by Terry Sawyer

It was gaudy synchronicity that Temptation Island even ended up on my television screen. I was making dinner for friends when we discovered that the muted box was broadcasting the Fox networks latest homage to rock bottom humanity. As a lark and an exercise in anthropological slumming, we all decided that it was worth a laugh or two. I stand corrected.

As it turns out, Temptation Island reaffirms every objection I've ever had to so-called Reality TV. First and foremost being that these contrived circumstances are no more real simply because the players are unknown. Unless, of course, you find it an everyday occurrence that your relationships are besieged by STD-free, scantily clad singles in a tropical paradise. And, were you to find yourself in such a situation, barring the distorting effect of a TV camera, it is doubtful that you would find yourself overjoyed at the prospect of competing to keep your mate, eating a rat or marrying an anonymous millionaire. Better yet is the boardroom brilliance that tells us that reality can be packaged and sold as if it's something that we aren't already embedded in for free. But perhaps the worst contribution of Reality TV is the unnerving display of the human interaction writ dumb. In the real world, having an alcoholic whore roommate is not only not captivating, it's a tedious pain-in the ass. It's been one of the hallmarks of adulthood for me to learn to avoid people who seem to be unable to cope with living unless they are swirling in a miasma of self-induced trauma. Now those same people are elevated to celebrity status for having all of the sickening personality traits of a psychotic poet without any of that silly talent getting in the way.

Maybe the networks have just become experts in victimizing people with no self-awareness. The recent election would certainly lend credence to that idea. Temptation Island puts its contestants in the position of constantly proclaiming their brain-dead audacity. One guy talks about being an ass-man more than a titty-guy only to have the TV cut to a swimming pool full of bikinied women with the omniscient voice-over proclaiming that the men are looking for women with great personalities. And what better way to find them then to go on a tropical sleaze bender with women hired to break up your current relationship. Nothing says soulmate quite like an all expenses paid wet T-shirt contest. Not that the gentler sex fares much better. The women of Temptation Island fall somewhere between stupid and a black hole. From the bimbo who worries, in a voice-over no less, about the earning potential of her date to the women offering their massage and skinny dipping services, the ladies of Temptation Island could just as soon be the staff at a Playboy mansion barbecue. Worst of all, host Mark Wahlberg, in his campfire inquisitions, attempts to treat the show as if it's just some sort of skimpy CNN. I gather that he is pretending that he's working to provide a serious meditation on human relationships, rather than a pornographic peek into the lives of the damned.

By the end of the show, our slight cringes of empathy had morphed into furious screams for emotional lynching. After all, there is only so much point in wasting goodwill on existential exhibitionists willing to prostitute their intimacies for an embarrassing stab at minor fame. It's like sleeping with your mother for a chance to be Donovan Leitch. While we were sorry at first to see the women in tears over their boyfriend's videotaped dalliances, by the end of the show even my friend Jessica was tipping her wine glass to the screen and shouting "that's right, cry, bitch, cry." I even found myself thinking that a swarm of tsetse flies or a sudden elimination of the food supply would dramatically increase my viewing pleasure. Better yet, why not have the island rife with gay singles, proving that with a little isolation and a fifth of your favorite poison, just about anybody is bisexual. It wasn't remotely possible to seriously identify with these people, but it was big fun heaping steamy scorn upon their well-deserved pain. I'm hardly a moral fundamentalist, but it doesn't take a right-wing nutjob to be appalled at this show.

The idea of being entertained by watching vacuous people volunteer to have their long-term relationships coercively ripped to shreds under the voyeuristic eye of a national audience, is enough to make anyone stop to think about the perpetually new lows of the entertainment industry.

I have little patience for arguments to the contrary. I'm not making the straw-point that people are out there scribbling notes from Temptation Island on how to run their own relationships. I'm simply saying that it's not exactly a positive step for television to encourage people to actively enjoy the psychological distress of other real people. This is not some screed about censorship or boycotts or any other high drama recourse. This is just a simple statement on the virtues of restraint. Maybe the next time Fox network executive Sandy Grushaw goes to the gas station, the clerk should say, "Hey, Sandy, thanks for shit cracker without the butter!" Or maybe when host Mark Wahlberg clubs in LA someone with a conscience would say, "God, you're scraping bottom. Wasn't there a game show somewhere to host?" I refuse to listen to academic arguments that inject arcane theory into abject nothing, and think that they're doing anything other than creating meaningless theory. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and surely a piece of shit can be just that.

Stepping out of my soul for a second, maybe it's possible to see a silver lining in all of this. What could be more heartening than the total democratization of fame, even if it's democracy of the lowest order? Maybe we're witnessing the implosion of the star system, as entertainment falls further and further outside of a specialized field, as more people become public figures for their mere existence under the lens of the "Real World". Perhaps, one day we will so empty reality onto the boob tube that entertainment itself will cease to be relevant. Celebrities will no longer be able to provide spiritual spackling for the gnawing voids that plague the life of the consumer citizen. The stars that used to provide vicarious meanings for our worlds would suddenly seem to be people who won a genetic crap shoot and have great jobs because they're pretty diversions. In its most optimistic assessment, maybe Reality TV could, in its debasement of life, bring us to do the unthinkable: turn the TV off. One can hope that one day people will realize that they already possess Reality, the home game, without being sold a more lackluster, integrity-free version.

More realistically, it's just the amoral descent of supply and demand ideology. You can't create trash without trash eaters and trash makers. In the end, the whole surreality hoopla is very likely just the desire of some talentless suit to have us all, in the immortal words of Bill Hicks, "Sucking Satan's pecker for peanuts. Shucks, in my defense, I didn't swallow."