The timing is perfect. At the very moment that South African TV audiences settle in for a summer of guilt-free voyeurism from Big Brother and having just watched its equally salacious rival Survivor, along comes a smart American movie to point up the error of our ways.
That film is Series 7: The Contenders, a scabrous satire of reality TV in which fiction just about stays stranger than life by the grisly expedient of having its cast slaughter one another. Five contestants selected at random are obliged to kill to secure their freedom; or, in the project’s scrupulously breathless parlance: “Real people … in real danger … in a fight for their lives!”
As you may have guessed, Series 7 has an acute feel for its targets’ tawdry minutiae. The cheap hyperbole, the lurid teasers — they’re all there in exactly the detail you would expect from a director (Daniel Minahan) who cut his teeth on the networks and for whom Series 7 apparently constitutes an act of smirking revenge.
Indeed, such is his handle on the form that he actually manages to capture the whole sub-genre in one beautifully turned sentence. Returning to her home town for the series’ finale, one character can only gasp: “Oh God — everything looks like it’s been dipped in plastic.”
Yet for all the film’s mordant precision, there’s a subtle sleight of hand at work. Much of Series 7 is simply too good to be true, not least in the heavily pregnant shape of its heroine, Dawn. And what a heroine she is: a world-weary pragmatist whose deadpan resignation and long-forgotten adolescent romance with a fellow contender give the film its funniest and most poignant moments.
It’s called hedging your bets. On the one hand we get a brutal satire of the media’s fixation with real life and an invitation to congratulate ourselves on seeing through the tack and exploitation. On the other, via the hugely appealing presence of Dawn, Series 7 draws us into just the kind of overblown human drama we’re supposed to be dryly shaking our heads at. As the movie nears its bloody climax we may be laughing up our sleeves, but we’re also desperate to find out what happens.
Expert as Minahan’s film is, it prompts the question of what is being parodied here. The base Darwinian logic of reality TV? For now at least it’s simply slapstick Grand Guignol, amplified beyond belief. The cruel nature of the programmers’ selection process?
Sadly, the real horror of Big Brother et al isn’t that the stars are plucked off the street, but that they’re coerced only by their own egotism. That is a routine fault-line in the shows jabbed at by Series 7, but one that Minahan himself sidesteps by leaving his characters untouched by exhibitionism.
And all that’s left is a sermon on the bovine ugliness of reality TV, but there’s little chance of an indie flick like Series 7 even being seen by the viewers who lap up (and appear on) Jerry Springer. The name of the game, it seems, is preaching to the converted, with a message shot through with double standards.
Not that we ever tire of hearing it. Because, while Series 7 does at least have the advantage of appearing at a time when broadcasting murder doesn’t seem quite as silly as it once did, the spectre of reality on the airwaves has long exercised filmmakers’ minds. As, uncoincidentally, has the chicanery involved.
As if to prove the point, the action guru John McTiernan’s imminent remake of Rollerball looks to have completely jettisoned all the guff about social disintegration (so 1970s) to accent what people really came to see the first time round: bloody, high-octane carnage.
Beneath the subversive trappings of the acclaimed The Truman Show — Grand Pooh-Bah of reality TV exposés — lurked a nasty habit of milking exactly the vicarious sentimentality that director Peter Weir was supposedly denouncing. Strictly speaking the movie was merely a rehash of (among other things) Paul Bartel’s 1969 comedy Secret Cinema, but its unctuous moral grandstanding helped it gain the status of modern classic.
As Jim Carrey’s hapless Truman struggled with the realisation that his entire existence was a docusoap, Weir was able to pile on the melodrama safe in the knowledge that his audience were having their intellectual bellies tickled. Watching The Truman Show on TV, it seemed, made you a gawping dolt; consuming it via Weir’s film rendered you culturally aware. It’s what’s known as a win-win.
The louder the dissent, the likelier it is that the motive is self-interest. Watching Rollerball, The Truman Show, or even — at times — Series 7, it’s hard not to think of the venerable British film critic who, when asked for the secret of his professional longevity, replied smilingly: “When I see a younger man coming up behind me on the rails, I crush his hands.” The same logic applies here: presented with a threat to your livelihood, you go on the attack.
So, while the portentous rhetoric of Peter Weir and the arch satire of Daniel Minahan may sound like worthy howls of protest, you can, if you listen closely enough, hear a pure note of fear from filmmakers alarmed by the prospect of their own obsolescence. Put simply, what appals directors about reality TV isn’t that audiences might one day get their kicks from watching strangers kill each other, but that if they do, they won’t be going to to the movies any more.
When you consider how many Americans watched Survivor rather than the season’s blockbusters, that is hardly paranoia. Throw in the money factor (a typical reality series costs roughly the same as 30 seconds of Pearl Harbor) and the current hunger on the part of cinemagoers for all things vérité (from the still influential Blair Witch Project to the surprise hit of this year’s Sundance Festival, the fly-on-the-wall documentary Startup.com) and you can understand why a director might suddenly feel disposable.
So for the moment movie culture remains in limbo: outflanked by the quick turnaround of its small-screen rivals and reduced to belittling the competition like a bitter ex-boyfriend slating his old flame’s new sweetheart.
And in much the same way you can’t help feeling that there’s something fishy and duplicitous about the prefab outrage. The great thing about a good film (as opposed to inherently bad reality TV) is that it can take you to any number of unlikely places — but dragging us on to the moral high ground for what is in essence a business wrangle is surely a step too far.