Wednesday, June 8, 2005
the MOSCOW TIMES
First there was "Za Steklom," or "Behind Glass," Russia's first reality show. The good people at TV-6 didn't bother purchasing the rights to the popular show "Big Brother," which was taking Europe by storm at the time. They just went and copied it.
The reaction in Russia was no different than anywhere else: Viewers couldn't get enough of watching six young people isolated in an enclosed space under round-the-clock surveillance from the television cameras. Not content to watch the show on TV, people lined up outside the Rossia Hotel, where the glass menagerie was set up, to see the six up close and personal. At times the scene recalled the lines that used to stretch across Red Square from the mausoleum, where that "most humane of humans" lay in state, the hero in a most inhumane show.
The young men and women who volunteered to be interned behind glass were nothing special -- just average kids dreaming about getting something for nothing. Perhaps their very ordinariness was what attracted such a wide audience. The show's participants were popular because they were the first of their kind.
The public fell in love with its six unpretentious heroes, but fell out of love just as quickly when the show ended and they returned to real life, once more proving that the public is both frivolous and fickle. You only exist as long as you're on TV. Once you're not on the tube anymore, it's as if you never existed, particularly if you never had any real talent to begin with.
The next two reality shows aired by TV-6 and its successor, TV Center, tanked. The heroes of "Posledny Bifshteks," or "the Last Steak," and "Teper Ty v Armii," or "You're in the Army Now," were totally uninteresting. Unlike the participants on "Za Steklom," they also had no concept of how they appeared to others. They preened for the cameras and tried to win over the public by behaving in a way they thought would appeal to people.
Reality shows then disappeared from Russian television until TNT decided to give the format another try. TNT is aimed primarily at younger viewers who aren't all that concerned with moral and ethical issues. Good thing. After all, how ethical is it to stick real people "under glass" and observe them as if they were guinea pigs or lab rats?
The reality show "Bolshoi Brat," or "Big Brother," broke all sorts of records in Europe and even in several Asian countries before coming to Russia. Endemol, the Dutch company with worldwide rights to Big Brother, has already raked in more than $5 billion on the franchise. TNT is estimated to have paid Endemol some $5 million for the rights to Big Brother, clearly intending not just to break even but to make a profit on the show.
The idea behind the show is simple: Viewers not only get to watch a bunch of average Joes going about their business, they also influence events on the show by voting with their cell phones. Every vote costs money, and most of the money goes into the producers' pockets. Tens of thousands of people cast their votes, and every 100th (or some other round number) voter gets a cash prize. That's a powerful motivation.
But the real motivation for viewers of Big Brother is the illusion of influencing the participants' fate. People can vote for their favorites, or "save them," as the producers put it. They can also vote to kick the jerks and the morons off the show, with the added bonus of watching them suffer.
The endless humiliations to which the participants are subjected are also a big draw. To be fair, the participants volunteer to go on the show. But once they're in the house, Big Brother's in charge. He can make them handcuff themselves to one another and do everything and go everywhere together -- with the exception of the bathroom. A proud Georgian named Georgy couldn't take it: He sliced his arm with a knife and left the show voluntarily. His "accomplices" were stunned. What was the big deal?
Big Brother can make female participants parade around topless in front of the men. Some of them broke down in tears of humiliation in the confession room, but none refused to go through with it.
You get the impression that most of the participants like being humiliated, but they like humiliating their fellow participants even more. Last week was "army week." Everyone was dressed in khaki uniforms and had to observe military discipline, especially the part about obeying the sergeants without question.
Big Brother selects a new sergeant each day. Today you could be lording it over everyone and handing out orders, and tomorrow you could be on the receiving end, paying for the hell you put everyone through the day before. It's a lot like "dedovshchina," or hazing: The fresh recruits endure the abuse of the older soldiers, consoling themselves with the knowledge that next year they'll take out their anger on the next group.
Joseph Brodsky once described prison as a lack of space compensated by an excess of time. In this sense, the participants on Big Brother are most assuredly in prison, even if they choose to be there. And as they do in any enclosed space, people begin to behave as if they're in prison or the army. Respect is reserved for the strong and the daring, not the finest among them. They go after the ones who are too smart or independent -- although it's unclear what sort of independence we're talking about when these people are all volunteers.
Why do people agree to go on shows like Big Brother? Probably because they're bored with their lives and looking for excitement on the side. Because they can't organize and spice up their own lives, and they figure that all-powerful television will do it for them.
But for all its incredible power, television can't turn intensely uninteresting people into the life of the party overnight. All it can do is stick them together in an enclosed space and watch how their incompatibilities emerge in all sorts of arguments, intrigues and plots. It can make abundantly clear that people are prepared to sacrifice their freedom and their sense of self-worth, not to mention their dignity, for a little popularity and a big payoff.
In other countries, where people imbibe the ideals of freedom and personal dignity along with their mothers' milk, reality shows like Big Brother may seem exotic, a sort of artificial nightmare that allows both the participants and the viewers to experience the horror of bondage, of life under surveillence when your thoughts and actions are completely controlled. Returning to normal life, Western viewers can breathe a sigh of relief and say: "Thank God it's just a TV show. In my country we have freedom and inviolable rights. We're not slaves."
But we Russians were brought up from childhood in the very world that these reality shows imitate. We need to learn self-respect and respect for others, not take pleasure in watching people just like us subjected to humiliation. Whatever people might say, television educates us. Big Brother is always right, we're told. Submit unconditionally and you'll be rewarded, we're taught. As the philosopher Nikolai Berdyayev said, man is a slave because freedom is difficult, while slavery is easy. This is the lesson television is teaching us.
