Series 7 is not a subtle film, but then neither is the genre it's burlesqueing, or the culture it's criticizing. Its premise — a reality-based TV show in which six contenders have to hunt each other to the death to win the prize money and their freedom from the game — is an obvious, ready-made metaphor for capitalism, a pitiless win/lose system that pits us all against each other.
Still, this is a funny, brutal, and frightening film. Seeing the American culture of death blown up on the big screen, seeing it held up as an artifact for our consideration rather than as entertainment for our absent-minded enjoyment, or as the grating background noise it usually is, is absurd and horrific. The film's violence is not graphic — as on real TV, we never see much gore — but it is shockingly cold and unglamorous: a woman injects a helpless man with a lethal drug and then watches, without statement, as his begging and cursing becomes feebler and finally ceases; a man bludgeons a teenage girl to death in front of her parents.
The series' reigning champion, Dawn, (Brooke Smith), is sort of the antithesis of Marge in Fargo, who embodied Life and Law; she's nine months pregnant and a grim, businesslike killer. We see a montage of "highlight" clips in which she efficiently dispatches her former fellow-contenders: shooting one in a convenience store, garroting another in her car, slashing the throat of a third in an elevator. Up against her in this round are Tony, an unemployed family man with a history out of Jerry Springer; Lindsay, a chaste and beautiful teenager who wears a Kevlar vest over her butterfly T-shirt; Connie, a devout Catholic nurse with a Kevorkian complex; Franklin, a hermit who lives in a trailer lined with aluminum foil; and Jeff, an artist dying of testicular cancer whose first gesture on receiving his official Glock nine milimeter is to press it dramatically to his own temple.
Even if you've only seen a few minutes of "reality-based" TV, the conventions of the genre will seem instantly familiar: the "up-close and personal" interviews to give some depth to people so we'll care when they die; the predictable "revelations" about their secrets; black-and-white footage interspersed with color for no real reason; the dark electric chords that signal danger (and excitement); the poignant guitar that horns in on any moment of tenderness, contrived or genuine, as subtly as a laugh track. The thranging black electric guitar theme that plays over the closing credits, which would be merely annoying coming from the tinny speakers of a TV set, is almost unbearable in Dolby surround sound.
Director David Minahan wants to have his cake and let us eat it too. Although he savagely parodies the reality-TV genre, mocking its transparently manipulative techniques, scripted suspense, and cheap human interest, he also uses those same techniques for his own dramatic ends. He wants us to care about the characters, to be moved by their startling revelations, to get caught up in the chase. This is a legitimate gambit in satire — in Spinal Tap, for example, we join in the condescending laughter at heavy-metal music and its subculture, but we also rock out unironically to songs like "Stonehenge" and "Big Bottom," and genuinely care about the fate of the beleaguered band. But it's a tricky one to pull off.
For the most part, Series 7 manages to succeed on this same level; we root for one contender, secretly hope to see another get plugged, we want to know who'll win, we want to see what happens next. It's undeniably an exciting film — even fun, in an way that should probably makes us feel a little sick and ashamed of ourselves.
Series 7 tries to atone for the obligatory pandering to our bloodlust by offering us a vague, conspiratorial anti-corporate agenda, of the same sort put forth in films like Network and Rollerball. The one contestant who declares to a crowd that "The show is a fake!" is presented as a stereotypical crackpot, but when he's shot through the chest an instant after making his big pronouncement, it's not clear whether this refutes his theory or confirms it. Certain aspects of the show are clearly faked; the series' (and film's) climax is a "dramatic re-enactment" that transparently alters events and frames an innocent person for murder, so that we have to infer for ourselves what's really happened in the game's final confrontation, which is hinted at so broadly it's not very hard to figure out.
The real conspiracy, of course, is the one in which we're queasily complicit — the conspiracy between the show and its audience. The humiliations and cruelties of "reality-based" TV could not exist without our enthusiastic attention, any more than those of the commodified life could exist without our grudging consent. And it is, after all, the spectacle of our own destruction we're relishing.
This point is made with discomfiting, heavy-handed force in the movie's climax, when the two last contenders barge into a suburban multiplex, a lot like the one where we're probably watching it, and take the audience hostage, announcing that unless their demands are met a lot of people are going to get hurt — to supportive applause. Dawn silences them by explaining, "That's you, assholes!" They're like the crowds in 1984, cheering newsreels of innocents being massacred. To put it in media critic Mark Crispin Miller's chilling formulation, Big Brother isn't watching you — "Big Brother is you, watching."
Even more insidious is what the film does not say, but shows us, about class. LiP would not be the first rag to note that most reality-based TV shows (including Springerian talk shows), find their stars/victims exclusively among the lower to lower-middle classes. They're people who are willing to endure boot camp, eat bugs, or weep and scream about their affairs in front of a national audience for fleeting fame and a chance at a big cash prize.
The contenders on Series 7 are clearly drawn not from the general population but from a pool of lottery entrants; notice there are no lawyers, college professors, or Senator's daughters stalking each other with nine-millimeters. The film's characters all live in trailers or tract houses in modest suburban developments. The film's landscape of fluorescent-lit convenience stores, shopping malls, hospitals, and parking garages is depressingly familiar. Jeff, the dying artist, specializes in flat, drab landscapes of suburban houses.
"Jeff's art holds up a mirror," explains his wife, in a line that's clearly intended as a self-referential throwaway. "And a lot of people just aren't ready for that."
But there's another motive behind the contestants' willingness to kill, even more wholesome and respectable than money: family. Whenever Donna is angrily challenged to explain how she can do the terrible things she does, she recites the same rationale that so many people do for "doing what they have to do," no matter how insane, or who it hurts: "I have to do this for my baby. That's all that matters." For her, murder is just one of the responsibilities of parenthood. Tony, too, claims to be doing this not for himself but for his wife and children, but when he's under fire and his wife blurts out that their youngest child isn't his, he takes off in his pickup holding a knife to the baby's throat. Lindsay's parents train her and push her like a pair of drill instructors out of overprotective love, and, in return for all they've done for her, they get to watch as her face is bashed in in front of them. Even Connie, the lethal nurse, interrupts her remorseless killing spree to deliver a baby. The hidden bond and conflict buried between the two main contenders is an abortion.
It all brings new meaning to the term "family values." The image of Dawn turning away and covering her eyes in distaste as she dutifully puts a bullet in a man's brain is enough to make you turn your own face and cover your eyes; it's an image of everyone who's ever done what they had to do for the supposed sake of their families — who's just had to close their eyes, grit their teeth, and keep plugging away.
Reviewed by Tim Kreider
05.05.01
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