Mother Jones on TV's Solitary
As part of the "Torture Hits Home" package in the new issue of Mother Jones, Michael Mechanic has written a terrific story about the Fox reality TV show Solitary. The show features contestants who undergo brutal psychological and physical "treatments" with a $50,000 prize as the carrot on the stick. Reminds me of Videodrome. From Mother Jones:
LinkThe brainchild of producers Andrew Golder and Lincoln Hiatt, Solitary places nine men and women in cramped pods for up to 12 days with no human contact. "Guests," their names reduced to numbers, must instead submit to Val—a female spin on Hal, the sentient computer from the sci-fi classic 2001—who serves as host, enabler, and oppressor. (Hiatt calls her "a benevolent bitch.")
In season one, after softening up her charges, Val delivers the first treatment. Players are allowed to sleep but are awakened repeatedly by earsplitting alarms; to stop the onslaught, they must regurgitate a numeric code that grows more complex with each cycle. After hours of this, Number 4, a tough 30-year-old Romanian immigrant, mutters, "This is a psychotic-experiment show, not a reality show."
It gets worse—or better, depending on your perspective. Bleary-eyed contestants must scrutinize a video montage of horrors to solve an equation. They complete hundreds of sickening revolutions on a sit-and-spin apparatus. They lie for hours on a bed of wooden pegs; a Buddhist martial arts instructor deems the pain "intolerable." Players can quit anytime by hitting a big red button mounted in their pods, but to do so means going home with only the phone number of a consulting psychologist. The last person standing leaves with $50,000...
Their initial Solitary concept... was likely among the darkest ideas ever pitched to a TV executive. They proposed burying 10 cells in a desolate location such as the Salton Sea with nothing visible from the surface but a row of ventilation shafts. "From the sky," Hiatt marvels, "the thing would look like a bizarre alien graveyard." Contestants would be allowed sleep and food but would remain (hidden cameras aside) in utter isolation: no treatments, no Val, no nothing. "When they want to leave, they walk out into the light, and the last person to walk out into the light wins," Golder explains. (He and Hiatt habitually point out that contestants who participate in Solitary do so of their own free will.) "It was a very draconian social experiment."
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Only in America ... or, um, a Stalinist gulag.
I could do the original version, but I frikkin' hate sit&spins...
Anyone ever read "The Running Man" by Stephen King? Totally different from the movie (which has it's own charm) with Governor Arnold.
In the book the Running Man is just one of the many games on the Network. "Dig Your Own Grave", "Treadmill to Bucks", where a person with a heart or respiratory condition runs on a treadmill and, my favorite "Swimming with Crocodiles"
Exactly how far are we from that now? It's not just the sickness of the producers that scares the shit out of me, it's the audience who are watching largely to see the absolute worst of humanity.
Oh and all those people in the running man, they volunteered too.
What? Really? Did we really just transform human suffering into entertainment? Farewell, Roman Empire!
(They Shoot Horses, Don't They? also comes to mind)
Are they told when other people drop out? Seems like it would be Extra Cruel with More Drama to let them go on for days after everyone else had dropped out, and then the last person finally gives up and drops out thinking he is a failure, only to find out he won the $50k.
I, too, think i could handle the first version, but the one with the sit &spins and the blaring alarms and crap? ugh. No way.
This is incredibly sick. They are torturing people for the entertainment of the masses. You can dress it up in fancy language, but that is what they are doing. Now, there has always been a undercurrent of this in the reality genre, but it has always been presented as something to be overcome, not endured and celebrated.
They are TORTURING people on NATIONAL TV for other, presumably regular, people to LAUGH AT over dinner.
I swear to god we are mere years away from televised executions a la Running Man.
This is torture porn, pure an simple.
Now when we have the next Abu Ghraib, Rush can point to this and say, 'It's no worse than that TV show.'
This is just Guantanamo with cameras, right ?
Ohh, and without the waterboarding, I hope.
Well, shows like American Idol have been torturing the audience for a few years now . . . Time to turn things around I guess.
Seriously though, this is going too far. The producers should have their salaries revoked and donated to Amnesty International.
This would be a truly excellent show if it actually did 'advanced interrogation techniques' to good-looking, white participants. You'd have to randomize the show, so that the audience didn't get desensitized to it.
