 |
Big Brother CBS:Triumph of Conventionality |
| What happens when CBS presents a game show in which the American public gets to pick the winner? This, and other questions were fabulously answered when the reality game show, Big Brother, was aired on both TV and the Internet. The game plan? People living with no privacy at all. We can see them, as cameras record their every moment, awake or asleep, but they can't see us. Ha ha. Nor can they see anything on TV, on the Web, on email; they can't get telephone calls, they can't see the newspapers, can't listen to radio, records, tapes, VCRs or any other kind of electronic distraction. They only have ... each other.
Periodically, they must nominate two of their own for banishment, the public having the final say. One by one, the houseguests are weeded out. First, by popular vote, an argumentative black dude called Mega is voted out. Well, that decision enabled more people to speak without being shouted down. Fair enough. Next to go was the woman named Jordan who had so much entertainment potential that Salon.com steadfastly insisted to the end would never be voted out. "A stripper with lesbian tendencies?" they asked incredulously. Never. But never came early this year. It's easy to see why the houseguests nominated her. She was playing sexual games which were turning the house into Peyton Place, teasing and titilating Josh and deliberately pushing Brittany's buttons. But why did the public vote her out? Isn't this kind of turmoil exactly what provides the drama? While the systematic voting out of all controversial houseguests made the program admittedly dull, even to those of us who were addicted to it, another interesting dynamic was taking place. Most people will recognize the term Big Brother from the novel by George Orwell, 1984. To anyone who doesn't know, 1984 is a dystopian novel about a totalitarian society which is run by the slogan, "Big Brother is watching you." "Big Brother" in the novel is the ruling Party which is personalized by a picture of a man's face appearing on posters everywhere. "Big Brother" of CBS is really the viewing public. While it sort of came off as a joke to call the show "Big Brother," it is uncanny how many parallels one can find between the society in Orwell's novel and the society which we saw developing in the Big Brother House. After the first few most troublesome people were voted out, the remaining guests developed a tight bonding. Their survival tactic, to the intense frustration of CBS, was to be completely non-confrontative, to get along, not to see anything that could be a source of disharmony. How far they were willing to go in this was indicated by events following the banishment of Brittany, the madcap, cuddly virgin. While several guests had been marked as candidates for banishment that week, the good folks of Rockford, Illinois decided to target her for banishment in order to "save" their favorite, their own "Chickenman" George. George is a middle-aged family man, father of three, a roofer to whom many people warmed up as a "salt-of-the-earth" working class icon of Middle America. To support George was to support family values, to support the working class. He was "one of us." But the large, concerted effort to assure his victory which was orchestrated by people in his home town, while not violating any of the rules of the same, struck a great number of people as blatently unfair. At least two companies pledged corporate funds towards paying for phone calls choosing Brittany's banishment. While most people were paying their dollar and voting their choice, Rockford was throwing deep pockets into tweaking the outcome. So a large number of people shouted "TILT!" Organizations sprang up devoted to the cause of voting George out of the house. The rules allow multiple voting. The rules allow organized targetting. Fine. Let that be the two-edged blade that cuts both ways. Before the public could vote George out, the houseguests had to nominate him. But they didn't know what he or Rockford were up to. So how to let them know? People pooled their money and hired a plane to fly banners over the Big Brother House informing them of the treachery. But somehow the guests didn't seem to put it together. They acted really dumb. Then CBS allowed Brittany to visit with a houseguest of her choice. She picked Josh and informed him of what Rockford had done to her. His response, however, was that he wanted to "keep it real in the house" by not acknowledging what he had just heard. "It's going in one ear and out the other," he said. Compare this with the society in 1984: ...the speculations which might possibly induce a skeptical or rebellious attitude are killed in advance by his early acquired inner discipline. The first and simplest stage in the discipline, which can be taught even to young chldren, is called, in Newspeak, crimestop. Crimestop means the faculty of stopping short, as though by instinct, at the threshold of any dangerous thought. It includes the power of not grasping analogies, of failing to perceive logical errors, of misunderstanding the simplest arguments if they are inimical to Ingsoc..."It seems that isolation from external stimulation produced the same state of mind