are being called — are a precious source of drama, their story a tale of burial and resurrection and a free-giving mill of prêt-a-porter life lessons.
More than that, there’s so much symbolism involved in this story.
From the number 33’s Masonic and Christian esoteric meaning, to the miners’ survival against the elements and ascending to surface, going through the coming from darkness to light.
It would be beside my point to develop any of those subjects, when my point is only asking a couple of simple questions:
Why did we spend hours trying to empathize with something that actually concerned 33 men and their relatives, when it isn’t about us at all?
What inversion of values makes us believe we have to be mentally and emotionally connected — be it through TV or Internet — to something happening across the globe to people we don’t know, just because it’s news, or so we are being told?
I obviously can’t and am not trying to argue against the interest intrinsic to what happened in Chile.
I kept the TV on for at least one hour on CNN’s live broadcast of the rescue while studying, to be my own devil’s advocate.
We take for granted that the facts and information that are constantly broadcasted and appropriated by the media are indisputably important in the course of events that we often forget what we like to call “history.”
And more than that, we give things completely beyond us priority in detriment of immediate aspects of the world around us that will influence the current conditions of our own lives.
If you feverishly followed the story and rescue of these miners and can remember the emotional sprints of sadness and joy that you felt while that capsule went down and up several times, you must already be cursing me.
My point exactly.
Because whatever your opinions about the event are, they are now helplessly bathed in the syrupy sentimentalism the media outlets purposefully poured onto the story.
That’s what I am disputing here: not the beauty of the story but the validity of the time and energy spent on its portrayal.
Moreover, the story will develop with spectacular consequences far beyond the expectations of common workers, now former employees of a small mining company in Chile.
These men, celebrities even before their resurrection, will have their lives changed more by the conditions of being celebrities than for having survived in terrible conditions for 69 days.
As for us, hypnotized for one day by the cinematographic characteristics of their story, will miss at least one of the daily news breaks that should be grasping our attention: Our education is getting trapped underground, and no rescue efforts are being made by those who have the power to save us.
Marcelo Vieira is a 32-year-old jazz cello graduate student from Brazil. Follow him on Twitter @TDR_MVieira.
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Contact Marcelo Vieira at [email protected]