The Fake World: Big Brother and the Rise of Quote Unquote Reality as Quote Unquote Entertainment
by Al Burian

America, relentlessly crushing the cultural competition around the world in all other arenas, seems to lag behind in the area of game shows. Sweden, for instance, apparently has a game show where you not only stand to win a lot, you also entertain the possibility of losing substantially. It works like this: in order to participate, contestants must agree to fork over their car, which is then installed into a contraption called the "crusher." Providing they answer various trivia questions correctly, they may stand to win a bundle, but should they totally freeze up and lose their cool (and, with your car in the jaws of the crusher, who wouldn’t), well, their car gets reduced to a cube of scrap metal as they look on helplessly and the Scandinavian studio audience hoots its approval. Sweden has one of the highest suicide rates in the world, and you wonder how many contestants go on to jump off buildings or throw themselves in front of subway trains and if there’s anyway to televise that. The Japanese also reputedly have us totally whupped in the game show department. From what I hear they have shows where contestants try to climb greased poles over pits filled with alligators. Now that’s entertainment!

Visiting Germany this spring, you couldn’t help but notice the sudden national obsession with a new television program, Big Brother. The premise of the program is totally bizarre- basically, it’s a game show involving ten contestants, who agree to be locked into an apartment for one hundred days. Every room in the apartment (excluding the bathroom but including the shower, which is separate) is video-monitored and under surveillance twenty-four hours a day. The interactions of the contestants, who are not allowed access to television, radio, or any other media that might connect them to the outside world, are then recorded. The TV show airs nightly, and consists of an edited version of the highlight events of the day. The contestants have no idea what will or will not be aired, but have to assume that anything is fair game. The game show aspect of the whole thing is that the viewing audience gets to "vote" each week on one contestant to eject from the apartment. The last person in there gets a million dollars or whatever the prize is.

The format of Big Brother was purchased by a German television channel from a Danish television producer. Apparently this program, or similarly formatted ones, have already aired to phenomenal success in other European countries. The Spanish Big Brother was especially good, I’m told, actually the first television program in Spanish history to get better ratings than a soccer game, and all because the contestants started making it with one another on the very first day. I can imagine the voyeuristic appeal of watching someone professing their illicit inter-contestant love in the kitchen and then getting to see them walk out in the hall and make out with someone else. For similar reasons I still often regret not having rigged up cameras in all the rooms in my old house. I suppose the show speaks to that urge on some level.

But, as fucked up and sociopathic as it sounds on paper, when one gets a chance to actually view the program, one is struck immediately by how crushingly boring it is. Part of the problem is that, in selecting their aggregate of cross-sectional average joes and joellettes, the producers have rounded up a group of the most uninteresting, uncharismatic dullards one could possibly imagine. I suppose this is the point, in a way: not to see the already strip-mined-to-the-point-of-tedium "lifestyles of the rich and famous," or Top Ten Secret Hang-Ups of the More Beautiful and Important than You, but to spy on the nose-pickings, door-knob-fumblings and chewing-with-their-mouth-open type activities of the common people, the people so average and just like you and me that everyone can feel a little superior, convinced that we ourselves wouldn’t look that bland and socially flaccid, if it were us locked in there, under surveillance, picking our noses and belching out inane small talk to a bunch of unappealing and badly dressed strangers we’d been incarcerated with.

The Big Brother contestant who resonates most in the hearts of Germans is this one particularly hideous fellow named Zlatko (pronounced "Slut-co"). Zlatko, whose main claim to fame is that he’s never read a book, becomes a huge celebrity overnight. He’s pretty much your grade-A cretin, a big lummox of a man who pontificates pointlessly on any topic which crosses his mind without having the slightest idea of what he’s talking about- audiences eat it up. Although not allowed to leave the confines of the apartment or receive word from the outside, the contestants do have a weird kind of window into what’s going on in the outside world. They have a back yard that they are allowed to venture into. Fans gather outside the wall separating the yard from reality, to cheer on their favorites or jeer at the girls they consider too bland or bitchy or unfashionable. Zlatko, meandering about the yard, often pauses to savor the roar of the masses. "Slut-CO! Slut-CO!" he hears the populace roar.

He grins. "Those are my fans," he beams. This is correct. He is unaware that outside those walls his name is synonymous with oaf, and the whole idea of ironic appreciation, that a mass of people can love something based on how much it sucks, a phenomenon familiar to all Americans in the post-Dancing Outlaw age, is not one which he has yet wrapped his mind around. As far as he can tell, what’s going on is that he is famous. And, really, in some very basic sense, that is what’s going on.
You’d think Zlatko would be a shoo-in for the million dollars. But, strangely, the rules of the game are counter-intuitive: instead of entertainment value equaling longevity, Zlatko’s sudden celebrity insures that he is the first ejected from the apartment by 900-number vote. It’s as if the populace, in love, can’t stand to be without him. Or perhaps they simply haven’t learned the other, more boring contestant’s names. Zlatko is elected ejected; he emerges on a Saturday into the mob of hysterical fans awaiting him outside. "Slut-CO! Slut-CO!" they scream, pointing and laughing. He moves regally through the throng, obviously savoring the moment, waving his hand in the slow, semicircular motion of a beauty pageant contestant. Then he is whisked into a limousine and straight to a recording studio, where he records his first single. A week later it is number one on the German charts, having sold a half zillion copies.