among the houseguests. When asked if she was surprised by Josh's reaction, Brittany said she was not. Living in the house puts you in a different state of consciousness. "Even the air is different in there," she said. Paul Ramer said the environment becomes so intense that if you spill a glass of water it becomes a traumatic event. When she and Curtis had that little disagreement in the bathroom, in the scheme of things in perspective in the real world, that was not even an argument, but it was huge in terms of those people in this house and specifically Jamie. That fact that she was being au contraire to what Curtis was saying became hugely dramatic which is one of the beauties of the show, because in essence nuances become rather profound. As a matter of fact, the guests eventually managed to overcome their reluctance to face what they knew and did nominate George, unanimously, in fact. Not before George almost managed to lead them in a mass walkout whereby they would all have forefeited the prize money. However, even after George left, the blandness and the coziness continued. I think the real reason they nominated George was that he had become a disruptive force as well as the others before him. He had been behaving erratically, forcing his nocturnal company on the lone surviving female, Jamie, making group harmony more difficult. Why were the surviving guests so dull? An article explained why Jamie, for example, seemed so repressed: She said she knew she couldn't show any emotion. She could see that everyone that had been banished up to that point had shown some kind of emotion. If you started to go off, you were gone!Jamie made it to the last four. After she left, there were only three guys, the soft-spoken, refined lawyer, Curtis, and the two jocks, Josh and Eddie. Eddie was a very special jock in that he had lost one of his legs to cancer when he was 12. So, not only was he a jock, he was a hero, overcoming his handicap to be on his special handicapped team. America loves heros who overcome handicaps, especially when they're jocks, even better than middle-American working man. Just before the final vote, Big Brother asked each of the last three candidates whom they thought "most deserved to win." A loaded question if ever there was one. As candidates, each of them wants to be the winner, of course. But can one admit that obvious fact outright on American television? Turned out not. Only Curtis had the honesty and integrity to admit he "hoped to win," adding that he was leaving the decision to the American public. Very diplomatic way of putting it but not good enough. The two jocks each said the other one should win. If they really meant that, wouldn't they have dropped out of the race? But hypocracy ruled the day. People overwhelmingly said with their words and with their vote that Curtis screwed himself by admitting he wanted to win. Josh came in second with twice as many votes as Curtis received. Salon.com had the following amusing comment: Curtis leaves it up to the public to decide. Non-threatening, but, as it turns out, not self-sacrificing enough. Curtis, we predict, will be dinged for third. Eddie won with twice as many votes as Josh received. Like George, he was a symbol of something Americans hold sacred. Long before the final vote, Jordan, the abrasive and feisty ex-houseguest had this to say about Eddie: Because, for one thing, if that guy wins it's going to be because he has one fucking leg. I'm so irritated by this whole sympathy vote. Yes, I know that he's disabled and I have no idea what it's like to grow up with one leg -- I fully understand that he has a life experience I could never relate to -- but in the house, he didn't want to talk about it.But I think it was admiration rather than sympathy. That and the fact that Eddie insisted he was devoid of self-pity. He declared he never went through a "why me" period. Instead of self-pity, he preferred to cash in his handicapped chips to buy the right to indulge in judgment against others. He gets mad ... "when I see people pissing their lives away being junkies or alcoholics." Americans don't like self-pity nor any other emotion directed to the self. They love judgment, however. And heros have the undisputed right to judge. They eliminated anyone who showed emotion (evidence of a self), admitted he wanted to win more than he wanted someone else to win (Curtis) and even voted Jamie off, calling her "Ja-ME" on the ground that her lack of emotion was just "playing to the camera" because of her big ego. But a nice, conventional moral judgment, particularly one targetting a group that is already on everyone's shit-list (junkies) is right in order. Well, good old American conventional wisdom has prevailed not only in the house but amongst the public as well. All that is left to say has been put far more eloquently by Salon.com: We gazed up at Julie Chen's enormous face. Three months it had taken us to learn what kind of smile was hidden behind the mask of total indifference. O cruel, needless misunderstanding! O stubborn, self-willed exile from the loving breast! Six gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of our noses. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. Links |
