The Year 2000 Minus George Orwell Equals 1984
One man's take on "Big Brother."
by Paul Rosenblum

I have good news and I have bad news. First, the good news. The good news is that Jerry Springer and his staff will probably retire from TV very shortly along with his "mentally and emotionally-challenged 'guests'." The bad news is: Why?

TV has found yet a new low. This one has been around the world, most recently from Sweden. It's a game show. No, it's a reality show. No -- it's --- it's----- (clunk) 'two shows in one'. Most of all, it's sickening. Imagine a TV show where there are two 'tribes' of people left on two desert islands with a TV crew and is televised in hour long weekly shows killing animals, eating things that they would never eat in their normal lives and doing things that they wouldn't ever do in their everyday lives, and at the end of each show, there's a member of each tribe who gets voted off the island and get sent back to --- (oh my gawd) ---Real Life. Oops - that's Survivor, part of CBS's blockbuster Wednesday prime time lineup. That's not the one. This new show premiered after Survivor and it somehow seems like the natural next step.

This one takes place in a house, specially built for ten people (hand picked by CBS) to live in together for ten weeks. The house consists of two bedrooms (5 beds per bedroom), one bathroom and a swimming pool; it has no washing machine, no dishwasher, no newspapers, television or access to any outside people. Oh, yes - did I mention at least a camera in every room, including the bathroom and that edited tape will be broadcast 5 nights a week for the American public to watch? And if that's not enough, how about logging onto the Internet and viewing them live whenever you desire, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Each week, someone gets voted out of the house, and the person who survives the ten weeks gets to leave with $500,000.00. Who are the people and where did they come from? Are these X-Files extras who ended up on the cutting room floor? George Orwell wrote one of the most important books of the 20th century called 1984, in which there were cameras watching everyone in the society and gave privacy to no one. CBS has found a way of trivializing it into a prime time TV Game show. What is this show? You want to watch it? I'm sure you do. Nearly everyone will, eventually. If I titled this show, it'd be called "For Your Eyes Only," but CBS calls it Big Brother.

Regis - Don't give up your day job. This CBS entry taps into the voyeurism of the American public and I predict will hit new ratings records and push Millionaire out of the top spot. I watched the premiere on Wednesday night along with millions of other people. Why? Hey - I write about this stuff! I have to watch. Sometimes I wish I were Ed Norton, working the second shift! Anyway, this show literally turned my stomach. This is theatre? This is acting.? Hardly.

This is a textbook on how to forever destroy the participants' marriages or relationships. Being staged, the "cast" is not a composite of American society; hell, the choice of the participants aren't even random. These are hand picked, well interviewed, well prepared people for this "game" show. Some "game show." The production company interviewed the applicants and picked them out of probably thousands of people. What they came up with is a cast of people including a man and a woman who has been married 20+ years, (not to each other), a number of career oriented young people (for example, a man who has accepted a job as a United States prosecutor), and a woman who has won beauty contests ("Darva Conger, Part 2?").

There's also a rebellious girl in her late teens who loves to dye her hair red and wear a nose ring. Hey, this is drama! Cool stuff, huh? Just like The Truman Show with Jim Carrey. But, this is real life, folks. What people will do for $500,000.00 astounds me. America is going to watch these people live together, talk to each other, swim, eat, read, sleep, take showers, etc. Despite the fact that their outside relationships may be harmed, maybe permanently damaged on this nationally observed "get-together," they chose to do it anyway. 15 minutes of fame, I've heard of - but ten weeks of fame? That's about nine weeks, 6 days, 23 hours and 45 minutes too long for me.

I know what you are saying as you read this. This writer is nuts. Everybody will be watching this, and this will be a big hit and it'll be on for years. Hey - you're right. It will be watched by enormous amounts of people, get extraordinary ratings, and be on for years. I think I'll read my George Orwell novels whenever this show is on. I never thought that TV would hit rock bottom this low. In thirty years, we go from Ward Cleaver to Big Brother. (This is going forward?) Hugh Beaumont is turning in his grave. Family values, my web cam!! Maybe it's in the water. We are all being poisoned to death, but before we keel over, we're becoming crazy and doing crazy things. That is, just some of us.

How's this: Regis Philbin, Chuck Woolery and Maury Povich (Millionaire, Greed, and Twenty One, respectively) should be in this house together along with Sammy Sosa, John Rocker and Walter Cronkite. Throw in some good looking women (your choice- but I nominate Monica Lewinsky) ---sit back on the internet and watch what happens. Now, That's Entertainment! Tonight, I think I'll stick to the classics on TV like My Favorite Martian, Mannix, or Gunsmoke.. Then I can see a Martian being hunted down by a private detective on the Ponderosa. What we have here is a new kind of mental illness, yet to be diagnosed or named. I think we need a telethon to raise money for this new disease. Let's try and figure this out, and kill it before it kills all of us!

Even Faulkner was boring!
A half-hearted defense of "Big Brother"
by Yancey Strickler

What you are living in is not the real world. What is real? Is this real? Are URL's real? You live in The Matrix, a program, a grid, something that controls who you are and how you see the world around you. Not a computer program, but a network television programming grid that watches you, imitates you, mutates you, makes your life a far second from the real you see on your television screen. Unlike The Matrix, your world doesn't offer a pot of gold at the end just for surviving.

