Big Brother 12

I realize I’ve been posting up a storm lately (by my standards), and I apologize if what you like about this blog is how infrequent and therefore unobtrusive it is, but back in January when I reviewed Dead Set, I wrote:

(confession: I never miss Big Brother in the US, but in my half-hearted defense, the differences between the two shows make the US version much more of  a strategy game and much less of a schadenfruede party...I could say much more but maybe I'll save that for a post in the summer when the show returns).

Well…here it is summer and Big Brother 12 is premiering on Thursday.  I’ve actually been considering doing a weekly update sort of thing, but we’ll take that as it comes.  What I want to accomplish in this post is to give a brief overview of what about the show works for me, in part by contrasting the US version with its International cousins.

Season 1 and the International version:

In a sense, the second season of Big Brother US, when they introduced the Head of Household competitions, is the first real season of Big Brother US.  Season 1 (which aired in 2000, so we’re talking the very tip of the reality game show spear here) was formatted in the same way as the International versions that preceded it.

Ten contestants enter a house wired for 24-hour surveillance.  For the duration of the show, no news from the outside world reaches their ears (9/11 was a unique and understandable exception to this prohibition in season 2, particularly as one contestant’s cousin was killed in the attack). 

Each week, the contestants individually and secretly nominate two of their fellow houseguests.  They are not permitted to discuss their nominations (which would lead to strategizing and alliance-forming) with any other contestants.  The two contestants receiving the most nominations are placed “on the chopping block” to be voted on by the viewing public.  Whomever the public votes against leaves the house, and so on week after week.

This show format made Big Brother 1 a popularity contest par excellence.  The contestant whom the largest percentage of the voting audience wanted to win would invariably win.

What was somewhat interesting about this season was that the participants themselves didn’t really know what to make of what they were experiencing.  Survivor had also just recently commenced, so the closest analogue that they were likely familiar with would have been Real World, which had been in production since 1992.  But Real World was a very different show that emphasized conflict rather than competition.  What worked for participants of Real World translated strangely and haphazardly into the game show atmosphere of Big Brother 1.

The HOH and the rise of Will Kirby:

But then in Season 2 the producers (known as the TPTB, or The Powers that Be, in Big Brother online forum parlance), made the first and most significant of several format changes: they introduced the role of Head of Household.  Instead of secret nominations from each of the houseguests at the end of each week, at the beginning of week the show would hold a Head of Household (HOH) competition, the winner of which would have the sole responsibility for nomination.  Furthermore, instead of having the public vote on which of the two nominees would be evicted, the houseguests themselves (excluding the HOH and his or her two nominees) would cast a secret ballot to make that determination.

Let the strategizing and alliance-making begin, basically.

Also, Big Brother US is no longer purely a popularity contest; it is not at all the case that the character whom the audience most favors is guaranteed to win.  In fact, it is quite possible that the contestant whom the audience most despises might win, should his or her strategy prove superior.  Instead of being a show about popularity and humiliation, Big Brother grew to be about loyalty, betrayal, hubris, revenge, duplicity and paranoia (and popularity and humiliation).

Season 2 also saw the rise of Will Kirby, the young doctor from Florida who ended up taking home the prize (which was then and has remained a half a million dollars).  Will was so well-suited to the game, such an effortless liar with such a trustworthy face and such an intuitive grasp of group behavior that almost every self-styled “strategy player” to enter the Big Brother house since has been laboring under the anxiety of his influence.  Everyone knew that Will was a liar, but no one ever thought that Will was lying to them.

Season 8 and the Live Feed:

Season 8 was both a high-point in the show and kind of a low-point in my life.  CBS sells access to a 24-hour live internet feed, and in season 8 they were offering a free month of access as a promotion to get you hooked.  In season 9 I actually paid for a month of access.  I’m better now, but for a while there, I would wake up, turn on the feed, and mostly watch people sleep as I was preparing to teach my introduction to literary theory summer course each day.  Actually, because the house is on the west coast and I’m on the east coast, and because that Season 8’s houseguests liked to do their scheming really late into the night, chances were often good that a few of them were still up and talking as I was waking up.

It’s hard for me to defend a viewing practice that on the face of it looks so pathetic, but the best I can say is that there’s something about the pace of real life—it’s tediousness and monotony—that the edited, prime time version couldn’t hope to capture—that in fact the prime time version specifically omits.  If you can’t stand the work of Samuel Beckett, then I can’t expect you to understand, but if you can, then maybe you know what I’m talking about.  Malone have mercy on us both.

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I have more things to say, but in a few minutes I’m taking off for a few days, and I wanted to get this up before the live premiere airs.  So expect a few more ruminations as well as my thoughts on this season’s cast on Friday or Saturday.