It'd be a great (I'd hope) wake-up call to all those Americans who are still cool with what Camp X-Ray (and all the other allegedly invisible) detention centers are doing in the name of Security and Freedom.
@7, yeah I think there's definitely something to the idea that this kind of show could normalize the idea of torture even when it's not really torture. If you can get the public psychologically adjusted to seeing people in agony, it's not as much of a shock to see depictions of real torture.
Fascinating show though.
Great. What others do for "re-education" and state control, we'll do for mass amusement. Too bad we won't even get reliable psychological data from this unethical exercise.
There is a big difference. The participants *can* leave at any time. And frankly by showing the psychology and agony of this stuff I think it makes people *more* rather than less aware of the implications of things that happen when the US Government uses similar tactics on prisoners.
The idea that this form of expression is less acceptable because it allows people to get the wrong impression about something that isn't actually related is scary. Should we also get rid of shows that document what soldiers experience in SERE training because people might get the wrong impression?
I read the M.J. article a couple of weeks ago, and frankly I'd love to do this show if it didn't end up on national TV. Yeah, I'm a freak, but I enjoy testing my limits in this way and if other people want to do so I think it's their right. At a certain point liberal parentalism becomes just another form of big brother.
I was born to be on that show.
On the one hand: I'd partcipate in a heartbeat, just because I'm an extremophile. Endure SERE-level endurance testing and get paid? sign me /up/. (yes, I would get paid. I have slept through tornados and been awake for five days straight, ridden in a Yugo with four other 250-300 pound men and hiked Philmont, and can engage myself in tasks many others find screamingly boring - the secret of my employment.)
On the other hand: This really does de-sensitise people to torture.
Dichotomy! One electric monk, stat!
It's horrific, but not as creative as what was forecast by the BBC's "Time Trumpet." I think it will be around 2012 when "Rape an Ape" becomes a huge hit. Contestants enter a cage with the goal of forcing themselves on an ape. The show is revitalized with "Rape a Celebrity Ape," where the subject is a celebrity in an ape suit.
Does the money take the place of the authority figure in the Milgram experiments? If you can question the subject all the way to 500 volts you win $50,000...
What's next? A reality show based on the Stanford prison experiment?
The movie Network predicted these times well.
"The Lust of the Eye" Beware.
"Where am I?"
"In the Village."
"What do you want?"
"Information."
"Whose side are you on?"
"That would be telling…. We want information. Information! INFORMATION!"
"You won't get it."
"By hook or by crook, we will."
"Who are you?"
"The new Number Two."
"Who is Number One?"
"You are Number Six."
"I am not a number — I am a free man!"
(Laughter from Number Two.)
cue the big beach ball
One thing's for sure: Number Two of The Prisoner was a benevolent lib'rul peacenik in his interrogation techniques compared to the right wing waterboarding torture-lusting brownshirts controlling "'mericuh" today.
@20:
It took me years to figure out they were answering his question all along.
This is the bread and circuses of our era.
And it's from FOX, natch.
Does our President Chimpy McCokesnort know how to play the violin?
...while I don't buy into the whole auto-hate of reality TV which seems to have permeated the internet, I'm going to concede that this is probably too far.
If you're going to do psychological experiments of this ilk, then it needs to be friendly- Channel 4's "Shattered", a reality show where the contestants had to stay awake for a week, managed to avoid a massive shitstorm simply because all the events were things like being made to cuddle teddy bears or have lullabys sung to you, and a cameraderie between the contestants was encouraged- as opposed to the likes of Big Brother where it's all about conflict.
Of course, I could be falling for overnegative reporting of the show- it's quite easy to gather together a negative view on this show on a blog as politically charged and... let's say "opinionated" as BoingBoing.
Local TV news directors have been getting bonuses for live tears since television began, like 60 years ago (NBC Cleveland started October 1948).
Mad Magazine was parodying that fact in print in 1960-1 with the newscaster twisting the victims arm off camera.
@#14: See you in Pittsburgh.
@#24: http://www.unm.edu/~luvcraft/bush_fiddled.jpg
Oh please! Granted BoingBoing is openly leftist, but this is just one step too far. You guys are lambasting a scripted reality game show as being torture? That's just utter nonsense.