His absence only makes the grating boredom of life in "the most famous apartment in Germany" more acute. Unlike MTV’s The Real World, where the actors seem grimly determined to milk their moment in the spotlight for all the career they can squeeze out of it, prancing and posing and falling over one another in attempts to be the most noticeable and interesting, Big Brother is like watching video footage of a war zone- anything that moves gets annihilated. It is a strange phenomenon. The viewing public seems determined to scour the set of anyone interesting or noteworthy. It’s the most populist, democratically controlled television show in history, and the viewing public has spoken: we want this to be as tedious and boring as possible. Large-jawed contestant Alex and some woman, I think her name starts with M, begin a tepid and predictable affair. The public goes wild, reveling in sordid footage of them humping timidly under some blankets (on infrared video), and then ejecting them both from the apartment. One is moved to ponder: what the hell is wrong with you, viewing audience? Can Hollywood and all the other media conglomerates really have it this wrong? You all don’t want to see people humping? Verily, there seems to be a concerted movement to rid the program of anything interesting, titillating, or otherwise in the realm of what might be traditionally considered "entertaining." Perhaps the Germans, renown for their overly cerebral cinema and contributions to the field of sociology, really do just want to see the nose-picking, doorknob fumbling and openmouthed chewing.

I’ve never been able to quite grasp what it is that people find so compelling about watching people play variants on scrabble or pictionary, even when a gigantic spinner operated by a woman in evening wear is thrown into the mix, but I suppose it is worth noting that the game show ascended to a place of prominence in American culture at the same time as valium. In any case, Big Brother and related shows have upped the ante considerably, standing at the forefront of two trends in television entertainment: the game show, now a considerably different beast than when Pat Sajak was first applying in the network mail rooms, and the "reality-entertainment" show, which is the strange newest frontier of lowest common denominators in what variety of flashing lights people will willingly sit in front of and assure themselves that they are not wasting their time.

"Reality-entertainment" is a sort of inverse situationalist theater; a media spectacle which allows the audience to be self-consciously not hypnotized by media spectacle. Instead of being an all-consuming distraction and escape from our surroundings, it is characterized by its painful ordinariness and banality. An early example would be America’s Funniest Home Video and related programs, which became quite popular for a brief period, audiences seeming suddenly insatiable in their urge to see brides trip and fall into the wedding cake, or some guy throw back his fishing rod and accidentally lacerate his drinkin’ buddy’s jugular vein with the hook. The genre came under fire when it was discovered that the whole premise of these shows- that these were average Americans caught on camera going through the motions of their everyday routine (and narcissistically self-documenting it, of course), and, through random chance, clumsiness, or a vengeful God sending lightning to strike grandpa in the genitals, hilarity ensued- was being compromised, due perhaps to the prize money offered for "funniest video," which was prompting parents to set up elaborate, well-choreographed acts of sadism involving running over pets, whacking their children with oars, or hooking up generators to strike family members with fake lightning. The production values on these faked funny home videos were excellent, but the revelation of their contrivedness ruined the whole oeuvre of the programs- much like the phenomenon of "urban legends," which are astounding when delivered under the pretense that "it happened to a cousin’s ex-girlfriend," but which fall apart once the whole "urban legend" concept becomes popularized to the point where, instead of trying to convince you that these far-fetched tales actually might have occurred to a distant relative, people discuss them now with the cold clinical detachment of amateur social scientists. "Have you heard the urban legend about the guy who sticks the toothbrush up his butt?" they ask languidly, as if no longer interested in discussing the actual toothbrush being inserted into the rear but rather how sick it is that people feel the need to talk about putting toothbrushes into their rears. The problem is, these things only work if the illusion of them having happened is maintained. Otherwise, it’s just telling jokes that aren’t very funny.

Cheaply produced, lowbrow programs which follow around and film police while they bludgeon people and kick in doors have been all the rage in the United States for years. Unlike the actors on Big Brother, who seem to clam up under constant video-monitoring, the cops on these shows seem to find the cameras surprisingly invigorating, and feel compelled to act out their most excessive Dirty Harry fantasies for the American viewing public, beating the shit out of suspects and then philosophizing brusquely into the camera about it on the drive back to the station. You can practically see the veins in their temples bulging as they strain their brains to find something profound to say, or at least an appropriately Schwarzennegerian one-liner to growl. "These punks come out here thinking they can flaunt the law," muses officer Rex Ballsmouth, after arresting publicly intoxicated teenagers at the state fair (who, seeing the camera, wave and make absurd faces, yelling, "Hi, mom! Check it out, I’m on ‘Cops!’) "What they don’t realize is, I am the law around here." Cut to commercial.

The events depicted on these programs are no doubt in some sense "real," but the people appearing on them are still aware that they have a role to fill and so they act like what they think people on TV should act like. On a show like Cops or Emergency 911, where the people are overweight and have receding hairlines and mingle and mate with other unattractive people, this attempt at aping the gestures, speech and behavior of actual prefabricated television people comes off as occasionally comedic but mostly just intensely depressing.

