Unhealthy Concerns for Big Brother Politics

Unhealthy Concerns for Big Brother Politics: Obsession with Big Brother Trivia That is far from Trivial by Roxanne McDonald

While I could give a hamster’s behind for real Big Brother politics—you know, how low our president’s IQ is, how we are censored and controlled and forced to go for the greed over the common good, etc.—I get more concerned about what goes on behind the scenes of Big Brother the TV show.

I mean what goes on behind the behind the scenes we get to see on scheduled TV.

The General BB Phenom

If it matters to anyone other than myself and maybe my mother, my obsession started with the very first, I mean the very first episode—with the caravan of matching black vehicles with their tinted windows, chauffeuring the first candidates into the compound. I was fascinated with the concept as it followed so keenly the Orwellian concept, the delivery, and stunned [still am] by how people would voluntarily give up implied Big Brother life to actually willingly subject themselves to agreed-upon totalitarianism…for any amount of money.
My interest has never waned [having a consistent fascination with one of the most frighteningly prescient books of all time and having taught the book in lit classes over the years—and Big Brother is not a character, per se, by the way, peeps, but is a construct, an abstraction, a real collective mindset/entity], but has rather been piqued and has peaked on several select occasions.

Big Brother’s Watching You, Alison

While I couldn’t help but think about several studio practices all along, this episodic intrigue began when Alison Irwin [Big Brother 4] tried to communicate [cleverly, I might add] to an ally by way of pointing out words in a book, so that the cameras and the audience couldn’t decipher what she was “saying”. Big Brother called her on it and forced her to reveal what she was secretly communicating. Whooo. That was creepy enough to make me want to quit the show…, until I realized I wasn’t a part of it. Oh, yeah.

Big Brother Will Make it up to You, Dick

This leads my coo-coo dissertation to what I meant to write about here, today. I don’t spend days obsessing about Big Brother the reality show, but I do spend hours searching for single details that will uncover the machinations of this number-one program.

This week, I have been so damned worried about Dick getting his cigarettes back, for instance, as the lunatic Jen had destroyed his selective luxury item [don’t know if that’s what Big Brother determines it, as does Survivor, but I know how important it was/is for Dick to pack enough smokes to keep him sufficiently fixed for the duration] on her way out the door, so to speak: when she realized it was over and went all rules of the game AWOL [which I am still celebrating over, too].

Anyway.

Some details/moments I looked into further, lest I lose much sleep:

Okay, so the Jen behavior. Episode 22. She was on the block for the fourth time. She told us in the Diary Room that she was heh-heh so not worried, as she had made it off the block three times before and so there. But then she didn’t

get the PoV [nor did anybody who said God had issued a decision in her favor] and apparently figured she was drowning anyway so why not take in more water, choke the chances of surviving altogether?
She furtively [and giddily] lifted Dick’s cartons of smokes, opened and jammed and jumped on the cigarettes and [we don’t see it but it is implied when she carries in a bottle of bleach] soaks them in bleach.

Then [again, what we see on TV], Jen cooks up three turkey burger patties and scarfs at least one of them along with an apple and something else [yogurt? Can’t remember]. When Jen is supposed to be on slop.

Big Brother Has Rules Big Brother Can Change at Any Time, Jen

Okay, none of that might matter to ya, but what I found when I actually Googled “Big Brother Dick’s cigarettes” [yes, that’s what I mean by obsession, folks] was that, whew, Big Brother replaced his cartons, but further, that the way we saw what Jen did and how she was penalized was not technically exactly what went down or how:

Ryn at Big Brother’s Keeper posted this aside on August 23rd, in his “What a Difference Two Weeks Makes”:

Side note - I was under the impression that Jen was given the ‘penalty vote’ for destroying Dick’s property. She had apparently found a loophole in the rules that saved her from a penalty for eating. Yet CBS implied her penalty was for eating. They also omitted the fact that they replaced Dick’s cigarettes and that was the reason Jen said she decided to eat. For anyone that doesn’t feel the show is edited to portray incidents in a certain light, I invite you to spin that one for me.

Fascinating stuff. Boy, would I sure love to see a copy of the players’ contract with CBS. Or better, the program policies: what we do and see and what we allow audiences to see and think we did.

Big Brother will Get You, Plane Banner Person

This brings up the next consideration [and the one after it, too]—the plane banners. I have pondered their existence and the paying participants and all that before, but I came across some “facts” about the banner-flying pilot(s) I was delighted to learn more about:

The popular news site, TMZ, revealed the truth back at the beginning of August, after the banner flew that read, among other things, how Eric is a liar. Most important in purpose to the news byte was to inform audiences that the pilot traditionally known for banners over Big Brother houses was NOT the one who pulled that latest banner.

Jerry Hider, of Blue Yonder Air, was getting paid to fly related banners over the house, though he refused to reveal the person or persons paying him to do so. [Oh, that helps me a lot….] But interesting, too, is how after a cease and desist order by Endemol lawyers forbade Hider to fly any explicit “Eric is America’s Player” number across the smoggy skies of L.A., Hider claimed that “he, CBS and Endemol enjoyed ‘a symbiotic relationship.’” And he also denied having any intention of ruining the game.

This brings us—or, well, me—to the next and for now last item of interest.

Be Very Careful with Big Brother, AmERICa

In the cease and desist letter, Endemol explained that the alleged proposed actions would “violate a ‘tort of intentional interference of an advantageous business relationship.’”

So how do we justify our votes for AmERICa to do pretty much the same…interfering with the “advantageous business relationship” of every other houseguest and CBS/Endemol? Yes, they each agree upon entry to go with whatever Big Brother determines as part of the dynamic of the game. They are brainwashed [I say this mockingly, not in any literal sense, I think] to “expect the unexpected.” But how much is the scientist affecting the experiment? What’s that paradox, that phenomenon called? Wave-particle duality effect? The Werner Heisenberg Effect? Principle of Uncertainty Syndrome?

But, hey, whatever it’s called, they are, after all, Big Brother. They can do that.

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