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Music Review
Sharps & Flats
On Rhino's exhaustive "1970: The Complete Fun House Sessions," the Stooges obliterate the line between dumb joke and visionary achievement.
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[03/10/00]

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But before the show could be aired, a jilted player (apparently a disturbed Bosnian refugee) threw himself in front of a train. If only Rick Rockwell had anything like his courage! In the ensuing scandal, the show was temporarily banned and one of the producers fired from the network. Further, the media claimed that many of the players had become scrawny and malnourished, and that the environment of the show elicited every possible sort of antisocial behavior, short of cannibalism and chasing one another around with spears, from the contestants.

In 1998, the Danes and the Norwegians got involved as well, and both the game and the selection process for contestants were modified to ensure that nobody would end up dead. But the American "Survivor," playing it safer still, has only 16 contestants as opposed to the 48 of the Scandinavian series. Its big innovation: more money! And greed! The winner will take home a million bucks, as opposed to the roughly $33,000 the Scandinavian game paid out. And the promotional material makes it clear that the U.S. show isn't even nominally about democracy. Rather, it's about capitalism. You -- yes, you -- might be the sole survivor! You could outlast all the other contestants and become a millionaire! Losers! Winners! Lots of loot!

Even so, unless the players launch a mutiny against CBS and declare an island republic, the attenuated American version of the show will probably be to the Swedish original what MTV's tepid "The Real World" is to Europe's genuinely edgy "Big Brother." On the wildly popular Dutch program, a group of nine strangers, ranging in age from the teens to the early 40s, was locked into a suburban house for 100 days and given $85 a week for supplies, including food. As with "Expedition Robinson," the idea was to set up a petri dish for group cooperation -- only this time in a panoptic fashion, with cameras and microphones covering every possible location.

Following a general trend, the players on "Big Brother" voted every few weeks to kick out a stooge, and at the end, the stooges assembled to vote for a winner, who left the premises $120,000 richer. On "The Real World," of course, the action is heavily staged. Plus, you're allowed to leave the house, and the cameras don't follow you into the bathroom. In the "Big Brother" universe, you were locked in, with no escape at all from the prying eyes of millions of TV and Internet viewers.

Several countries, including Britain and Canada, have expressed interest in hiking the "Big Brother" idea, but so far there's been no discernible interest from America. The show may just be too extreme. We like to talk about our domestic entertainment industry as though it were the world's beacon of crassness and meretricious display, but the crassness of our shows is more in the attitudes they display than in their actual content -- whereas for the rest of the world, it's the other way around.

Our fairly mild "Real World" practically radiates voyeurism and Gen-Y psychopathology: Its participants habitually mug and pose for the cameras as though they'd always thought of themselves as being on TV, as though the cameras inside were always turned on. Meanwhile, the doughty, friendly Dutch were somehow able to whip up a reality-TV show for the younger demographic that involved totalitarian mind control and bathroom cams ("Big Brother" was on the youth-oriented Veronica Network), without having it seem especially sordid or exploitative. The difference is that the Dutch show, much like "Expedition Robinson" and "Ryori no Tetsujin," had an essential playfulness that allowed truly bizarre and risky things to go on without dragging the viewer into a philosophical struggle over the principles of watching and of being watched. The show knew all along -- and its participants and viewers knew all along, as more atomized, more socially disconnected Americans seem often to forget -- that no matter how real or heavy things might become, it was only a TV show.

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