Despite the cries of scandalized indignation and the vehement protests of all those who have, on this occasion, denounced the excesses of reality TV, one must frankly rejoice at the recent airing of the “game of death” show on France 2. Rich in lessons, it also holds invaluable “clinical” virtues.
Firstly, it exposes to broad daylight the immeasurable extent of the television shipwreck: aiming to achieve ratings success by leveraging the denunciation of its most morbid mechanisms is indeed a feat: a rare intelligence of perversion that ensures, to paraphrase a famous legal formula, being heard even as one invokes one’s own disgrace. It implicitly betrays the cultural desert and intellectual drought of an audiovisual landscape that no longer knows which dark cupboard to draw new ideas from.
The height of manipulation, this programming has also allowed television executives to absolve themselves by shifting the blame for the “banality of evil” onto the game participants and evening’s viewers: instead of incriminating the principle of holding such electrified arenas, this bread and these circuses pointed the popular stands to general scorn. Under the pretext of a preliminary warning, which paled in comparison to the media hype announcing the “documentary,” Caesar and his acolytes emerged exonerated. Who knows if tomorrow, given the keen interest shown in the program by the youth, they may even be congratulated for their pedagogical boldness.
A third consequence, should it be deemed fortunate? Far from political correctness, this show abruptly breaks with a reassuring and ultimately widespread belief: that one day we might achieve an irreproachable human behavior by scientifically quantifying suffering and measuring desire, freed from any form of aggression. What angelism! The soothing function of “prime time” is decidedly not what it used to be. “Human beings,” reminds us the specialist Serge Tisseron, “seek representations of what they feel” which “allow them to share intimate emotions of daily life by displacing them onto social representations” (in “The Violence of the Image,” under the direction of Florian Houssier, Edition In Press, 2008).
This “game of death” indeed served as a reminder of the inalterable capital of violence lurking within every human being. It has cracked the varnish of a polite and urban behavior, so hoped for by the civilization whose essential driver remains “anger,” if not rage, according to the German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (in “Anger and Time,” Editions Hachette Literatures, 2009). So many illusions that shatter under the weight of frustrations, themselves accentuated by the violence inherent to the role ascribed to the image: regardless of substance and expertise, independent of authenticity which is yet a guarantee of identity, only what is “seen” exists. Terrible sentence. Frenzied lottery. There is then no need for a “legitimate authority”: in the tormented struggle for narcissistic recognition, the fragile modern being sells itself to the highest bidder, to the gaze of the other who vampirizes it more than it constitutes it. Despite the acknowledged proximities of the skin with the psyche, the television screen does not yet possess the same “total” properties as those attributed to sunscreens. Will the “torturers” invited on the set ever heal from these internal burns?
Psychoanalysis, which deals with this drive-related abyss of fundamental violence and daily encounters with its most fantasized – or sometimes enacted – forms of unspeakable savagery, knows well: in the transfer – and in the absolute discretion of the consultation room – an inexhaustible hatred most often proves to be an excellent advisor for the progress recorded in the therapeutic process.
