+ Interview with Daniel Minahan and Brooke Smith
The Cost of Self-Awareness
Of the many disturbing scenes in Series 7: The
Contenders, perhaps the most disturbing concerns a perky blond 18-year-old named Lindsay (Merritt Wever). She's been selected as a contestant for the fictional reality TV game show, The Contenders. She has no choice but to compete, and in order to win, Lindsay must kill her fellow contestants, all given their own guns and a camerapersons, so that their exploits might be documented for our -- or someone's -- viewing pleasure. Lindsay's parents, obviously worried about
their little girl's health and well-being, decide to drive her to her deadly encounters, like they're driving her to the movies. And so you see them, proud and worried, in their car parked near a golf course, giving Lindsay a little pep talk, just before they send her off, in tears, to do what she must. The camera stays with the parents, watching nervously as Lindsay disappears over a rolling green hill, primed to kill kill kill. Or so they hope.
Such is the absurd and frightening logic that informs most every incident in Daniel Minahan's satire of reality TV game shows. The contenders are way beyond eating worms for the camera; they've headed off into territory that was once known as science fiction. And yet now, strangely, six years after writer-director-former-tabloid-TV-producer Minahan first came up with the concept, it's not so outrageous as it probably seemed back then, before the cutthroat-corporate meanness of Survivor and the utter cynicism of Temptation Island became the reality of reality TV.
Series 7: The Contenders follows the formula of a
Real World-type marathon, with the half-hour (more
accurately, twentysome minutes) episodes coming one right
after the other. Looking to seduce viewers with
competition and vile melodrama like all reality shows
(except maybe Big Brother, which seemed
intentionally boring), the series called The
Contenders focuses on a feisty protagonist, reigning
champion Dawn (wonderfully, completely convincing
Brooke Smith). Having endured two previous series, the
perpetrator of ten kills is now eight months pregnant
(by whom, we'll never know) and tired. Her rage and
frustration, as well her dark roots, are showing. Told
that she need only complete one more "tour" (as they
used to call year-long terms of service in Vietnam),
before the producers will let her go "free," Dawn is
determined to win this last round and save her baby's
life. The film/TV series opens with a last-season
flashback to her final successful hit -- as she flies
into a convenience store and guns down a surprised
last victim -- boom! No doubt about it, this girl's
got star quality.
To up the emotional ante for the new season, the
show's producers send Dawn back to her hometown,
fictional Newbury, Connecticut (actually, Minahan's
hometown, Danbury), after fifteen years away. There
she must not only contend with the usual opponents --
in this case, the aforementioned Lindsay; Tony
(Michael Kaycheck), an unemployed asbestos-removal
worker who's desperate to support his family; Franklin
(Richard Venture), an aging conspiracy theorist; and
Connie (Marylouise Burke), a deeply religious ER nurse
with access to lethal drugs -- but also Jeff (Glenn
Fitzgerald), Dawn's very own high school
Goth-boy-pacifist sweetheart. Their backstory, told
via confessional interviews and dramatic
re-enactments, reveals that they hated school and
their peers, and shared a passion for Joy Division
(shown in their homemade music video for "Love Will
Tear Us Apart [Again]"), and the sad fact that he left
her when he found he was gay. Now apparently straight
again and married to fretful Doria (Angelina
Phillips), Jeff is also dying of testicular cancer,
and has somehow come to believe that being killed by
his former amour will be the most valiant, romantic,
and practical thing to do.
The film certainly has the familiar reality TV
mechanics right. Randy Drummond's all-over-the-place
camera work, soap-operatic close-ups, awful graphics,
action-crescendoes before commercial breaks, an
ominous voice-over narrator ("The only prize is the
only prize that counts: your life!"), and moody music
(the film is scored by the brilliant Girls Against
Boys -- and it's almost worth the price of admission
just to hear them back in action). The settings for
these encounters are perfect -- they shoot one another
down at the golf course, in the mall, at home, even in
the hospital. At the same time, Series 7 has set
itself a challenge, to convince viewers who can't bear
the thought of sitting through such a reality TV
marathon (under the banner of full disclosure, I'll
confess that I'm a freak for all-day Real Worlds,
but can't abide Survivor for more than five or six
minute chunks). And so, the movie must induce you to
identify with -- or at least like -- the protagonists.
Dawn more than fits this bill -- she's cagey and
funny, and pissed off enough at her circumstances that
she seems recognizable, and not nearly so annoying as
those wannabe calendar-pin-ups on the Outback
Survivor.
Still, the movie has to include some of the shows'
cheesy spectacle and infamous venom, not to mention
the bleak ritual of the nightly news (there's a car
chase that recalls OJ on the freeway). Perhaps worse,
it has to do all this while affirming the "family
values" that these shows tend to trample, in order to
define itself as less morally reprehensible. There's a
cost for this strategy, and on occasion Series 7
slips into a kind of condescension toward its lesser
(loser) characters and or its imagined TV audience.
And in this way, the film allows you to feel all right
about watching it: you, the movie viewer, are smarter
and more self-aware than those folks who watch such
violent pap on TV for real, aren't you?