I caught a couple of episodes of Solitary 2.0 one night, when it was really late and there was nothing else on. So say these volunteers are being tortured is just flat wrong on one level, and just stupid on another.
This isn't the Running Man or the Long Walk or other fictional examples of torture entertainment. The contestants arn't executed or maimed following their participation. They don't have life-long psychological scars from their time on a game show. Sure someone might eat a foul-tasting blend of their favorite foods. Sure, someone might have to recite a complex message after moving a load of bricks. But to equate this as torture is just stupid. Being as the worst thing than can happen is the contestants don't receive the prize and lose a game, this hardly compares to forced captivity and real torture as has been seen over the course of human history.
The over-reaction from my fellow young people (20s and 30s) is just sad. In their quest to find something wrong with such a program, they make these grandiose claims. And when viewed by other trendy "radicals", the claims get bigger and more absurd claims and everyone feels better than they can spot such horrible things. But when non Code Pink members/non left-wing extremists..you guys look like you guys like you're sheltered, guilt-ridden liberals that try to apply poorly constructed arguments so something that is utterly pointless, in this case a game show. I mean, come on.
I hope one day I hope you guys will turn your attention to truly important matters, like the fact that some want a government who can't deliver the mail to be in charge of the health care system.
Revraven,
The boldface type really nails it.
Sounds like the job market, to me.
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Even if players join voluntarily, and are vetted for stability, I suspect there would be a few real (not reality-show real) psychotic breaks and/or regressions. I doubt we would see that footage though.
Would contestants go onto solo careers afterwards?
The silly show seems like it simply compresses about a month of every day life into 12 days. Given the dehumanizing aspect of most jobs, most of us exist in states of greater or lesser trauma. In our Spartan, war-like culture where competition and conquest are traits esteemed above all others, we boast of how little sleep we need. The losers who can't keep up are cast aside and relegated to meaningless roles.
What is work anyway besides being around people we don't like, and being forced to answer inane questions and solving stupid problems of ever increasing complexity? There's always pressure. Always so much pressure.
Proud gladiators that we are, when we're not "at work" we spend the rest of our time mortifying our flesh in one way other the other--diet, yoga, jogging, and all manner of mild forms of torture. Yet, for all this we are still inadequate and we must forever seek to find ways to improve ourselves one way or the other.
$50,000 in the right hands could spare a soul two years of such horrors. In some ways it is quite humane. I'm not sure exactly how to put a value on it, but you could say maybe 10 times the reward for only half the torture. Seems very humane to me. How else to explain how it is that they found contestants?
That being said, I think I like the idea of winning a prize simply by living in a coffin for a period of time even more. It is only to some that this would even seem like a torture. I don't think a party girl could tolerate it for more than 20 minutes. But the contemplative soul who lives in her mind anyway wouldn't find it difficult to endure. If I were to run the contest, I would have only philosophers compete against each other. Maybe one day you'll be able to win a prize for remaining dead longer everyone else?
About 5 years ago I had an idea for a game show: the first naked insomniac to fall asleep in front of a live, studio audience would win $1,000,000. See, the very idea of winning a sum of money this large would make it difficult to fall asleep.
Pointing out that the show bears similarity to torture techniques - particularly sleep deprivation and stress positions - isn't really a value judgment.
I certainly don't think such a show should be banned or suppressed, but that doesn't change the fact that it probably does have a normalizing effect on the overall public perception of torture. Despite the obviously vast practical differences between such a show and real torture, I can see a show like this causing people to believe that psychological torture techniques don't have any lasting effects, or serious consequences.
After all, Joe Q. Public endured 2 weeks without sleep and being strapped to a pegboard (or whatever), and he came out just fine in the end - so why is it so much worse when the same techniques are used in a torture setting? There are rational explanations, sure, but I think the public gut-level revulsion against torture is pretty much the main reason it's not in widespread use today.
It's not torture. If water boarding is not torture, neither is this.
But thank god American television still has to live up to some standards: The show doesn't show exposed nibbles, right?
I was rather hoping that I was just being silly;
http://www.dgen.net/blog/index.php/2001/08/28/human-tamagochi/
@36:
"Nibbles", that's a woman's "fore bits", right?
(P.S. Som de fleste danskere er dit engelsk fantastisk flydene. Jeg kunne bare ikke dy mig for at drille lidt da den vandede vittighed faldt mig på.)