Would the residents bond, talk, fall in love, have sex? Lose their humanity? Turn on each other?

Reality is interesting. The static documentaries of Frederick Wiseman ("High School") and the cinéma vérité masterpieces of D.A. Pennebaker and the Maysles brothers ("Dont Look Back" and "Gimme Shelter") demonstrated that some piercing truths can be found in an unblinking, (somewhat) unnoticed camera eye.

There is something terrifying about reality. Why can't we face its implications? Consider "The Truman Show," the movie that critics oddly hailed for 10 minutes a couple of years ago and then promptly forgot about. The trouble with "The Truman Show" was that it wasn't a movie -- it was an idea for a movie. The script never confronted the implications of its lancing high concept: What if you discovered your life was a TV show?

Truman, played by Jim Carrey, lives a perfect life in an entirely created world with a camera under virtually every bush and behind every wall. He discovers what's going on, and walks out. End of film.

The writers couldn't deal with the fact -- or were afraid to deal with the fact -- that "The Truman Show" is about the audience, not the subject. The film tried to make the viewers misty-eyed and human, when in fact they were monsters, ready to sacrifice someone's life and humanity for their entertainment.

The movie needed to begin with Truman going back out into society. Perhaps he'd find he could not blend in -- and eventually opt to go back to his perfect wife and calm life inside a gilded cage. And perhaps then his fans, seeing that their subject was in on the game and quickly tiring of his self-consciousness, might reject him.

His life might, in fact, be canceled.

Or perhaps he'd lose his mind, a mild child raised domestically and released, unequipped, to fight for life in a harsh world.

The audience could then have faced the consequences of its unthinking use of a man's life for its amusement. Encoded in the failure of "The Truman Show" is that very syndrome: For our amusement, the filmmakers crafted a movie that touched on the implications of decadence, but didn't confront them. In this way is a tragedy of pop art writ large on our psyche.

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The sad thing about "Big Brother" is that it was handled so incompetently.

Virtually nothing on the show worked. The idea, as you may know, was to lock 10 strangers, whom we know only by their first names, in a small house for about three months. (The show ends Friday.) There is no phone, no TV, no computer, no radio, no dishwasher or washing machine. The residents slept five to a room, men and women divided.

Cameras monitored their every movement -- in the kitchen, backyard, common areas, bedrooms and bathroom. Even in the shower and toilet, cameras ascertained that the residents were alone before turning demurely to the wall. Every two weeks, the residents nominated two other residents for banishment. Whom they voted for was kept secret.

Then the audience voted, via a 99-cent phone call, to kick one of the nominees out. (Sometimes, ties put three or more people up for banishment.) The last resident standing wins $500,000. The two runners-up get $100,000 and $50,000.

That was the setup. But things soon changed. The isolation of the "Big Brother" house was overstated from the start. The houseguests were interviewed about their thoughts and actions alone each day in the so-called Red Room. In other areas of the house the "Big Brother" announcer spoke to them through a P.A. system. There were first one, and then two, live shows a week, hosted by a chirpy CBS factotum, Julie Chen.

Also, the producers spent their time crafting "challenges" for the houseguests. These were designed both to pass the time and create stress lines in the group.

None of it worked.

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