Survivor II

The Plaid Adder
Comments:plaidder@mindspring.com

Oh my God, how much more could I hate this show? Let's see...no, no, not very much more.

First of all, the faux Stonehenge "tribal council" set offends my innermost being. There is just something so wrong about going into one of the few places on earth that has managed to resist our attempts to screw up the planet and then creating a completely artificial movie set which is supposed to look all cool and "primitive." Then, there's that host guy explaining that before every vote there's going to be a little "ritual." Of course he has to explain exactly what deep meaning each element of the ritual has because this "ritual" is a piece of cheese cooked up by the producers which has no actual significance whatsoever. "Each of these torches represents your life in the tribe..." Uh huh. And then of course there's the voting off, during which you get to watch the one person on the "tribe" who might have had some dyke potential crumple in humiliation as all the younger, cuter chicks turn on her. (Cause as Liza said, "Look at 'em! They're not gonna vote off some hot young guy!") After which the host guy snuffs out her little torch with the words, "The tribe has spoken."

The tribe has spoken my ass!

There is something fundamentally disgusting to me about the way this show takes an utterly contrived situation which would never have come to exist without millions of dollars in corporate sponsorship, months of marketing research, and a huge technological apparatus, and tries to dress it up in "primitive" authenticity. The whole premise underlying the appeal of this show is that what's happening to these 16 people represents some kind of return to our primitive origins. (Otherwise why are they "tribes"? Why build that set? Why hold these "rituals"? Why go to aboriginal territory?) The effect is that the kind of behavior that "Survivor" encourages--backstabbing, betrayal, deceit, self-interest, etc.--is made to look like it's our natural state. The whole show is designed to sell you on the idea that you're watching human nature stripped down to its most basic essentials; and of course, it's ugly.

Unfortunately, what we are watching is not only ugly, it's bullshit. The behind-the-scenes maneuvering and Machiavellian savagery for which Survivor has become famous is not driven by primitive human nature or by the necessity of trying to survive in a harsh environment; it's driven by the rules of the game, which arbitrarily demand that people be periodically forced out of the community. These rules do not exist because they have some basis in "primitive" culture; they exist because the producers know that cruelty makes good television. This is not the story of primitive culture; this is the story of Western capitalism. These people are not fighting for their lives; they're fighting for a million dollars. Without that prize hanging in the air--and, perhaps more importantly, without the tacit understanding that none of the contestants are in any real danger of dying, and that they will all get to go home once the filming is over--a lot would change.

For instance, if these "tribes" really believed that their actual continued survival would depend on their ability to work together, things would be very different. (Not necessarily better, but definitely different.) If the rules required a team to win as a whole, instead of requiring that only one person can win, that would completely change the way people interacted. And so on and so forth, my point being that to force people to behave in this particularly depressing way is fine and dandy--after all, they volunteered--but to go to great lengths to present this kind of behavior as fundamental, natural, and therefore justifiable can only do us harm.

A more accurate name for this program, really, would be "Discomfort!" or "Americans Get Paid To Live In Third World Conditions!" The fact that we consider it a huge accomplishment for a group of well-fed, healthy Americans to endure 42 days without electricity, running water, or climate control, when there are hundreds of thousands of people all over the world who spend their entire lives like this, tells you something about our national sense of entitlement.

It's not that this kind of behavior doesn't go on outside of Surivor. After all, that's the most painful thing about watching the tribal council--it's just like high school. But that's exactly my problem with it. What is the point of taking the worst elements of adolescent culture and dignifying them with this pseudo-aboriginal setting and fake ritual trappings? The "tribe" has spoken? No, the clique has spoken, and it would be a lot more honest if instead of snuffing out the loser's torch, the host just instructed the rest of the team to get up and move to a different lunch table.

I'm getting old and cranky, I know. But it really bugs me to see people trying to sell this as an image of our essential human nature. Nobody knows what our essential human nature is. How much could it hurt us to try to come up with an idea of human nature that we could try to live up to instead of down to? And even if that would be too much to ask, couldn't we maybe expect that in this day and age, people would understand something about the dangers of cultural appropriation--enough, at least, to realize what an insult a circus like "Survivor II" is to, for instance, the people who for thousands of years have managed to live in the Australian outback without regularly sacrificing each other to the TV gods?