I heard about Big Brother quite a while back, some time around 2000. Call me slow, but until yesterday I’d never actually seen it live on air. Living away from the UK for over 4 years in Japan (where they don’t have Big Brother, well not the TV show anyway) means that I haven’t been privy to this voyeuristic fanaticism. I turned on the TV last night hoping to find news of a nasty bus crash that I came across in Holborn yesterday (another foray into ‘the fascination of the abomination’) and instead I got a group of people ripping each other’s throats out in a fantasy house of mirrors.

The first thing I noticed was how small the house is for the number of inhabitants, almost claustrophobic. With transparent walls and mirrors everywhere, the house seems to have been designed around the obtrusive gaze. Housemates have as little privacy as possible. They are under constant surveillance from the group and of course from Big Brother who sees all but cannot be seen. It reminds me of Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon, the prison design in which “The occupants of the cells [...] are thus backlit, isolated from one another by walls, and subject to scrutiny both collectively and individually by an observer in the tower who remains unseen.” It is of course the Orwellian nightmare enacted. I find it perverse that Orwell’s novel which conveyed an image of a future society so undesirable and fearful to most readers, has now become an object of fantasy and desire. It’s frightening what corporate media giants can do when they pull out their big marketing guns. But even more frightening is the capacity for the self-infliction of pain, humiliation and oppression that human beings are capable of. We spend so much time, money and effort trying to eradicate oppression, bringing down walls in Berlin, toppling statues of Saddam in Baghdad etc only to reconstruct it for our entertainment…what strange creatures we are!

With the house design in mind and watching the group argue and scream at each other made me think that the whole thing has been engineered to generate as much hatred and conflict as possible. I assume that’s what the producers are hoping for, that the house spirals into hedonistic decadence: Sex, blood, violence, abuse, deception…all the vices contained in one arena, nothing much has changed since the hayday of the Colosseum. The technological infrastructures we have built are more sophisticated, but our moral ambivalence is just the same. I wonder whether a time will come when the ultimate fantasy will be fulfilled in a game shows like this, the one where the public gets to chose who will be sent to the slaughter? It seems like the next logical step.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 19th, 2006 at 2:21 am and is filed under Uncategorized. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

About the Author: