Big Brother, American Style

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 7, 2000 | by Suzanne Fields

It's the year 2000, not 1984, and Big Brother is alive and well. George Orwell was prophetic, but he was off by 16 years and he got it all backwards. We, the plebeians, ordinary men and women, have become Big Brothers watching with omnivorous eyes the most intimate details of other people's lives, intruding into the inner sanctum of strangers like Peeping Toms and Tomasinas.

The latest example is Big Brother, the new CBS "real-life" TV show that airs in one-hour weekly segments on Thursday nights and half-hour segments on the other week nights. It also can be watched for 24 hours live at www.bigbrother2000.com. For those who have been vacationing on Pluto, Big Brother is voyeurism with a capital "V." Five men and five women, all strangers to each other, occupy a small two-bed- room, one-bathroom house under the surveillance of 28 TV cameras and 60 microphones.

I just tuned in and eavesdropped on a conversation between William and Cassandra, who were talking to each other in the bathroom. She was berating him for pushing the others too fast, trying too hard to get into their heads, straining too much to act like a "brother." He said he wanted to be more stimulated. He was tired of hearing everybody's blanketyblank biographies (blankety-blank being a euphemism for the all-purpose f-word). He was restless for more brain activity.

It went on and on, and I listened and listened. This was done as "research," of course, but it was much more than that -- fascination that these two people were talking as though they were alone. They looked totally unconcerned at being watched and I quickly became obsessed with a conversation that was taking place between toilet and shower stall.

In some ways this was worse than what happened in Nineteen Eighty-Four Winston, the protagonist for most of Orwell's novel, could never ignore the existence of Big Brother. The survival of his dignity, his personal integrity, depended on never forgetting, not for a single minute, that Big Brother was there and could intrude on his thoughts and watch what he was doing at any time of day.

But TV shows such as Big Brother -- and its sister show, Survivor -- expose how easy it is to forget that privacy is a value that can be eradicated totally by a camera.

Americans are living on two parallel tracks when it comes to the issue of privacy. We continually express fear of losing personal privacy through information taken by the government or by the Internet -- medical records, bank accounts and credit histories. But we can't seem to get enough of the new TV shows that expose the most secret and indiscreet details in the lives of a new breed of exhibitionists.

So here in Big Brother is Josh, the womanizer who comes to the house equipped with a box of condoms; and Curtis, who describes himself as a Christian and carries a Bible while looking for romance. Brittany likes to dress like girls in porn movies but claims she's a virgin (it's not clear whether CBS investigated that in their "extensive" background checks).

All inhabitants of the house are compelled periodically to enter the "Red Room" alone where they talk about their experiences with an off-camera Big Brother (actually a Big Sister). Ratings require that in these intimate moments contestants reveal their vulnerabilities, humiliate themselves more than they already have and, best of all, rat on their housemates. In the Red Room every other week each person must nominate two housemates for expulsion.

This is where the fun begins for we-the-viewers. We get to vote on the nominations and therefore contribute to the least-savory aspect of the show, public rejection.

One critic has described Big Brother as an "encounter group from hell." It strikes me that it has more in common with behaviorist experiments for testing how much pain one person is willing to in-flict on another. It also echoes some of the brainwashing techniques employed in the movie The Manchurian Candidate. (One person rejected from the Swedish version of Survivor later committed suicide. Too bad, but off camera.)

Winston, the protagonist in Orwell's book, describes the Thought Police as having terrifying omnipotence. "You had to live -- did live, from habit that became instinct -- in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized." That's why he kept his back to the telescreen, though he knew that even his back could be revealing. For 40 years he hated the poster of Big Brother in which the eyes followed him as he moved, hated the image of Big Brother that filled the telescreen wherever he was, hated what Big Brother represented in a passive conformist society. The hatred defined his humanity.

But finally, after all those years of cherishing his stubborn self-willed resistance, Winston's determination is vanquished and his struggle ends. Tears trickle down the side of his nose. "Oh cruel, needless misunderstanding," he cries. He loves Big Brother. The struggle against his integrity is over. He embraces the Big Brother in himself.