'The Dope Show', a contemporary reality show
“We're all stars, now, in the dope show” – Marilyn Manson In 1932, Todd Browning’s film Freaks was released, meeting with revulsion as the actors were in fact real-life persons who were suffering from disabilities. They were actually performers in a sideshow circus and the American director attempted to portray a day in the life of these performers. The film was banned for many years as it was regarded as promoting the exploitation of innocent, vulnerable people. Detail of 'Social Housing' by Etienne Farrell and Mark Mallia. In the 1960s, the film enjoyed a resurgence of interest and eventually achieved cult status in the 1990s as a masterpiece of the horror film genre. Browning was a master of capturing suspense and intrigue, as he masterfully did in his masterpiece Dracula of 1931. In Freaks, he intended to portray persons with a flawed physical appearance but who were intrinsically good. Some of the ordinary-looking people in the film were portrayed as very cruel, their ‘normality’ and ‘beauty’ masked something seriously flawed – the latter were the actual freaks of the show. It was a comment on perception and how the image of a person incurs one to be deceived into accepting...