We Like To Watch

By James Poniewozik

You are not, to paraphrase Jay McInerney, the sort of person who would watch Survivor. It's not just the larvae-eating contest (which ex-Survivor B.B. Andersen, 64, helpfully describes as "like having a booger in your mouth"). It's the gladiatorial concept: stranding 16 people on a tropical island to scrabble for food and shelter, all for the delectation of sluggards licking Cheetos dust off their fingers in their air-conditioned living rooms. It's the Machiavellian twist: having the contestants vote one another off the island until there is a single million-dollar winner and 15 rejects. It's the suffering, the mean-spiritedness, the humiliation.

And that's why you are watching Survivor. And you, and you. More than 23 million of you, a phenomenal audience for summer-rerun season, watched last week as CBS's castaways reaffirmed our faith in human nature by kicking off the lawyer rather than the crotchety old guy. The first week the Pulau Tiga-based game show aired, ABC scheduled the virtually unbeatable Who Wants to Be a Millionaire against it. Survivor won in almost every audience category. The second week, Survivor won hands down. By the third week--when Regis Philbin, monochrome outfit in tatters, slunk away to lick his wounds, leaving Two Guys and a Girl and Norm to take his butt whuppin' for him--Survivor had ballooned into the biggest TV success since the last voyeur-vision landmark: Fox's gift to late-night comedians, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire? Which--we know, we know--you didn't watch.

Something strange is happening in television: the rise of VTV, voyeur television. Despite Survivor's gross-outs, its dark premise and its wall-to-wall cheesiness--the faux-Lion King sound track, the "tribal councils" held in what looks like a Holiday Inn Polynesian lounge circa 1963, the somber narration of Jeff Probst, former host of VH1's Rock 'n' Roll Jeopardy! and challenger to Regis for luckiest-man-in-America status--despite all this, viewers have embraced the desert-island soap with fascination and bemused contempt. Does Dirk have a crush on Kelly? Will Ramona throw up again? Kim Reed, 27, of Syracuse N.Y., who writes for the website mightybigtv.com watches it while on the phone with friends. "I cannot tear myself away," she says. "I have watched every season of The Real World, and it does not compare to the evilness of this show."

Sipping a Miller Lite at Harrys' of Arlington in Arlington Heights, Ill., and watching the third installment, Christopher Wojcik, 24, declares, "I think it's fixed, and I don't buy any of it." He has not, however, missed an episode. "That older guy that got killed off the show last week deserved it. You just don't wash your clothes in the fresh-water supply," he says, referring to the transgression that helped get Andersen the boot. (Note: Losers are not actually executed, but Fox hasn't worked up a knockoff series yet.) "Don't vote me off the island!" is rivaling "Is that your final answer?" as a red flag for water-cooler bores. And last week CBS announced a Survivor sequel, set in the Australian outback.

But something perhaps even stranger is happening: through a sudden explosion of new-wave voyeur shows, ordinary people are becoming our new celebrities. Following Multi-Millionaire's Darva Conger and Rick Rockwell, there's now Stacey Stillman, 27, Survivor's cranky attorney ("I never realized how annoyed I looked," she says. "I was hungry"). There's Julie (last name withheld for security reasons), 20, the Mormon naif in the just-premiered ninth season of MTV's The Real World, in which this year's crew of twentysomethings find romance and hurt feelings while sharing a New Orleans mansion. There's Joyce Bowler, 44, who persuaded her family to spend three hardship-filled months in a house outfitted with 100-year-old technology (or lack of it) for The 1900 House, a fascinating British show that made its debut last week on PBS. "[Celebrity] does become quite addictive," she says. "But you have to realize it's not your whole life. We don't do this for a profession." In VTV-crazed Europe, where Survivor and CBS's forthcoming voyeur game show Big Brother originated, ex-contestants have become pinups and pop stars.

