Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [26]
I want to be the Dog Whisperer.
But I do not know how to do any of this. When I have a family of my own, I know that every mistake, every downfall, every skinned knee, every D in school, every unwanted pregnancy, every misguided tattoo will all be my personal failures, symptoms of my inability to protect my children, my puppies, my precious, from the vagaries and indecencies of the outside world.
The perfect home cannot be found out there. I hope Jill is okay. But I don’t know. The world has punished her for her brashness, for her willingness to take risks and tempt the fates, and it makes me want to destroy everything I survey. Or just hide from it. Keep it away and safe.
I can keep them safe. I tell myself: If I dare, if I trust myself, if I can overcome how evil and venal the outside planet is, they will be happy and well and warm, and I can keep Jill that way, and my fiancée, and everyone. I can do it right. I want the Dog Psychology Center. I can be Cesar. I can be Daddy.
My hand is the mouth. My fingers are the teeth.
7
HONEST, HONEY, I’M NOT GAY, I JUST LIKE WATCHING HALF-NAKED BUFF GUYS WITH FULL-BODY INK
Jerry Stahl
NO DOUBT KYLE DIDN’T REALIZE, when he was given fifteen to life for murdering his brother, that the American viewing public had a very different future in mind for him than the Department of Corrections. Thanks to the good people at MSNBC—and their wildly popular, endlessly rerun prison documentary series, Lockup—his ultimate fate was far more extreme than mere “inmate.” Kyle was sentenced to become…entertainment.
Lockup, for those with lives and/or fulfilling late Friday and Saturday plans, represents the first wave in a torrent of prison porn that permeates the nation every weekend. (The National Geographic Channel—rebranded as the NGC—now also includes its own prison series; there’s something poignant in how they’ve morphed from the magazine you’d scan for pygmy tit to another network of shirtless convicts. But that’s a whole other issue.)
Every Friday, after MSNBC’s normal viewers call it a night, the top executives hand over the keys to the Penitentiary Fetishists and drive home to Connecticut, leaving a nation of Vicarious Incarceration Junkies and Solitary Confinement Ecstatics to feast their eyes and gorge their souls—until Monday—on the heinous drama of doomed, muscle-bound men leading lives of nonstop physical menace. Lives that, in their very fluorescent-lit naked danger and sadness, may be the only spectacle left with the power to take the viewer away from his own quotidian agonies.
At one point, though it’s mathematically impossible, I believe that the network was actually running six hundred hours of prison documentary every weekend. Until “reality” news in the form of Morning Joe returned on Monday and bumped the reality documentary show off the air.
Turn up the sound! When the big man movie guy starts off every show, you can close your eyes and imagine the $5,000-an-hour voiceover pro with a bad toupee leaving a coffee ring on the studio promo copy.
Among the nation’s toughest is California State Prison, Corcoran. It’s severely overcrowded and plagued by racial tension. We spent months inside this institution with a notoriously violent past, where officers try to maintain order. In this episode, we focus on inmate interaction, which, in prison, is volatile at best—whether it’s with officers, disputes with other races or gangs, or even a prison romance. In Corcoran, it’s not a question of if there will be violence, but when.
And I say: Yes!
The chyron says Lockup: Corcoran—Extended Stay—Road to Redemption…
If Bruce Willis strode out and smirked, no one would blink. But the inmate they get to tell a story is even more guileless.
Lockup operates on the principle