Series 7: The Contenders
"The simplest Surrealist act consists of dashing down into the street, pistol in hand, and firing blindly as fast as you can, as fast as you can pull the trigger, into the crowd. Anyone who at least once in his life, has not dreamed of thus putting an end to the petty system of debasement and cretinization in effect has a well-defined place in that crowd, with his belly at barrel level."
- Andre Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism
In the form of the television game show 'The Contenders',
Series 7 brings to film audiences the next
hyperreal step in the world of reality TV. For each
series contestants are conscripted, issued with a
handgun and a camera man and are sent onto the streets to
compete for their lives. Each player records
their 'kills' of fellow contestants by telephone and the
last person standing is the show's ultimate survivor in the
truest sense of the term. The show's reigning contender
must win their way through three series in total before they can
win back their freedom.
First time Director Daniel Minahan, a former television news producer, convincingly captures and exaggerates the look, feel and episodic structure of reality television via hand held camera work, melodramatic performances, and TV show packaging. True to the reality TV format, Series 7's characters are stereotypically drawn and self consciously acted out. The extremism of Series 7 serves as both a satirical look at the reality TV phenomena and a reflection on the culture that spawned it. Without taking itself too seriously, Series 7 seeks to blur the barriers between reality and fiction just as tabloidisation has blurred the traditional barriers between news and entertainment. These elements create a formula that audiences of reality television will easily recognise. Yet television programs, like films, always inform us about the history and the culture of the society that created them.
In the real culture, reality television programs Survivor and Big Brother both stage competitions for the duration of a television season, at the end of which a winner will take away a large cash prize. For the contestants of these programs, the games involve the placement of restrictions on their freedom of movement; as Big Brother's contestants are held under house arrest, and Survivor's contenders are placed into a foreign environment alive with physical threat. Clearly, these shows place a higher cultural value on money than they do on physical freedoms. Series 7, on the other hand, serves to invert the values of this formula. In it's inception, it is life, not money, which is most prized. Ironically, however, in the world of Series 7 this value becomes expendable at the pleasure of a mass television audience.
One of the key tenets of reality TV is the notion of 'reality' that it seeks to represent. The genre claims to present real people acting in real situations in real time free of scripts or sets. The popularity of the genre shows a yearning at the level of audiences for media representations that more closely mirror their lives. However, the idea that reality game shows on commercial television are capable of producing this is questionable. As any good anthropologist or documentary film maker will tell you, once you place a camera into an environment, it changes it.
Series 7 actress Brooke Smith watched numerous real world reality TV game shows while studying for the part of Dawn, and remarked to her director on the behavior that she observed that, "These people are just acting. They're behaving the way they think they should on TV." The logistics involved in making Survivor reflect this contrivance. While Survivor purports to present to audiences its 16 contestants battling alone against the elements each week, its decreasing cast of 'survivors' are constantly surrounded by a hidden production team of some 300 people. Just a few hundred metres away, the production team's camp is complete with the relative comforts of home, including cable television access, Internet facilities and gourmet cooking. This hidden army highlights the level of staging and impossibility involved in reality TV game shows.
Jean Baudrillard recently wrote of the cultural dangers involved with this kind of media contrivance when he surmised that, "Little by little, history has shrunk back into the probability of its causes, of its effects and, more recently, into the field of its present, into its effects measured in "real time". Events will not go any further than what their anticipated sense, their programming, and their diffusion will allow. This strike of events... this refusal to signify whatever there may be, or even the capacity to signify whatever comes our way... this the true end of history, the end of the Reason or Logic of history."
In a similar vein, Series 7 reflects on the fact that the plasticity of reality TV programming and the cultural appetite for it effectively take us one remove further away from a true representation of life as it is lived. This genre serves as a distraction from, rather than a reflection of, what is happening in the real culture. By taking the reality TV format to it's ultimate, hyperreal end, Series 7 can be seen to provide a subtle kind of cultural warning. This is subtly complex film making at its most thought provoking.
Vanessa Long
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