The price: living in front of cameras that catch their every tantrum, embarrassment and moral lapse. TV and media critics are conditioned to believe that once people start entertaining themselves by spying on others, we are just scant moments away from grandma porn and ABC's Monday Night Stoning. (You could base a drinking game on how often the Colosseum, Network and Orwell come up in discussions of VTV.) Stuart Fischoff, professor of media psychology at California State University, Los Angeles, cheerfully admits to enjoying Survivor but adds, "The downside that does concern me is the need to get more excessive and extreme. Let's try a public execution. Let's try a snuff film." On the other hand, TV voyeurism also means millions of ordinary folks are making other ordinary folks, without benefit of surgical augmentation, into stars just for being themselves. Can that be so wrong?

We'll get to that. But first, maybe more puzzling: Why on Earth are so many people willing to let us look? To understand, you need to first look away from television. (Oh, just for a minute. You can do it.) Our culture is deep into a populist period of personal confession, the First-Person Era. There's the unflagging craze for memoirs--especially ordinary people's tales of woe, like Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Elizabeth Kim's story of orphanhood, Ten Thousand Sorrows. "I don't see any sign of them waning," says Jeff Zaleski, book-review editor of Publishers Weekly. "The high-profile memoirs by famous people haven't done well, [but] there's been an increase in the common-man type of memoir." Novelist Martin Amis writes in his own new memoir Experience, "We live in the age of mass loquacity. We are all writing it or at any rate talking it: the memoir, the apologia, the c.v., the cri de coeur. Nothing, for now, can compete with experience--so unanswerably authentic, and so liberally and democratically dispensed." Thus the modern appeal of the real: journalists pepper their reports with the pronoun I; historians focus on the lives of ordinary people rather than those of their rulers; and many literary scholars set aside the classics to study first-person testimonials of peasants and slaves.

Then there's the World Wide Web, the invention that puts the "me" in "medium." No sooner was the Internet opened to home users than its essential text became the personal home page, a document dedicated to the fact that its author exists: here I am, here is my dog, here is my story. And that was before 24-hr. webcams enabled their users to broadcast live feeds from their offices and boudoirs, even from inside their refrigerators (see accompanying story). With so many willing, casual exhibitionists among us, it's less surprising that VTV happened than that it didn't happen sooner.

Is this narcissism or catharsis? It's hard to tell the difference nowadays, but several VTV veterans explain their decisions to bare all in the language of therapy and personal growth. Survivor contestant Sonja Christopher, 63, was already a survivor--of breast cancer--and signed on as a way of moving on. "I had been through a lot in the past two years," she says. "Following this fantasy, doing this crazy thing, was a way to try to heal myself. It was a survival instinct." "I felt suffocated and trapped in the life I was in," says The Real World's Julie. "I certainly did a lot of growing up." Others, like Bowler, compare the experience to adventure travel. "Other people want to climb Mount Everest, but I've always wanted to go back and forward in time," she says.

And the potential money and fame generally don't hurt. That was the explicit draw of Making the Band, the ABC reality show that chronicles the auditioning and training of aspiring boy band O-Town. "It was the sweetest," says Trevor Penick, 20, of getting picked for the show. "Just like The Real World, you know?" Indeed. Some seasons, The Real World has seemed like a postgraduate program for aspiring actors, models and singers, with more than 35,000 applicants a year. "The ideal candidate [for a VTV show] would be a strong narcissist," says Atlanta psychologist Robert Simmermon, a fellow in the division of media psychology of the American Psychological Association. "Narcissism is not all a bad thing. It's kind of like cholesterol. You have good and bad narcissism, and you have to have a healthy mix."

In Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, Neal Gabler argued that celebrity culture had created a universal lust for the camera, and he sees these series as a case in point. "Reality has become the greatest entertainment of all," he says. "It's symptomatic of a larger phenomenon that all of life is entertainment." It's a grand argument, appealing to our now conditioned distrust of the fame machine. But it's an easy one to take too far. In fact, most of us don't want to, in Gabler's words, "get to the other side of the glass," not this way. That's partly why we goggle at these shows, dumb struck.