Similarly, MTV’s attempt at genre-definition, the Real World doesn’t so much drag the television format down to the level of unedited, badly lit actual existence, but, as is the general artistic mission of MTV, filters "reality" through a tight filter of carefully preselected attractive embryo-celebrities whose actions, although not word-for-word scripted, exactly follow the conventions, plotting, and format of television. The actors speak and move with the fake naturalness of people who know that they are on camera and are comfortable being on camera. Sure, they are "human" in some technical sense, but following their post- Real World attempts at careers in the various ignoble branches of the gnarly treelike growth that is the entertainment industry, as they bare their rumps on dance-a-thons or in Playboy magazines, or host variety shows in VFW halls in their hometowns, or become strippers and used car salesmen with their faces plastered on huge billboards by the freeway, advertising "REAL deals from Crazy Larry, YOU KNOW HIM FROM MTV’S THE REAL WORLD!" you quickly come to recognize these people as not in any genetic way related to you or me, but rather a part of that other species we share the planet with, whose craft crashed aeons ago in the vicinity of Los Angeles, CA, and on whose home planet everything is flat and two-dimensional and waves of radioactive static float about like tumbleweeds- this strange alien species, now stranded on the planet, finding itself only truly at peace when returned to its natural habitat, the 2-D cathode ray screen.

The game show is, in some sense, "reality programming," not in terms of the situations depicted (but then, cruising around in an ambulance is not a part of most people’s everyday routine either, unless you happen to be an ambulance driver), which are insanely contrived, but in that you get to see ordinary, average people thrust into these situations, and watch them react and occasionally crumble into weeping nervous wrecks under the pressure of these inane situations. In the game show we can see one of the primary conceptual principles which allows a show like Big Brother to work: people tend to like to watch shows where they can feel superior to the contestants.

The whole premise, after all, the promise implicit in the very title, is that it’s you the viewer getting to act the part of Big Brother; that it’s these poor hapless Winston Smith rodents in their video-monitored cage being controlled, prodded, and product-placed. Viewers can dig this in the high-tech age of internet and apparent leveling of the trickle-down format for information and entertainment dissemination- people love to talk about the picture of themselves in a Speedo on their homepage as "little brother looking back;" and to a certain extent the sudden explosion of complex networks of information shuffling might be, theoretically, subversive- however, it’s hard, once you extrapolate this, to apply it to sitting around and watching people mull over their choice of breakfast cereals. The ironic application of Orwell’s dystopian mascot to a television program designed to sell board games, ad space, coffee mugs and etc. all premised on the off-chance that they’ll show someone soaping themselves in the shower in an unorthodox way, is a good indicator that things haven’t turned out as Orwellianly as predicted. The user-friendly democratic capitalist state cheerfully repackages and sells everything, even dystopia (look at Red Square in New York City, the yuppie apartment complex with statues of good ol’ Lenin on the roof, a humorous nod to bygone times when we actually considered the Soviet Union a threat), invasion of privacy and (at least Donahue’s working on it) murder by the state. There is no need to control and suppress a populace that lays down and plays dead this easily. We don’t need an actual Big Brother watching over us because we’ll pay money to watch ourselves do nothing. The future seems to be veering in the inevitable direction of highly popular cable channels offering 24-hour-a-day broadcast feeds of the video cameras at the ATM’s around town, tantalizing audiences with the hope of maybe seeing their neighbor taking out a twenty late at night, and maybe catching a glimpse of their balance. In the former East Germany, huge numbers of people were employed by the secret police as informants; no one knew exactly how many until after the collapse of communism, when the files of the State were opened to the public and it was ascertained that fully fifty percent of the population was spying on their neighbors. Orwellian? It seems like the new model does him one better: now almost one hundred percent of Germans are willing to engage in armchair surveillance, and they’re not even getting paid for it anymore, they’re being sold a seat in the panopticon under the pretense of "entertainment."

I arrive back in the United States, filled with tales of what those crazy Europeans do for fun, only to find that Big Brother has already been licensed from the Danes and a U.S. version is in production. By the time you read this it’ll probably already be airing, or maybe even done airing depending on how many quaaludes the printer has access to this time around. You’re probably already watching Survivors, another Danish formatting import, wherein you get to root for whether you want the aerobics instructor or the homophobic navy SEAL to catch and eat the most rats, thereby assuring that the contestant avoids scurvy and emerges relatively vitamin-deficiency-free to claim the million dollars. Extensive psychological counseling is required of the contestants after appearing on Survivors, to prevent a recurrence of the Danish fiasco, wherein one especially unstable specimen emerged from the ordeal a little out of whack and proceeded to track down two of the producers and kill them. I can just imagine the Danish television mogul, in a pool of his own blood in some ergonomic kitchen, thinking contentedly as he passes away that his kids and grandkids will be well-provided for by format licensing. Of course, what they should have done is continue to follow the contestants after they got off the desert Island where they were encouraged by Subway sandwich-eating camera crews to eat those rats, and filmed the revenge act. At the very least, they could televise the therapy sessions.