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Dispatch From The Youth-Culture Front
Oct. 21st, 2003 10:10 amCaught some MTV yesterday. (No need for comments how you are above MTV now, or always have been. We know.) There was some homecoming event, but in between there were segments of a show called Boiling Point. In it, the producers invent some annoyance, like being followed on the street by a sleazy-looking photographer snapping pics of you while saying it is for a sex website, or posing as a fake security guard who holds you up and takes your ID from you claiming it is fake, or a girl who engages you inconversation of some kind and then her boyfriend appears, loudly menacing you for 'stealing his girl'. The annoyance has a Boiling Point set at some amount of minutes depending on how aggravting the producers think the challenge is (3 mins, 6 mins, 10 mins) and then random people get filmed dealing with the annoyance. The challenge is shown by intercutting around four filmings of the challenge together, each on a different person, switching visually between 'participants' so it almost looks like the challenges are happening simultaenously, like a race. A 'participant' 'loses', and thus drops out of the 'race', when they start swearing (usually the first 'fuck') gets aggressive, or physical. Then the clock stops and the hidden camera team reveals itself, and the people go "aw shucks man, I can't believe you did that" and laugh and the chick in the setup hugs you and tries to be all non-threatening. One of the intercut 'participants' almost always reaches the clock limit without losing hir cool, and then gets the one hundred dollars and a lot of aw-shucks, there's the camera, you were so cool. That the hidden-camera people seemingly never get their lights punched out is probably because those segments do not get shown, or it never happens because of a combination of a careful choice of the mark and their insta-relief when the stress dissipates together with the you're-on-camera effect.
Now MTV has always had to deal with charges of being compleltly faux-subversive, eventhough it was the first channel to publicize bigtime the images that struck fear in white America and ended up being emulated by way too many suburban kids and now Justin Timberlake. However, it becomes apparent quite quickly that what Boliling Point as a show rewards, and thus holds up, perhaps unwittingly, as exemplary, is conformism to authority figures, other people's anger and intrusions, and submission to circumstances. It is quite remarkable just how far they think is funny to show, I am waiting for the team to stalk women on a campus at night and see how quickly they reach Boiling Point -- and reward on national cable the one who is cool with it.
That's it. MTV is now explicitely sending the message that To Be A Tool Is Cool. Perhaps they can show manufactured youth rebellion on some video on M2, but Boiling Point makes quite clear what the media wants out of its consumers: submission for the chance of being a one-hundred-buck whore.
Now MTV has always had to deal with charges of being compleltly faux-subversive, eventhough it was the first channel to publicize bigtime the images that struck fear in white America and ended up being emulated by way too many suburban kids and now Justin Timberlake. However, it becomes apparent quite quickly that what Boliling Point as a show rewards, and thus holds up, perhaps unwittingly, as exemplary, is conformism to authority figures, other people's anger and intrusions, and submission to circumstances. It is quite remarkable just how far they think is funny to show, I am waiting for the team to stalk women on a campus at night and see how quickly they reach Boiling Point -- and reward on national cable the one who is cool with it.
That's it. MTV is now explicitely sending the message that To Be A Tool Is Cool. Perhaps they can show manufactured youth rebellion on some video on M2, but Boiling Point makes quite clear what the media wants out of its consumers: submission for the chance of being a one-hundred-buck whore.
