For those who have lifestyles instead of lives, death must appear incomprehensibly terrifying, the ultimate faux pas that brings life’s scrapbooking evening to a hasty, embarrassed close. It is non-returnable, non-deductible, non-refundable, non-negotiable. And, more appalling, it makes you all spotty and fat, and then it makes you stringy, and finally it makes you soggy, and once that happens, you might as well be a natural brunette for all the gentleman callers you’re going to get.
Television, where death comes to life, has always resisted this breathless, eeuw-you-licked-a-slug attitude to mortality. In the amoral world of prime time, exit wounds are entry points and a stiff is a stiff to be mulled over by lugubrious cheek-swabbers in Midwestern labs or turned over, sunny side up, by Machiavellian cannibals in muzzles.
Most of all, television has been unflappable. But all that has suddenly changed for, recently, the medium seems to have made a terrible, childlike discovery: getting hurt is sore. Worse than that, fatal injuries can kill you.
I Shouldn’t Be Alive, one of a dizzying number of new series dedicated to the visceral thrill of the narrow squeak, sounds promising at first. At last, one assumes, a show in which impossible odds are overcome and life affirmed. Perhaps episode one will introduce us to a parasitic teratoma, sporting half an eye, a tooth and a hank of hair, who escapes the scalpel and incinerator and is given all the advantages of its more intact, less pulsating siblings. It goes to law school, answering multiple choice questions by flinching or not flinching. It fights prejudice in the office by rolling about on the desks of bigots, getting ooze on their memos. At last it goes into politics and, supported by the love of a good woman (and her handbag, in which it travels to rallies), it becomes president. Now that’s adversity. That’s television.
But three minutes into any one of these programmes and one discovers the truth, for they are not so much about remarkable escapes as they are a damning indictment of natural selection. For instance, genetic offal decides to wade down the length of the Amazon while nursing running sores on his bum. Piranhas pick him clean from the waist down. In an ideal world the lesson is learned, its wisdom imparted to the tribe, and the jungle ants make him no more. But the world is flawed and, before nature can take its course, he is found and carried to a bush clinic, his tibias waving about like two grisly dousing rods gripped by a psychic ogre, and his life is saved. Idiocy perseveres.
The problem, however, is not the exploits themselves, which can be quite diverting if watched as travel documentaries. Neither are these tales rendered fatuous by the endearing shock of the survivors: harrowed, nibbled, truncated, perforated, flayed and castrated, they seem curiously surprised by it all, as if they had been sitting under hairdryers at the salon and had suddenly had a hammerhead shark fall out of the ceiling into their laps. What? How? Surely? Well I never … Ouch. I Shouldn’t Be Alive, perhaps, but in most instances, it’s a case of I Shouldn’t Have Used So Much Chum.
No, these are mild irritations. The massive flaw that undermines the close shave memoir at its most basic level is the same thing that gives it its existence to start with: the disappointing reality that the survivor is a survivor and not jungle mulch. Into every nightmarish set-up, every grisly dead end, the twin intruders of recovery and rehabilitation force their way and the drama of death becomes the melodrama of survival, as flat as a bayoneted life jacket in the mid-Atlantic.
The trouble with survival is that it denies closure and clarity. There is a moment when he should have been alive (walking towards the end of the pier, carrying a lunchbox and a fishing rod) and then there is a moment when he shouldn’t have been alive (hammering on the orca’s spleen, awash in fishy digestive juices, as it skulks about biliously under the Arctic pack ice). This is good. This is television. But then there is another moment, when he is alive and pensively ruminating on whether or not he should be. Somewhere in there lies nine months in hospital and hundreds of plates of jelly … and a few balloons and a cell-phone charger and a box of Jolly Jammers smuggled in after visiting hours. But where? And do the Jolly Jammers deny the Arctic pack ice? Is he ever going to die? Are we allowed to film him when he does to get what we paid for?
I Shouldn’t Have To Think This Hard.