Long before The Curse, Albert Brooks skewered “reality TV” with Real Life
Brooks' nearly perfect and prescient comedy anticipated the dark side of reality TV, four decades before Nathan Fielder would take up the mantle
Film Features Real Life
Following last year’s reality TV home deconstruction project, The Rehearsal, Nathan Fielder returns to screens this week with The Curse. True to form, the series sees Fielder, who also directs and co-writes, and Emma Stone starring as aspiring HGTV gentrifiers Asher and Whitney Siegel. Co-written by Benny Safdie, who appears on the show as Dougie Schecter, the director of the Siegels’ house-flipping show, The Curse tests the limits of reality TV in ways that reveal the craven, self-interested intentions of those who make it. Surprisingly, in its debut, Fielder comes to similar conclusions to a prescient film released roughly 40 years earlier, Albert Brooks’ prophetic comedy Real Life.
In Real Life, Brooks plays “Albert Brooks,” a self-absorbed motion picture director from Hollywood. Parodying one of the earliest reality shows, 1973’s An American Family, Brooks directs “Brooks” as he directs the Yeager family for a one-year experiment. He will film the Phoenix-based family, hoping the banal activities of their mundane lives are enough to entertain the masses. Unfortunately, the family’s patriarch, Warren (Charles Grodin), emits rays of unsympathetic rage and insecurity that the camera can’t help but pick up, and he knows it.
In addition to cameras being planted throughout his house, a crew of space-aged cinematographers wearing state-of-the-art helmet cams documents the Yeager’s contentious dinners, triumphant trips to the amusement park, and the old-fashioned breakdown of the nuclear family. These cameras offer a diegetic explanation for the film’s footage. The black void of the camera’s eye fitted over the operator’s head appears in the background of many shots, with the frame matching their position. Though the movie occasionally cheats the conceit (a nitpick in an otherwise perfect comedy), the cameras offer the most explicit rebuttal to Brooks’ desire to film reality: Who could act normally in front of all these cameras?
There are many similarities between The Curse’s premiere and Brooks’ debut, aside from both coming from writers, directors, and actors who are deeply interested in modern Jewish masculinity and who cut their teeth in experimental meta-comedy. Fielder and Safdie’s characters mirror the relationship between Brooks and Yaeger as they wrestle for control of the camera. While Asher tries to negotiate his way out of an aggressive interview with a local newscaster, Warren, a veterinarian, tries to convince Brooks to cut his accidental killing of a horse in surgery. The footage of him “killing an animal of that size” haunts him. He can’t face the reality he created, and neither can Asher, who finds himself cursed after trying to fake a good deed with a young soda seller.
What’s still incredible about Real Life is that Brooks came to these conclusions long before reality television became a ubiquitous form of entertainment that entire networks would base programming around. To Brooks and Fielder, “reality” on television is not the unobstructed filming of life. Reality is whatever the director or star wants it to be, and the more they try to control the show around them, the more versions of that truth they find. Because ordinary people aren’t used to being in front of the camera, their inner reality comes to the fore. Ultimately, by trying to fit the whole of “real life” into a TV screen, Brooks and Fielder land upon a deeper truth: Reality is whatever the camera sees, whether the person in front of the camera wants to reveal it or not.
25 Comments
He’s one of my favorites. I loved him in the thing I saw him in.
I love Albert Brooks.He’s the second greatest living Brooks.
Is James L Brooks still alive? I might place him second to Mel, if so, based on the enormous and deep influence he’s had on my entire life (Mary Tyler Moore, then Taxi, then Terms of Endearment, then The Simpsons). But if he’s dead, then Albert is definitely second only to Mel!
Knowing that you most likely meant Mel, I was going to be factious and put a question mark behind “Our Miss Brooks” as a reply, but then I saw the AVclub algorithm had a video about Garth autoplaying in the corner.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Our_Miss_Brooks
Also the second best Einstein. Maybe even the best.
You could’ve said “second best Albert Einstein.”
I came here to say nothing more than, I also LOVE Albert Brooks..I’m a black girl originally from Compton and I wonder if Mr. Brooks knows if his brilliance is as universal as it is.
Looking forward to the biographical documentary debuting on HBOmax tonight.
“ Only six of these cameras were ever made. Only five of them ever worked. We have four of those.”
My favorite thing about REAL LIFE is the way ‘Brooks’ becomes frustrated with how boring real life is and starts trying to insert drama into the proceedings. Also an accurate prediction.
I remember when being hip to Albert Brooks (and, incredibly, David Letterman) was like being in the world’s smallest club. His filmed bits from the early days of “Saturday Night Live” were amazing, particularly one that was a parody of NBC’s fall schedule promos featuring a show called “Black Vet” about a black Vietnam veteran who becomes a veterinarian and moves to a small town to set up his practice. It was so utterly perfect in concept, tone and execution (and so brilliantly idiotic) that it could have almost been a real show on late seventies network TV. It might have been my first experience of sitting and shaking my head in wonder at the sheer smartness of a work of humor (I had a similar experience around the same time with “Dr. Strangelove.”)I followed his feature films for awhile but eventually tired of the whole young, neurotic Jewish bachelor schtick and he never could figure out how to get out of his own head enough to branch out and make the kind of movies that would have sustained a filmmaking career. Nonetheless he could still be ingeniously, deceptively hilarious even doing a five minute bit for Johnny Carson and one routine with a Speak & Spell still makes me smile just thinking about it. I’d love to see the Rob Reiner interview with him but alas refuse to get sucked into the streaming swamp.
He had a stretch there that suggested something like genius, but Jesus, did he lose it after a while! It’s shocking how weak some of his later films are when compared to his first three or four.
His bits on Carson were always fantastic; my favorite is his Home Comedy Kit where he uses food to do impressions. It’s one of those clips I’ve seen a hundred times and I still crack up every time.
Amateurishly shot, but a brilliantly hilarious movie. It should be noted, though, that Brooks was hardly the first to ponder just how much “reality” is on display in a situation like this. Pundits chewed it over endlessly when “An American Family” was broadcast in 1973. “Real Life” is largely a parody of that program.
Nigel Kneale’s 1968 The Year of the Sex Olympics, for British TV (with Brian Cox) somewhat predicted the crass rise of reality TV
“If I had studied harder and been graded more fairly, I would have been a scientist.”
Real Life is one of the few movies that I can point to that was light-years ahead of its time. Brooks hit that one out of the ballpark and into the Sun.
Worth noting that Brooks’ co-writer (and the co-conceptualizer), as well as playing the ever-present cinematographer *behind* the headpiece-camera, was the great Harry Shearer. (He seems to *never* get credited for this fantastic and hilarious co-prophecy on the topics.)
Find A. Brooks’ novel 2030 (published in 2011). Pretty prophetic.
2030 (novel) – Wikipedia
Albert Brooks is the Husker Du of comedy–a unicorn to hipsters of a certain age, but mostly forgotten these days.
It makes no sense. No sense at all.
You earned that star.
Remember Letrasets? The letters you’d rub off with a stylus to sort of look like professional printing? I painstakingly rubbed off these letters to make a document that I framed and had on my wall for years: “Why says I can’t start real and end fake? What are they gonna do – put me in MOVIE JAIL?”
Also had the greatest film trailer in the history of cinema.