Shots In The Dark - reality and fiction in television programs - Brief Article

Interview, April, 2001 by Graham Fuller

WILL REALITY KILL THE MOVIES?

Nine whites and their black bus driver have been stranded in an abandoned settlement in the Namibian Desert. They have no means of contacting anyone who could rescue them, beyond burning the tires of their bus in the hope the black smoke will alert a passing aircraft. They must get by on dew scraped from the roofs of the buildings and canned carrots, some of which have turned poisonous.

The only resourceful man among them treks off across the dunes to get help. We get to know the rest as they struggle to withstand the baleful heat and each other: a washed-up actor; a disappointed American woman and her passive husband, whom she is bent on emasculating; a boisterous American girl who hints she has worked in the sex industry; a standoffish French girl with intellectual pretensions; a hot-tempered Englishman, his mousy wife, and his contemptuous father; and the none-too-bright African driver. The scene is set for power games, sexual brinkmanship and, perhaps, killing.

This is not the blueprint for an especially fiendish third series of Survivor, but the plot of the latest Dogma entry, The King Is Alive. Directed by Kristian Levring, it opens here next month, hot on the tail of Series 7, Daniel Minahan's savage satire of reality television. With Robert Zemeckis' Cast Away--in which a plucky volleyball survives a FedEx plane crash but not the ordeal of becoming Tom Hanks' alter ego--this pair of smart digital video entries comprise less a trend than a whisper from the zeitgeist.

Survivorismo was always going to creep into the movies around about now; television, better tuned to mass prurience than cinema, just got there first. Survivor and its knockoffs happily legitimize social Darwinism, deriving their thrills not from the spectacle of human endurance but from the cruel elimination or humiliation of their weakest participants. Lord of the Flies for fame-hungry narcissists, these shows are just one more reason American TV is a national disgrace right now.

How did it get that way? We are moving, clearly, through the period of decadence that habitually comes at the end of one century and the beginning of the next. In contemporary popular culture, it is manifesting itself not as decadent art that will make future museum pieces, but in the squalid exploitation of people's weaknesses. Survivor is no more a celebration of outdoorsy resilience than The Howard Stern Show is a celebration of women's sexuality. It is, though, a fascinating evolutionary development, because in the world of reality TV--as in amateur porn--the stars come from the audience. Actors should think twice about striking in June. It could only be a matter of time before we say, "Who needs 'em?"

The King Is Alive and Series 7 weren't predicated on the Survivor archetype, but they suggest the depths of degradation to which it aspires. I Levring's film, the characters are tourists whos driver got lost in the night; the desert mocks the (barely) civilized behavior as the Outback did the Sydney schoolgirl and her brother in Walkabout (1971). Led by the actor, they rehearse King Lear, yet the casting and performing of the play only hastens the betrayals and divisions among the group. The jittery bleached-out digital video aesthetic serves the movie admirably as what scan empathy these misplaced Westerners shared evaporates, reducing most of them to animals- Janet McTeer's vicious wife evokes nothing less than a praying mantis.

Reality TV's dog-eat-dog imperative is mordantly literalized in Series 7, which takes the form of a prime-time program in which the contenders must kill each other off until just one survives. Writer-director Minahan skillfully deploys a full arsenal of tabloid TV tropes in rendering his search-and-destroy game show credible as the reigning champ, a pregnant Ma Barker type hungrily played by Brooke Smith, faces off with a blustering asbestos-removal worker, a Christian E.R. nurse, an over-protected schoolgirl, an artist dying of testicular cancer, and a paranoid geezer.

Minahan originally took the queasy concept to a network that asked him to "make it more like Ally McBeal"; had his film been broadcast, he might have had a War of the Worlds-size shocker on his hands--at least in gullible parts of the country. It is most effective at its bloodiest: There is something eerily banal about the way one contestant bludgeons another to death in a mall before being blasted in the chest by a rifle--but, hey, in 2001, that's entertainment.

Graham Fuller is Interview's Film Writer at Large.