In 1997, during the first wave of a reality TV deluge that remains ongoing, a cast member of MTV’s Road Rules named Holly spoke about the nickname her cast used for the crew: “Big Brother.” Holly said, “we’d be like into the radio, ‘uh Big Brother, we’re just wondering’” this or that. Soon, someone would come tell the cast the plan. The same year, the Dutch show Big Brother would debut. Its American counterpart would follow three years later.
Now, in an economy built upon much more pervasive surveillance, the action of Alex Higley’s upcoming novel True Failure revolves around Ben, a patently mediocre thirty-something Chicagoland accountant who is fired from his job. In response, he decides to hide this fact from his wife Tara while he commutes to the library, bets on baseball games, and spends his remaining time trying to get on Big Shot, a lightly fictionalized Shark Tank. He has no product. He has no startup. Every day he watches either Big Shot or Law and Order: SVU on his laptop. He develops a strange obsession with Mariska Hargitay. When I first read this, I thought: In what universe? What accountant responds to losing their job this way?
Then I was reminded of the interview with Holly, from Road Rules, which I first encountered in Mark Andrejevic’s Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched. Andrejevic writes, in 2004: “[Big Brother] may have come from recollections left over from a junior high school English class, but… the totalitarian specter was gone, replaced by the increasingly routine, annoying but necessary intrusions of commerce in the form of the entertainment industry.”
In Ben’s world, the subjectivity, identified by Andrejevic, “that equates submission to surveillance with self-expression and self-knowledge” is deeply interwoven into daily reality. Such submission is now the price of admission for much of our social, cultural, and economic activity. In this milieu, losing a job can feel hopeless. Ben turns to one of the “infinite lotteries,” as he describes it in a conversation with his former co-worker Nguyen, that comprise boom-and-bust surveillance-entertainment capitalism. He hopes to enter the market not for his specialized knowledge as an accountant but as a “Big Shot.” He fantasizes about being chosen. Perhaps he will even go viral. Perhaps he will make it.
When Ben finally comes clean about losing his job and presents his bizarre non-plan to get on Big Shot to Tara, including the notebook in which he has scribbled the brainstorming generated in afternoon beer-drinking sessions with Nguyen, she is befuddled. She is shocked. She reads some of Ben’s strange scribbling about Mariska Hargitay. She sees through the sheer weirdness of Ben’s decision to include the SVU star in his brainstorming. Ben first inventories the contestants by watching every episode. He determines that the contestants who are most consistently successful are women and there is always something vulnerable about them. Then, while watching SVU one day he scribbles a few lines beginning with “Mariska Hargitay, _____.” He crosses them all out except for the final one. “Mariska Hargitay, attacked.” By “attacked” he means “raped,” and the narrator says so. This is what Ben means, though he is unwilling to write the word. “You are neither vulnerable nor a woman,” Tara tells him bitterly when he explains his thinking to her. He acknowledges that she is right. Nevertheless, he is not dissuaded. She asks him to stop trying to get on Big Shot. He declines.
Tara takes comfort in the idea that he has no chance, but comfort turns to anxiety when Ben advances to the next round after a terrible audition video, and advances again, after an equally disastrous in-person audition. As he progresses, Tara begins calling the production office daily. She speaks with two interns to the head of casting, a woman named Marcy Lon. Marcy has taken an interest in Ben’s application in equal parts amusement, earnest interest, and as a possible exit strategy from a show she sees as hampering her longer-term goal of making movies. She decides to film him pitching on the show anyway. He would never make the cut. If it became a minor catastrophe, allowing her to exit gracefully and blame it on exhaustion without burning any bridges, all the better. Like Ben, she doesn’t have an idea, no real plan for a movie she’d make if given the opportunity.
When a conversation doesn’t convince Tara, Marcy invites her to L.A. Marcy doesn’t tell her colleagues. Tara doesn’t tell Ben. Tara negotiates five figures for her and Ben to be filmed. And they go on the show. In the strange logic of Hollywood, Tara sits as one of the “Big Shots,” along with Mariska Hargitay. The resulting scene is as chaotic as you would expect, and it ends with everyone seemingly getting what they wanted. Tara and Ben pay off their credit card debt—which also conveniently gets Ben off the hook for a couple thousand in sports gambling he’d added to the balances—and they discover that Tara is pregnant. Later, while watching the episode of the show from which their unusable filming was cut, they both notice that Marcy’s name has disappeared from the credits.
This book reads like an experience of television, and as so often in television, people return to lives spent in front of the television. Ben is rescued from his lunacy by freelance accounting work. Tara is pregnant, and Higley is quick to let the reader believe that this is a happy ending. But I’m not so sure. Tara went to art school, studied painting, worked hard, honed her talent, painted original ideas, was praised for her work, and then quickly discovered that a successful artist is made less by her technique than her ability to promote herself. In a long string of compromises, she has married, moved from the city, started a daycare in suburbia, ended that daycare for the sake of a child with her husband, plays Sancho to his Quixotic, vapid, reality show pursuit, and the original dream is now so far out of reach she can hardly stand to paint. She has now twice abandoned her authentic ambition for the sake of life, and now a child, with a man who doesn’t seem to have any ambition of his own.
“The Real World is a place,” Andrejevic writes, “where people can individuate themselves… by willing submission to pervasive surveillance.” We may be so susceptible to surveillance marketing, and to the logic of reality television, because we deeply crave an experience of the real. That is, an experience that feels real. And nothing feels more real than a well-spun fiction. In her daycare work, Tara writes journals for the children. She fills notebooks with stories about each child: journalistic accounts of events, fictionalized versions of events, and sometimes total fictions, with no distinction between what is invented and what is not. She gives the notebooks to her clients’ parents after their time together is finished. In True Failure’s final scene, one of her former clients calls and tells her that his father has begun to read him the journal. The boy only wants to know one thing: “which ones are true and which ones are made up?”
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