Reality Matters_ 19 Writers Come Clean About the Shows We Can't Stop Watching - Anna David [28]
On the other hand, the allure, if I had to guess, is not unlike what makes MSNBC’s sister broadcast, Predator Raw, such a runaway success. With one difference: The pedophiles on Pred constitute that rare slice of society that is unquestionably more morally reprehensible than anyone else on your Christmas card list. Plain old convicts, by contrast, occupy that niche of mythic outsider guys who have been represented on-screen by everyone from Paul Newman to the cast of Oz.
Prison, as made palpable by MSNBC, is like life but scarier. Even if you can feel superior to triple-homicide Ace from East Nebraska, there’s no denying that his skills make life in super-max a lot easier for him to deal with than it would be for you. The amount of incipient ass-kicking and shiv-sticking on any given episode of Lockup is staggering. As ratings slump and some other thrill comes along, a new title is rumored to be in the works: Shanking with the Stars!
But it’s not the physical violence that’s so frightening. Or not just.
After my first 479 hours of viewing, I finally nailed down the source of a deeper chill. I was watching Associate Warden Lopez, a full-faced, mustached man, as he hosted the Internal Classifications Committee in a confab with an elderly African prisoner. The prisoner, in a yellow jump suit, slumped further south with every word. “I am here to review the asset placement, to determine if their housing is appropriate, and to insure that due process has been available to them.”
Inmate Ed Dwayne Smith and his cellie have been charged with prison murder. But to hear Ed Dwayne plead his case, he might be here for having filled out a 1040 in pencil rather than pen. “I’ve been trying for a month to get my RBRT heard!”
“Well,” says the associate warden, “did you not postpone, pending the GA?”
“Sir?”
Now it’s time for another full-faced Anglo in a CO uniform to chime in. “Did you forward your request? When you return back to your cell, write a quick note saying that you want this 115 heard, immediately. And this way we can devote your postponement.”
Poor Ed Dwayne is getting the okeydoke from the COs. But that’s not the worst of it. Maybe there’s a deeper terror here that America relates to—the spectacle of a heinous bureaucracy on parade. On some level, for these guys, being in prison is like living in the DMV—being forced to line up and fill out forms and ignored to your face by people who don’t care if you’ve been waiting in the wrong line for thirteen years.
What does it say that America gleans entertainment from men whose entire lives are a struggle to maintain dignity, sanity, self-respect, and (in some cases) anal virginity while locked up by the state? Nothing, I suppose, but that they’re documenting more interesting times. Most of the shows airing today, after all, are reruns: shot during the Bush era, a clearly more naïve time.
Perhaps, in these times, we should be gearing up for deeper amusements. We can at least pride ourselves on the fact that we know where our prisoners are—no more black sites, so to speak. But my guess is that producers are going to need to go the extra mile. Until camera crews shoot full-on executions—what are we, barbarians?—then how about full-time cell-cams on the first batch of neocon torture-paths to go down for taking bites out of the constitution? Make Alberto Gonzales: The Ad Seg Years! a pay-per-view event, and I’ll be there with the guaca-mole.
Lest we in the United States feel like we invented penal entertainment, in this regard—as in so many others—we take a cultural backseat to the French. For a time, during the French Revolution, executions by Madame Razor were a massively popular entertainment. Enterprising vendors hawked programs listing the names of the Soon to Be Dead. Spectators came to blows over the best seats. Those legendary ladies known as tricoteuses sat up front knitting, day