Series 7: The Contenders
***
Cinema
Releases - June 1, 2001
Certificate 18. 86 minutes. Written and directed
by Daniel Minahan. Starring Brooke Smith, Marylouise Burke, Glenn Fitzgerald,
Michael Kaycheck, Richard Venture.
I remember last summer, when the first season
of "Big Brother" appeared on television, and I boycotted it as voyeuristic
garbage before seeing a single episode. I was fresh from declaring "The Truman
Show" to be the best film of 1998, and found myself fearful of the growth
of reality TV.
The premise of "Big Brother", as you should be
aware, is to take ten volunteers, lock them in a house together for ten weeks,
and film their back-to-basics experience round the clock. Each week housemates
go to the confidential 'diary room' to nominate two members of the group
for eviction, and the two or more members with the most votes face a telephone
poll whereby viewers vote for who they want to leave. When all but three
of the housemates have gone, viewers vote for who they want to win the show's
grand prize of £70,000.
I figured "Big Brother" would be a generator of
nasty gossip. I also figured that the show's producers would deliberately
put unstable people in the house, so we could peek in while sparks flew.
I was wrong -- when I finally caught up with the show, I found it to be made
with consideration for the participants, and became absorbed by how different
personalities reacted to the artificial situation.
My fears about reality TV in general, however,
have not been assuaged. It's encouraging that the innocent fun of "Big Brother"
has been so well-received, but flip over to the next channel and you'll see
"Survivor", a sick affair in which contestants are made to fend for themselves
on a hazardous desert island and ordered to plot against each other to attain
a £1million reward. The thing about all these shows is that they're
the thin end of the wedge -- the time will come when viewers will want the
stakes to get higher, and things to get more savage. There would be an outrage
if people were killing each other for prize money on television today, but
society's values do change, and a quick look at Roman history shows us that
if people committing murder for sport and the authorities are allowing it,
people will accept the status quo.
This is the contention of "Series 7: The
Contenders", a dark satire of reality television in which unwilling
contestants are chosen at random, given guns and told to kill or be killed.
An early scene shows us the selection process, in which lottery balls
corresponding to social security numbers are pulled out of a dome; memories
are evoked of Vietnam.
Daniel Minahan's film is shot just like a television
programme, with climaxes every few minutes, a cheesy narration, and shaky
video photography. There are dry digs at the way television insults our
intelligence with transparent gloss and spin, the way people seem to talk
about absolutely anything personal whenever a camera is pointed at them,
and the gormless nature of a lot of American culture -- but mostly the film
is chilling, because it rings far too true. Face it -- if the television
networks could get away with a show like "The Contenders", don't you think
they'd go for it?
COPYRIGHT©
2001 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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