BONUS: Mose Allison, “Big Brother”

The Draper-Cooper Continuum of Subjectivity

I apologize for posting so lightly over this past month.  I’ve got a couple of movie, book and television reviews to type up, but I thought I’d dip my toe back into the blogging pool by noting a few sort-of-related observations about subjectivity inspired by some dots connected by James Fallows and one of his readers with regard to Facebook and the recent resignation of Dave Weigel from his position as conservative movement correspondent at the Washington Post.

As far as the Weigel debacle is concerned, it seems to me that the Post wanted an uncritical hack but with Weigel they accidentally got themselves a real reporter smart enough not to suffer fools gladly.  That’s a bit beside the point I’d like to get to though.

As Fallows notes, Michael Zuckerburg, the evil boy-genius behind the plastic police state that is Facebook, has been catching some heat lately for the way the website nudges its users to exhibit themselves as much as possible to as large and public an audience as possible.  One good reason to gently corral the privacy options of facebook users in the direction of greater access is obviously to market that access to advertisers.  However, for Zuckerburg, profit doesn’t seem to be his only motivation.  According to some recent comments, he appears to think that his timely innovations have catalyzed nothing less than a revolution in subjectivity.  Witness the audacity of youth:

“You have one identity,” he emphasized three times in a single interview with David Kirkpatrick in his book, “The Facebook Effect.” “The days of you having a different image for your work friends or co-workers and for the other people you know are probably coming to an end pretty quickly.” He adds: “Having two identities for yourself is an example of a lack of integrity.” (quoted at Crooked Timbers)

His comments reminded me of a favorite exchange from the first season of Twin Peaks between Audrey Horn and Special Agent Dale Cooper, who is surprised as he enters his hotel room at the Great Northern to discover Audrey naked in his bed.  Coop does the right thing (of course).  He resists the sexual advances symptomatic of Audrey’s father issues and resolves instead to be the comforting, emotionally present confidant/analyst she needs:

Cooper: Now I’m going to go down and get us two malts and some fries downstairs. Then I want you to tell me all your troubles.
Audrey: That could take all night.
Cooper: The night is young. Now I’m going to get the food and you're going to get dressed.
Audrey: I can’t tell you all my secrets.
Cooper: Secrets are dangerous things Audrey.
Audrey: Do you have any?
Cooper: No.

That “no” at the end, the lack of pretense, of masks, and of secrets is the essential mark of Agent Cooper, it seems to me.  That disciplined, deliberate authenticity is what distinguishes him so radically from nearly everyone else in Twin Peaks and what enables the viewer to rely upon him so securely and without reservation throughout the series’ run.  It is the reason we find the conclusion of the show, rushed and weird though it was, so strangely devastating.

But Zuckerburg’s remarks also made me think of what I have previously written about Mad Men’s Don Draper:

Like Hitchcock's mad north-by-northwest man, Roger O. Thornhill (What's the O stand for?), there was nothing at Draper's core...nothing to resist or belie the succession of masks he wore.  Though he appeared selfish, Draper was in fact only the other of others.    Each mask was like an advertisement, modelled on someone else's desire, loving the one it's with.

So I guess what I’m getting at is that Cooper and Draper might define the two extremes of a sort of spectrum of subjectivity, ranging from the radical cored-ness of Cooper to the radical masked-ness of Draper.  Each represent such pure examples of each type so as to be capable of existing only in the abstract of fiction.

I’ll also observe that each extreme possesses its own form of psychosis: 

In the case of Agent Cooper, psychosis takes the shape of the paranoiac, whose every movement of thought, every fleeting whim, is rendered visible.  He surveils himself and keeps nothing private.  Does Diana, his confessor/secretary, really exist?  Does the guard at the center of the panopticon?

The form of Draper’s psychosis, on the other hand, is that of the schizo.  Who he is changes to fit the rhetorical situation.  His “true-self,” should such a thing be imagined, would be the obscure totality unknown to itself.  Its name is legion.

I may revisit this thoughts later, but this will suffice for now.

The Zombie as Elegy: a review of "Dead Set"

Zombies have been eating at my brain recently.  It all started about a year ago, when I was motivated by my abiding interest in robots to purchase and read Chris Ryall's graphic novel, Zombies vs Robots (fantastic artwork by Ashley Wood...otherwise I don't recommend it).  I began thinking about how robots and zombies operate similarly but differently as Not-Humans.  Both robots and zombies are a means of manufacturing the characteristics we like to identify as uniquely human.  We like to imagine ourselves free-willed, open-minded and compassionate so we project the opposites of those qualities--mindless instinct, prejudice, and cruelty or absence of emotion (qualities of which even humans, especially humans, are capable)--into imagined non-human others.  This sort of formulation won't be new to anyone familiar with the emerging discourses of posthumanism, particular the Derrida-inspired work of Neil Badmington.

