Naked in Dangerous Places - Cash Peters [28]
“Yep.”
“Accidentally? The way I did with Yakel Village?”
“Yep.”
“And you think the audience will buy that?”
“Yep.”
I hope he's right. Even if you accept the possibility that one man could have wandered through a foreign airport in this day and age and never shown a passport or visa; hiked fifteen miles over hostile terrain without food or water; spent a day and night with a lost tribe he just happened to come across in the jungle, then got up and walked another ten miles until he came, quite by chance, here, to this market, that still doesn't account for the fact that the whole thing was done without a single detour, map, or mishap, and without asking anyone for directions. Does nobody but me think that's weird?
Of course, I shouldn't be surprised. One thing I've noticed time and again while watching reality TV over the years is how there's usually one particular element missing from it, and that's reality. In order to make it work, the whole thing has to be shrouded in a gossamer of pretense and artifice, not quite lies and not quite truth, but certainly not reality, either—somewhere in between.
“Cash—action!”
Unsure where to begin, I saunter around the market with Camera Mark and Todd, his boom microphone held at arm's length above his head, shuffling alongside me.
The job of selling the produce seems to fall to the women. They spread a blanket on the ground in the cool shade of a tree, then lay out their wares, which sometimes might be as little as a single bunch of bananas, arranged in an eye-catching display. They then sit, supervising their stall, waiting for customers to drift by, while the men … okay, hands up, those who think this sentence ends with the words “… stand around watching them”?
Exactly.
An eclectic range of fruits and vegetables is on sale. Some I recognize: eggplant, cucumbers, taro, and I think papayas too. Others are oddly or obscenely shaped and a complete mystery. “What's this?” I ask, holding up a hairy dirty stick.
Sadly although I'm speaking Bislama—probably—the female vendors don't seem to understand a word I say. They simply stare up at me, baffled.
We stop shooting for a few moments to regroup and figure this out.
“Got it!” Director Mark has had a brilliant idea. “Where's Joe?”
Next thing he knows, the man from the tourist office has been conscripted into the show, and he doesn't seem too happy about it at all, especially since he's being forced to wear his dark blue Nike T-shirt back to front and inside-out to hide the logo. This is so that the network's sponsors back home won't start whining about how Nike's getting free air time and they're not. The result, however, makes Joe look slovenly. Not only are his seams showing at the shoulder, but the V of the neck is the wrong way round and the Nike check-mark logo is halfway down his back.
“Action.”
And off we go. Take two.
On TV, Joe and I make convincing best buddies from the start, without any plausible explanation offered as to why, or where he came from. One moment he's not there, then suddenly he is, trotting at my side in his strange back-to-front shirt, smiling weakly, looking not the least bit excited by his meteoric rise from complete anonymity in local government to almost total obscurity on U.S. cable television.
“A bush market is the focal point of village life,” he explains softly. “It serves as a meeting place, a place to find out what's happening in the community.”
Today there's some kind of rally going on. A trestle table has been set up at the far side of the glade; behind it sits a panel of older men with serious expressions on their faces, waiting their turn. Another man, recently acquainted with the power of amplification and how it allows you to talk very, very loudly, drowning out anyone who disagrees with you, has been babbling for fifteen minutes or more through the bullhorn and sees no reason to stop now.
So what is this? What's going on?
“It's Women's Day,” Joe elucidates. “We're trying to promote women's rights.”
Well, what do you know!!! About time. Finally, someone is acknowledging the pivotal