So-called pilot was actually a documentary

Mar 18, 2010 14:10 GMT  ·  By
French documentary aims to expose the evils of reality television, shows how people would kill for a shot at fame
   French documentary aims to expose the evils of reality television, shows how people would kill for a shot at fame

The other night, a French network aired something called “Le Jeu de la Mort” or “Game of Death,” a documentary on how far some people would go if invested with absolute power and in order to achieve fame. Under the pretense of shooting a pilot for a new reality show, producers wanted to see how people would react in what could only be described as extraordinary circumstances, the Independent says.

So, they came up with the idea of a fake competition: in order to win it, contestants had to push a button that delivered electrical shocks to a man on a chair. Motivated by the desire to win, 64 of the contestants (an overwhelming 80 percent) pushed the button and “killed” the man, no matter how hard he screamed, pled or cried. What the people on the show did not know was that the man was an actor, there was no electrical current in his chair and they had just been tested to see how low they’d scoop for a shot at fame and, presumably, a prize in cash.

As expected, the documentary did not fail to cause a storm. “Critics, however, lambasted the documentary for using precisely the same brainwashing and televisual distorting techniques it claimed to expose. The experiment, they pointed out, was based on an approach first used by the American social psychologist Stanley Milgram in 1963. In an attempt to comprehend the behavior of genocidal Nazi death camp guards, Mr. Milgram created a bogus authority which ordered volunteers to administer electric shocks of increasing severity to an unseen person who answered questions wrongly. Two thirds of the volunteers obeyed orders to deliver the potentially fatal doses,” the Independent writes.

“Critics said that last night’s documentary – although it conceded its debt to the Mr. Milgram experiments – suggested that television was somehow uniquely capable of brainwashing people into committing murder. The original experiments, which are often replicated, suggested that the real problem was something deeply rooted in the human psyche: the incapacity of a large majority of people to resist authority or to refuse to follow a crowd or mob. The program, shown on the France 2, the main state-owned channel, was made by Christophe Nick, a celebrated French filmmaker of shock or investigative TV documentaries. The narrator made it clear that the principal target was mass television culture,” the publication further informs.

The conclusion of the documentary was that television had been using humiliation and violence as a means to attract audiences for many years, so perhaps concluding that it won’t be long until we have murder in prime time is not that far-fetched. Critics, as also noted above, strongly disagree.