Anyway, while I've never considered myself much a fan of the horror genre, Zombies vs Robots took a little bite out of me and now it's infected.  I'm most of the way through a privately-screened Romero retrospective, and additionally I've been consuming loads of other zombie-related media from the past several years.

A few days ago I watched, late into the night, Charlie Brooker's Dead Set, a roughly three-hour mini-series that aired on E4 in the UK in October 2008.  Like most zombie flicks, the plot is dead simple: the production crew of the reality tv series Big Brother is preparing for a live eviction night.  Rambunctious crowds gather outside the BB house/studio in ravenous anticipation of the vote's result.  News reports of ongoing political protests threaten to bump the show from its usual timeslot, but unbeknownst to all the real trouble starts when a driver who is chauffering one house-mate's mother to the studio pulls off the rode to inspect what looks like a car crash and gets zombie-attacked.  To make the story short, the infection makes its way to the studio and converts the crowd.  Nowhere is safe...except inside the Big Brother house, which is fortunately so cut off from the carnage that when Kelly, a lowly member of the production team, enters the house covered in blood and brandishing large shears, the housemates mistake her at first for Big Brother's latest prank before a bitey encounter with one of the zombies gets their minds all right.

The act of taking refuge from zombies in the Big Brother house pretty much exhausts the novelty of the series.  What follows proceeds predictably.  A run for medical supplies.  A reunion between Kelly and her boyfriend, Riq, who's had his own tragic adventure getting to the studio with the help of a lonely, survival-oriented woman.  Ultimately, those taking refuge in the house turn on each other, acting out a parody of the way the real casts of Big Brother act out a parody of real life, and one by one they fall, ostensibly to the zombies, but really to stupidity, selfishness, jealousy, and cowardice.

Romero's influence is present throughout Dead Set, and this is most explicitly announced when Joplin, the cowardly lionizer, explains to Marky why the zombies have begun to amass outside the studio gates: "some primitive instinct....  This was like a temple for them."  Joplin is echoing a line originally spoken by Stephen in Dawn of the Dead (1978) when Francine asks him why the zombies are drawn to the mall:

Some kind of instinct. Memory of what they used to do. This was an important place in their lives.

Romero doesn't skimp on the thrills and gore, but satire and tragedy are the twin spirits that (re?)animate his films, and I think it's fair to say that, most broadly speaking, what he satirizes is human behaviors conditioned to be automatic...knee-jerk actions committed without first thinking through consequences.  Conversely, Romero regards as a virtue (though not, significantly, as a remedy to habit) the cognitive effort of careful planning.  In other words, the classical analogue to Romero's zombie hordes would be Euripides' Bacchantes.  So drunk they're dead-drunk.

As in Romero's Dawn of the Dead, the recipient of Brooker's satirical barbs in Dead Set is the middle-class.  In Dawn of the Dead Romero focuses on their consumer habits, the more meta-fictional Dead Set is organized around the bourgeois cult of television (confession: I never miss Big Brother in the US, but in my half-hearted defense, the differences between the two shows make the US version much more of  a strategy game and much less of a schadenfruede party...I could say much more but maybe I'll save that for a post in the summer when the show returns).

But there is one detail of Dead Set that, according to one zombie purist, violates the spirit of Romero's undead: Brooker's zombies don't shuffle along, they run.  In a tongue-in-cheek review in The Guardian, Simon Pegg, who wrote and starred in the highly-recommended horror-comedy Shaun of the Dead (2004), criticizes the phenomenon of running zombies, a bastard-innovation that he traces to 2002's 28 Days Later, a film that in his view is not, properly-speaking, a zombie movie because its monsters are merely diseased and not re-animated corpses.  Speed, according to Pegg, violates the essence of the zombie:

As monsters from the id, zombies win out over vampires and werewolves when it comes to the title of Most Potent Metaphorical Monster. Where their pointy-toothed cousins are all about sex and bestial savagery, the zombie trumps all by personifying our deepest fear: death. Zombies are our destiny writ large. Slow and steady in their approach, weak, clumsy, often absurd, the zombie relentlessly closes in, unstoppable, intractable.  

Although in Brooker's defense I'll note the inability of Brooker's zombies to turn doorknobs or climb low fences, Pegg's criticism is insightful and informed, and (if I may return to my initial comparison of zombies with robots) I think he identifies in this passage one of the most significant differences between these two types of non-human others.  Both robots and zombies occupy a sort of middle category between life and dead or between being and non-being, but whereas robots negatively embody for us the humanity we like to imagine we've been given, zombies negatively embody the humanity we can lose.  One is busy being born; they other's busy dying.