So is Orvieto still a real town? But, what would it mean for it not to be real? The people in the town are real in their scramble to survive. Would a critic claim that while their lives are real, the setting is not? What would have to be preserved to make the impatient critic judge the town to be real? For true reality, must we require the citizens to do hand labor in the fields? Would the town be most real if it were isolated and unnoticed, out of the flow? No, it is be more real when it is in today's world. Or are we trying to reassure ourselves with some image of people going about their daily lives with no concern for the eye of the uprooted Other and no need to fish for sustenance in our wider economic streams? What function does that picture of "real" places play in our psychic or social economy?
Maybe what we want is for it to have a unified and different character from our everyday. Imaginethat the town were indeed fully isolated, turned in on itself, with a unique character, no visible connections to our busy world, and no other tourists from outside looking on. How would it then function for us outsiders? Imagine that the isolated town is full of hidden video cameras, and that unbeknownst to the citizens, we can observe everything they do, as in the film The Truman Show, but with all the citizens unknowing. Would such universal voyeurism be the truest tourism? It would not, because it would lack that contact sought by the tourist, who leaves home to touch and be brought inside another world, not just to play the voyeur at another TV set. Tourists want to touch the real life of the place. But then begins the dialectic MacCannell analyzes. The inside, the backstage, the real life, becomes another performance. You can never reach the final back room. (MacCannell 1989) However, MacCannell's description of this dialectic is misleading. He presupposes a closed notion of the back spaces and activities, so in some ways he perpetuates the duality he should be criticizing.
(c) David Kolb, 1 August 2001