By Jordan Carroll
Japanese tv show blurs lines of reality
The Japanese anticipated the American flood of reality television by about a year. In fact, they’ve gone beyond the bleeding edge of American television and into a Videodrome of their own. Enter Nasubi. Nasubi was a young Japanese comedian, one of many trying to get a good gig.
After attending a casting call for a “show-business related job,” Nasubi was blindfolded. The producers took him to an empty apartment, told him to strip naked, and gave him stacks of postcards and a camera. He was told that he would have to mail out the postcards to contests and live entirely on the prizes. He had no food and no comforts other than a table, a cushion, a radio, and a phone. Nasubi lived like this, naked and living alone in an empty apartment, for a year and three months.
At times, he forced himself to eat dog food when nothing else was there and cried when the rice he’d won ran out. He got lucky several times but, more often than not, he went bored or hungry. Nasubi went for weeks without food. He went through anguish and delight over basic necessities. It was a huge ratings success.
The viewers loved watching his pain and his triumph, so much so that the show was extended after he reached the goal of one million Japanese yen in prizes. All the while, Nasubi was oblivious to his famous self-titled show, the reality of the television viewers unknown to him.
Though this is a far cry from “Survivor” or “The Real World” or “The Osbournes,” it’s still in the same vein. The audience wants this sort of authenticity. They don’t want to watch a tragic actor; they want to watch someone undergoing genuine pain. These shows are trivial, really, but they are still symptoms of a greater problem.
The line between reality and entertainment is now blurred, and we don’t need a reactionary think-tank or a post-modern egghead to tell us that. The very fact that the word “reality” and “television” have been combined in a single phrase makes it obvious enough. The viewer and the viewed have created a sort of closed homeostatic system. The viewer tells the television what to do; the television tells the viewer what to do. As a result, political affairs, personal traumas, and everyday life have become featured fights in the coliseum of prime time.
A friend of mine from New Jersey saw half a dozen tourists, standing on a pier and taking photographs of the World Trade Center as it tumbled down. We, as a nation, have begun to view the world-at-large as a television show. Disasters are spectacles. National scandals are spun out in talk-show format. Court room scenes, suicides, and serial killers all get more than fifteen minutes of fame.
The difference between the lives of real people and the lives of sitcom characters is their time slot. We crave entertainment that is real and reality that is entertaining. Regardless of the morality, our nation wants to live in a voyeuristic world.
We want “Network” and “Natural Born Killers” and “The Truman Show.” We want a panopticon of six hundred channels. The gruesome details are just a commodity and the lives ruined are a business expense.
The only thing that stays our hand from creating an American Nasubi is the puritanical crucible of the public eye. We want clean fights, only.
We love to be offended, and that reaction is just more fuel for the media. So we lie and claim we’re watching because it’s news, or we’re watching because we’re disgusted, or that we’re actually interested in these vapid lives.
It’s like a car wreck we can’t keep our eyes off of. If media sensationalism became honest exploitation, we would no longer be able to condemn our celebrities. The media personalities would move from the status of sinners and freaks on display to the beloved status of victim and thus television would damn itself. Only our hypocrisy saves us from our circuses.
Does this man’s tooth brushing look mediagenic enough? Does that man’s scream sound marketable?
