Oh ‘Brother,’ It’s Not About the Money

The apparent success of the reality television program “Big Brother” invites us briefly to visit the question: Who is more bored? Is it the 10 people who agree to be locked together for three months in a “house” salted with scores of television cameras devoted to capturing every twitch, or is it the nation of people that watches them?

A case can be made for fingering either group. As to the stars of the show, while the producers of this unreal real event have seen fit to dangle the standard pot of gold above the heads of these self-committed prisoners, if one is to believe their pre-committal declarations, the money was almost irrelevant to their decisions to accept the challenge. That is a thoroughly believable proposition. In a nation where a half-million dollars rests beneath every 10,000th soft-drink cap or is available somewhere nightly for the right (and not even the ultimate) “final answer,” if the “Big Brother” participants were motivated exclusively by mere money, the opening bid would surely have been in the seven-digit range.

A clue to what this experience is really about for this demographically exquisite group has been supplied by two runners-up from “Survivor,” the figurative mother ship from which “Big Brother” was launched. Having spent more than two weeks on an island populated by sand fleas, snakes and assistant producers, one of the non-survivors has expressed the hope that she will now be recognized by strangers on the street. Another has said that he’d like to realize his dream of opening his door one morning to find a National Enquirer reporter sorting through his garbage.

The truth, dear viewers, lies in the dumpster. Daily life in America, though demanding and stressful, is also predictable and anonymous--painfully so for some. We are so well off, so sure that we can sustain ourselves physically and materially for the four score and whatever that science and our 401(k)s now ensure, that increasingly the question becomes, “Is that all there is?”

It is a question that seems to prompt a widening array of absurd, even pathetic behavior, much of it before a national television audience. We have been treated to a choir of women agreeing to marry a millionaire whom none has met; Jerry Springer-refereed physical assaults between or among people with “social” problems that test biblical and statutory legal boundaries; and now groups of people willing to expose themselves in virtually every fashion that the infinitive implies. It couldn’t be clearer: For the players, this is not about money--it’s about escaping a life whose boundaries they know too well.

But what about us, the millions of Americans who, by the act of watching these people, help them realize their dreams of finding fame or, more modestly, non-boredom? Are we not even sadder sacks than they? They, at least, have taken steps, albeit extreme ones, to change their respective status quos. We, on the other hand, have given in to our boredom by institutionalizing and making profitable for others the display of people doing . . . well, not very much. As a nation of television watchers and buyers of goods, we have announced that henceforth there’s no need to wrap programs about nothing in a cloak of creativity, a la “Seinfeld.” We are happy to trade clever for “real,” as long as reality is presented in a fashion that plucks our voyeuristic strings from time to time.

The creators of this new form of entertainment have done what they can to simulate the feeling that we are not really spending an hour watching people brush their teeth. They have denied extensive reading material to the inhabitants of the house to encourage social intercourse, some of it intellectual. They have taken away their pagers and laptops so we can be annoyed by what the subjects say rather than what they do. And they have supplied participants sufficiently varied in their primary, secondary and tertiary characteristics to ensure that over the three-month life of the program, there will be occasional lapses into issues of real moment, such as tensions between the races. At the same time, to guarantee that the folks in Big Brother Manor don’t wallow in such excessively weighty matters, the producers have given the audience the power to vote players out of the game. (My personal preference would have been an opportunity to vote a variety of people--first and foremost the producers of “Big Brother”--into seclusion.)

But try as they might, the people responsible for this latest benchmark in our cultural descent cannot--and probably do not wish to--alter our status as titillated tubers, warming our couches by the light of their invasive, tasteless images. What they have divined is that many of us will be drawn back to the small screen, night after night, because each of us, in his or her heart of hearts, is a player waiting in the wings.