Among all the aspects of modern life that bear the fruits of Japanese invention and innovation – lithium-ion batteries, LCD and LED TVs, comic books, electric cars – there’s none more unheralded than their contributions to shaping reality TV as it currently exists. Though the US had its own proud traditions within the genre, beginning with the PBS docuseries An American Family in the ‘70s and continuing through The Real World and Cops in the ‘90s, we, as a culture, preferred game shows and clip compilations (RealTV, America’s Funniest Home Videos). For some weird reason, we masked our love for messy bitches who love drama in the guise of “social experiments” or “documentary journalism.” The exploitation was always there, but it had a high-minded cover – we’re doing this for science! – and the great Japanese innovation was to leverage the schadenfreude inherent to the game show with the exploitation of the documentary social experiment, creating a form of mass media cruelty with its edges sanded off in the edit suite.
Clair Titley’s documentary The Contestant brings a particularly infamous moment that garnered a fair amount of Western attention at the time – 1998, before Big Brother or Survivor — back to the forefront and attempts to grapple with the hideous amount of ethical issues that lay at its core and its continuing influence. This is the tale of Nasubi, a Japanese comedian (named “Eggplant” because of his longer-than-average face), who signed up to be on the popular “challenge” show Susunu! Denpa Shōnen (literally “Warning: Crazy Youth”), and was astonished when he was chosen by the producer, Toshio Tsuchiya, to actually take part in one of their fame-generating segments. It was a Faustian bargain: Nasubi could become incredibly famous if he simply submitted to Tsuchiya’s grand design. He assumed he’d be traveling to another country and hitchhiking across it or something, but he was stunned when the producer led him into a small room with only a small table, a stack of postcards and pens, and a giant rack of magazines as its furniture, and asked the comedian to strip.
So began A Life in Prizes, a brand-new take on the Denpa Shonen challenge, which would save a dramatic amount of cash instead of globetrotting. Nasubi was left alone in this small apartment and was tasked with winning magazine sweepstakes to get food, clothing, and other essentials. He’d only be freed after hitting one million yen, as if to see if his luck could sustain him and provide for him. So, naked and alone in this room, sustained only by crackers passed to him by members of the crew (who would appear randomly at night), Nasubi set out to try and win those prizes. Without delving too deep into the wild specifics, he spent over a year in this form of isolation, with new and cruel twists of fate heaped upon him by Tsuchiya, who never met an ethical boundary that he didn’t want to hurdle over. His subject was told that his exploits would probably not make it onto the show, and he was never informed that he’d become an international sensation almost overnight.
If you’re thinking of Park Chan-wook’s Oldboy, you’re not too far off of the mark. Titley can only do so much to pry Nasubi’s actual emotional state out of the footage that was broadcast across Japan, but what’s there is frankly more than enough: a man, in isolation, naked and afraid, celebrates his minor triumphs for a small camera but, in darkness, begins to lose his goddamned mind. Nasubi endured the worst-possible version of the sunk-cost fallacy: By the end of A Life in Prizes, he’s resigned to doing it again, not out of some sort of desire for the isolation, but rather because he’d done it for so long at this point. And, in truth, the bargain paid off: He became an overnight celebrity in Japan, receiving the fame that he’d longed for as a bullied kid, and his influence has stretched across national boundaries – every time you use an eggplant emoji outside of texting someone a pictorial grocery list, you’re paying tribute to Denpa Shonen’s adherence to censorship standards – to say nothing of the endless well of creative cruelty that Tsuchiya struck upon and has been mined by thousands of eager producers in the decades since.
What Titley does better than most of her contemporaries in this space – there is, after all, a new documentary every week or so about some reality show misdeed on one of the thousands of streaming services – is how she manages to translate the tone of Japanese television to Western audiences. Fred Armisen presents the translated rantings of the hyper-excited announcer/narrator in English, whose deadpan cheer and enthusiasm strike the right balance of “excitedly happy” and “deeply oppressive.” The bipolar nature of the film – fake accomplishment meets real depression, all for the sake of an audience that the participant doesn’t even know is watching – is its strongest asset beyond Nasubi himself. Titley focuses on his own personal growth at the expense of the industry as a whole – Denpa Shonen would only survive a few more years before a Government crackdown on the industry forced challenge shows to adopt some measure of principle – and the film is stronger for it, documenting his transformation into a man of community, character, and charity, as he uses the idea of the challenge to benign ends after his hometown, Fukushima, is devastated by the 2011 Earthquake.
It’s been 25 years since A Life in Prizes premiered, and in some ways, it’s more relevant than ever. We oscillate from challenge to challenge, facilitated by the easy dopamine rush of social media. One year we’re dumping ice buckets on our heads for charity, the next, we’re watching dumbass kids break their jaws doing supermarket pratfalls with gallons of milk. One year, all we can do is yell about unfunny YouTube pranksters nearly getting killed by saying shit to the wrong person, the next, we’re all doing smaller-scale versions of the same pranks on our pals without even realizing that those pranksters probably staged their bits. But with successive iterations, we’re getting closer to having the hazards fully obscured by the blinding rush of attention and, potentially, money that might come our way. Therein lies the problem: We love this shit, and Titley fully understands that. It was great TV, but the costs were too great. The main difference is, I guess, that the idea of “informed consent” has slowly eroded to a point that would have made Tsuchiya envious. The song remains the same; it’s just getting faster and cheaper, spinning out of control.