For better and worse, VTV provides something many sitcoms and dramas don't. Surprises, for instance. "It's like a baseball game," says Paul Romer, the Dutch executive producer and creator of Big Brother. "Even when the game isn't interesting, you wait and stay because the next hit could be a home run." True, arguments over who's hogging the rat meat are probably not what Aristotle had in mind when conceiving the Poetics. And producers can contrive conflict, such as Survivor's races and bug-eating contests, not to mention its million-dollar endgame. (Georgetown linguistics professor Deborah Tannen, author of The Argument Culture, says this "shows that the programmers don't think human interaction itself is dramatic.") But Survivor functions as drama, if not art, because we can map its petty squabbles and triumphs on our own lives. Those mismatched 16, working together, then looking out for No. 1, could be your co-workers, your family.

For a celebrity-sated audience, there's also a refreshing populism in the casting; here are people that you rarely see on TV: mixed-race characters; the devout; chubby gay men over 30. In fact, The Real World's diversity may now be cliche--gay guy, meet the Asian girl; white beatnik, meet the alcoholic. (This year's gay guy, before coming out to his housemates, coyly announced he had "a secret," and regular viewers who had witnessed previous coming outs knew in a split second what it would be. If you use that line by the show's ninth season, you'd better have a severed head in your luggage.) But that casting has also proved genuinely worthwhile. Pedro Zamora explicitly used his stint on the series' third season to raise awareness of AIDS, which claimed his life shortly after the show aired. "He was the only one doing the show for truly altruistic reasons," says castmate Judd Winick, 30.

VTV stars offer a feeling of accessibility that traditional TV's Flockharts and Schwimmers, with their phalanxes of publicists and flunkies, don't. You feel you're seeing, if not the true person, at least a less mediated version. (The charming gent on the island could be a complete jerk at home, but so could your charming dentist.) This puts these fame-game amateurs in the awkward position of having their very souls judged in public. "People stop me in the street and say, 'I really related to your character,'" says Real World vet Kevin Powell, 33. "I wasn't a character. That was me." And these noncelebrity celebrities tend to be bite-size stars, celebrity snacks whom the public down in one gulp. Survivor spins off a new star every week as the contestants are voted off; each makes a weeklong round of the press--all to stoke the ratings of the bastards who eighty-sixed them!--and then flames out. "I'm so tired," Stillman said the day after her expulsion aired. "I've done about 40 interviews so far."

And unlike TV actors, VTV stars don't know what their "characters" will be like until the show airs. In 1973 the Loud family of California became the test rabbits for the genre when PBS filmed their lives--including the coming out of son Lance and the breakup of the parents' marriage--in the seminal cinema-verite documentary An American Family. The Louds were utterly unprepared to become national symbols of suburban angst. "My mom was very proud of the family she had raised," says Lance, now 49. "It ultimately crushed her how much of the show's emphasis was on the divorce." Sister Michele, now 42, remembers the first screening. "The opening title card read An American Family, and then the words cracked and fell to the bottom of the screen," she says. "We all just looked at each other and said, 'Uh-oh.'" Lance, who parlayed his notoriety into a writing career, says his father Bill, 79, called Survivor "No. 1 on my must-not-see list."

Ironically, the mainstream embrace of voyeurism comes precisely as many Americans feel their own privacy is in danger, be it from surveillance on the job, marketers on the Net or database-wielding bureaucrats in their HMOs. "The notion that people should be able to go home and close their front door and shut out the outside world seems to be breaking down, especially in light of the new technologies," says Reg Whitaker, political science professor at York University in Canada and author of The End of Privacy (New Press; $25). "These shows are a kind of acting out of the mingled fascination and fear that surrounds this, a way of playing it out in a kind of harmless way." For some, anyway. Survivor rates best with the young and the well-off--those who grew up with computers as helpers and playmates, those who use "nannycams" to watch the hired help from the office monitor. Where you stand on VTV, it seems, largely depends on where you stand on technology.

Thus far, though, TV's voyeurism has not met the organized moral outcry that European groups--religious, political, psychological--have directed toward the Continent's reality freak shows. (Although People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals has protested against CBS because the Survivor contestants monstrously killed animals in order to eat them.) But Americans have not yet met Big Brother.

