Big Brother, or the Politics of "Being Yourself"

I should watch Big Brother more, every time I do I get a decent theoretical idea. Anyway, when I log into MSN, it provides me with a dose of Australian "news," much of which concerns either Big Brother, reactions to Big Brother, or of course Kylie. So today, Big Brother has apparently infuriated the Australian Government enough to start thinking about a non-voluntary code of practice. Which surprisingly enough hasn't really needed to be mooted before, since a lot of our programming comes pre-homogenised from the US. And yes, they showed the Janet Super-Bowl thing here at 10 in the morning and nobody even blinked. Why? Because no-one was actually interested in the game in the first place, let alone buying into the Mom's apple-pie US nationality of those sorts of occasions, so all the coverage afterwards was about how upset Americans seemed to be hehe. But I digress.

So back to Big Brother. I remember when it first appeared here a professor of mine suggested that it operated as a modern conduct handbook for young people. Now that we're into the fifth season, the formula seems to be laid out pretty rawly now. As I pointed out in an earlier post, the chief currency used by contestants (performers) in these shows is sexuality. What is interesting about this, and is the element of performativity apparent in this. Now as anyone familiar with Judith Butler's work will know, every identity is performative. We change our performances of selves based on context, the company, the situation etc. Note that I'm being highly reductive about Butler here, but her point is, that those behaviours, gestures, that we take as being expressive of our "true selves" are in fact the behaviours which that self is constructed. So in thinking of Big Brother as a modern conduct book, first and foremost one should realise that previous performances are basically acting as a guide for performances of self on this show--and sexual behaviour has proven to be the most attention grabbing in the house, which meant over time that housemate/performers have gotten increasingly explicit, needing to be more outrageous than before to grab the same amount of attention.

Added to this is of course the editing and marketing of the show, which takes personalities and attempts to turn them into types. One thing I've heard on the show is the girls saying "I don't want to be the girl that cries," which has been one of the identifiable types on the previous seasons. It should be noted that while I've talked about the performativity of the housemates, the editing and framing of the footage, the editorialising by the show's presenter etc, all present quite strongly these performances as narratives of a certain kind. I'm reminded here of Eve's song "I'm Some Story Being Told," where she talked about the power relation between phallogocentric language and the self, where the self is being told by language--not the other way round. In the case of Big Brother, that means that the story being told is not by the performative self, but by the presentation of the show. That means, that while spectacular sexual display seems to suggest at some kind of personal power, in effect the game was over from the beginning, performances only provide raw material for the producers to use.

Interestingly, though, echoing Baudrillard's comment that every hegemony contains the thread of its own reversal, there is one exception - the live eviction show. Normally the show goes like this... contestant is evicted, comes onto the stadium, gets off on the attention, talks to the host about inanities, looks at the prizes, goes onto the Rove Live chat show two days later to bore us some more. Except last year, the otherwise unremarkable housemate Merlin came onto the stage with his mouth taped over, carrying a sign he'd secreted away from the show's producers that read "Free the Refugees." This intrusion of the political onto the apparently ideological-neutral terrain of entertainment was read in some quarters as in some senses obscene, because what had occured was a refusal of the narratives of liberal capitalism--he refused to behave as a (potential) celebrity, meaning that the entire premise of the show was short-circuited. The host floundered a little, and if i recall correctly the crowd even booed, though interestingly the host Gretel Killeen defended his right to political comment. The next day the nomination show for the next week was on, where the evictee sits in with the host, and the big question in the advertising was "will Merlin speak?" This time he did, basically apologising to Gretel for putting her in an awkward position etc, whilst she said he could have made his stance in a less aggressive fashion. I understand her position, but it seems to miss the basic point - politics is not a topic of discussion here. Given that these people spend all day with nothing to do but talk to each other, it's doubtful that they don't talk about politics, but we rarely, if ever, see political or social discussion. Big Brother is about personalities, not ideas.

Essentialist ideas - "I'm just being myself" - of personality remain dominant on the show, indeed in our society, yet the threat of an inauthentic performance haunts the show. The phrase "playing the game" is often bandied about, meaning that one is acting in a certain way in order to do well with the nominations and/or voting. What "playing the game" suggests is that *some* performances of self are being tailored to the context, whilst others are giving a "pure" unmediated performance of self. As I've pointed out above, all of the performances on the show are influenced by both the setting, the other performers, and previous performances. To suggest otherwise is disingenuous in the extreme, but interestingly it also illuminates a number of contemporary, sometimes contradictory, ways of thinking through self-hood in our media saturated landscape.

The calls for a government regulation then, seem rather strange, given that performances of self are already so regulated on the show, though the criteria of what is appropriate has been switched here to foreground the libidinous trace of wider society. Increasingly, sexual spectacle is the path towards celebrity - if you have the right access to media - think for instance of the dubious talents of Paris Hilton. Sexuality, a cult of personality, and media access, all rolled into one. Why be surprised, then, that Big Brother does the same? Whilst the claims that Big Brother is reflective of society should be regarded as complete bollocks - I can't think of a more contrived situation than B.B, without the day-to-day hassles of having to work, pay bills, balance home-life with work etc - but in this, at least it *is* reflective of wider society's continued fetishisation of commodified (hetero) sexuality.