It doesn't take the collective genius of Keanu Reeves and Lawrence Fishburne to recognize that television is changing dramatically. The golden standard of the sitcom and drama is rapidly depleting in favor of "hard hitting" reality television. Reality television has been here for awhile, Cops and America's Most Wanted being the most visible examples, but the new shows have shifted focus from the extraordinary to the mundane. While the original reality programs showed America the thrilling aspects of life (car chases, people being set on fire, and people being attacked by animals), the new crop of reality television takes the opposite approach by showing dull, everyday situations in hopes that they turn explosive, and many times they do. This has had the effect of decreasing the distance between the viewer and the onscreen action to the point where CBS and MTV hope that you are left with the remote in your hand staring at a mirror to your own, everyday life.

To place an exclamation point on this trend, CBS has just debuted Big Brother, the first full-scale Real World rip-off, complete with a live website, internal hype-machine and one-legged housemate. The show's premise should be familiar by now, but for a quick recap here is how it works. Ten strangers are placed in a large house in southern California removed from any outside contact (no phone, TV, internet, newspapers, etc), and must live there for three months (the show ends in late September). Every two weeks the housemates will nominate two unlucky roommies to get kicked out. Viewers then vote on who stays and who goes by calling a phone number and selecting one or the other. The last person left at the end of the three months walks out with a half million dollars.

CBS seems to be banking on the strength of Survivor to push Big Brother into the stratosphere. I can only imagine CBS execs conferencing about their new programming:

CBS EXEC
What about "Touched By a Demon"? Star Jones is available.

ANOTHER CBS EXEC
Fox already has it in production. But what if we make a show where it's like Real World in every way, except there are old people!

CBS EXEC
No one wants to watch old people.

ANOTHER CBS EXEC
Old people want to watch old people.

CBS EXEC
What about the Real World except the only two people in the house
are Puck and Rudie and we watch them fight and drink!

ANOTHER CBS EXEC
With old people.

CBS EXEC
Exactly!

From the looks of the first episode, this could be pretty much it. While the first forty-five minutes were awful pseudo-journalistic hype, the last five were chillingly real. Unlike the Real World or Survivor, there were no production values, no narration, and no music, just people standing around and talking with cameras flipping between them. It felt like being an amphetamine-crazed wallflower at a terrible party.

My initial fears of this simplistic approach being lost in favor of the over-produced Real World style where each minor issue is constructed into a crisis with a matching pop single were calmed by last night's episode. Once again the style was simple and straightforward, absorbing the dullness of everyday activities like showering and shaving into the mise-en-scene. The effect is eerie. As a viewer, I honestly felt like I didn't belong there, a huge step in pop-culture entertainment. Admittedly, the first few episodes of Big Brother have been boring, but at least the production doesn't try to tell you otherwise.

Strangely, the coming of this possible perfection of the Real World formula comes in the midst of the worst Real World season ever. The promises of beautiful, rich, young people living in New Orleans are huge, yet the show is incredibly dull. What made MTV so successful in the past was its casting of the Real World. People were genuinely diverse, like Jon the country music star with Kevin the angry black comic. Cast members were picked to be opposites, but reactions to the situation seemed to be more genuine. Now differences are minute. Some characters may be gay, others from minorities, and even more just plain stupid, but nearly all come from upper class backgrounds, and the rest act as if they do. The only fights we are likely to see are whose SUV's are optioned out the best.

Early on the season is focusing on Melissa, a half-Asian, half-African American girl whose glasses are so gaudy and awkward they would even embarrass Elvis Costello. The main problem with Melissa as the opening storyline is that nothing happens. She strips, meets a boy, claims to be ghetto, and gets homesick. Isn't that what any girl does the first time she leaves home?

The other castmates are cutouts of cutouts; MTV trying to rehash the most successful castmembers from the past into one big masochist orgy. It fails miserably. The Real World of the past felt spontaneous and slightly voyeuristic. Some people genuinely did not want to be on camera. This year's cast is a collection of extroverts who know how to portray themselves so that they come off as well as possible. It seems as if every look to the camera, every word phrasing, and each action they take is with spin control in mind, the generation of little Reagan's and Clinton's thinking one thing and showing another. While past casts were about as willing as the drunken suspects on Cops to be on camera, this year's is like Barney Fife showing the big city officials the way around Mayberry, except Mayberry is their own tortured suburban life.

Is Real World obsolete? Has MTV reached a point where every prospective candidate has been tainted on how to act? Did the Puck's and Pedro's, Jon's and Kevin's scare away the type of people we wanted to watch in the first place? Maybe so. The Real World is resume filler, a great activity for that "Other" section no one seems to ever utilize. The audience is now a jury, judging the pros and cons of each member, deciding who is a star and who isn't. Who gets a movie deal. Who gets to host next year's "Casting Special." Who gets Real World/Road Rules All Star Challenge?

While it is early in the life of Big Brother, maybe the cash reward will change that. These people have to pander; it's the only way they can survive. If someone angers the nation, they are off the show. We don't have to judge who is genuine, we get to decide who does the best job at appearing genuine, a job all of us want. Big Brother is part Jerry Springer, spying on who we fear we are, and part lotto where the audience holds the winning numbers. Even though it's not us who will win the half-million, CBS is doing its best to make you feel as if it is.

Yancey Stickler reads too much Adorno, watches too much Sopranos and The Larry Sanders Show, and listens to way too much Wilco.

Got a problem? Email Yancey at filmmonthly@hotmail.com