Walk through the nearly completed seven-room house in Studio City, Calif., where 10 contestants will spend 89 days being filmed for edited, same-day broadcasts five nights a week (starting July 5), and you get an idea of what so unsettled some continentals. Built from prefabricated modular units, it is perhaps the least homey-looking house $10 million can buy. The walls are lurid yellow and purple here, dead blue-gray there; the Ikea furniture is spare in the extreme. It is Martha Stewart's hell, a cold Bauhaus panopticon riddled with cameras.

The decor, says creator Romer, is intentional. The hope is that the "houseguests" will decorate their prison themselves. But if anyone wanted to put a warm, fuzzy face on VTV, Big Brother is not it. (In fact, Romer comes off rather like Christof, the controlling, vaguely European creator played by Ed Harris in The Truman Show.) The participants, to be chosen this week, will have no privacy and no respite; a 24-hr. website will stream video from selected cameras in the house. "When you walk through a city, you look through windows and wonder who is living there," says Romer. "That curiosity is completely satisfied by these shows." The residents will, barring emergencies, have no outside contact, except with the producers. They will harvest eggs from chickens, grow their own veggies and wash their clothes on washboards. And unlike on Survivor, they will be voted off by viewers (the last standing wins $500,000). They will be rejected by America.

The rules, the surroundings, even the name--everything about Big Brother seems calculated to provoke publicity-generating criticism, viewer guilt and inmate discomfort and rebellion. From the ads (we get a glimpse of a shadowy form behind a shower curtain) to the totalitarian overtones (the producers address houseguests through a p.a. system), it pushes every button about VTV's potential for corruption and abuse.

So how about that guilt? VTV detractors like to invoke the Christians and the lions, but there's an important element missing in that argument: volition. As in so many matters sexual--and there's almost always a sex element in VTV, right down to the syndicated candid-camera dating show Blind Date--there is a divide between those who will accept any act between consenting adults and those who will not. The criticism that VTV "reality" isn't "real"--it is edited, subjects adopt false faces--is absolutely valid. It is also, by now, a truism, widely acknowledged by viewers and many participants alike. This is part of why we enjoy laughing at these series: they let us feel superior not only to the people on them but to the medium itself. If these shows have made their viewers into savvier media critics, that's not a bad thing.

More abstract and worrisome is the overall message the shows send: that life is an elimination contest, that difference means discord. The Real World is a sort of teen-friendly Adam-and-Eve story--seven young people, set up in a coolly furnished paradise, are bound to screw it up. Survivor and Big Brother change the reference from Genesis to Lord of the Flies and No Exit. But if what they show can be ugly, it's insulting to the audience to assume viewers must take this as a model for life--that's like saying Chinatown is an immoral movie because the bad guy gets away. The argument for and against VTV comes down to this: Are people helpless against all-powerful media? Are they incapable of participating in the media of their own free will? Are they unable to watch people acting badly and yet remain good themselves?

One suspects and hopes our souls will survive. In fact, viewers may reject VTV altogether before long. In Holland, Big Brother's follow-up, De Bus, drew just 5.7% of viewers, compared with 53% for its predecessor, even though its pretty young contestants all shared the same 5-m-wide bed on their communal-living bus. Survivor, gripping as it may currently be, seems like it should be in the dictionary under novelty. And Big Brother, with its less exotic setting and nightly schedule, may prove a Big Bore once viewers sample it. Not that you're the sort of person who would ever watch Big Brother in the first place. Are you?

--With reporting by Carole Buia, Amy Lennard Goehner, Georgia Harbison and Benjamin Nugent/New York, Jeanne McDowell and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Karen Ann Cullotta/Chicago and Rachele Kanigel/Walnut Creek

With reporting by Carole Buia, Amy Lennard Goehner, Georgia Harbison and Benjamin Nugent/New York, Jeanne McDowell and Jeffrey Ressner/Los Angeles, Karen Ann Cullotta/Chicago and Rachele Kanigel/Walnut Creek