Eye on Big Brother has been keeping a very close eye indeed on the confected narrative of “Corey Worthington (or Delaney) redeems himself as a house guest”, most recently looking at how this narrative has only been maintained with difficulty because of “Nanna” Terri refusing to play the role cast for her, and Bianca’s far too loud condemnation of Corey in his persona of “just an average seventeen year old kid”, and how their refusal or inability to perform as expected has led to the narrative turning on them, in predictable misogynistic mode.
If Rima Haditchi has just decided to leave (rather than retiring hurt), as now seems increasingly obvious, she would seem to have made a sensible decision.
…It’s interesting, in this context, to see how Saxon the UFO lover failed in his own quest for redemption. Although apparently he got some kudos from the eviction night crowd for overcoming his admitted racism and homophobia by cuddling up to Nobbi (aptly named, as has been said before) and the bizarre though rather likeable Travis, the screen time given to his aggressive defence of what seems core to his sense of self - his belief in a conspiracy that hides the evidence of aliens from the rest of us (”the truth is out there”, one imagines) - surely doomed him. Saxon was actually displaying one of the key fracture lines in the postmodern personality of surfaces, and the culture of individualism as it affects civility - on one hand trying to defend his “passionate” “beliefs” with reference to protocols of truth and evidence, and when called on it, falling back on the default position of “how dare you diss me - my strange beliefs are myself?”… But what he didn’t realise was that Franz Kafka might have been writing about him when he said:
There’s infinite hope, but none at all for us.
In his naivete, Saxon failed to realise that true redemption requires co-operation, collective forgiveness and reconciliation, and the real conspiracy is that of the unseen and all seeing Big Brother (along with all his doubled ghosts like Kyle Sandilands and indeed the sms voters and the other housemates). Big Brother is a mirror of the postmodern condition, all happiness and individuality until you lose the constant struggle to perform. And then. You’re evicted.
As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman writes in Soundings:
Not for nothing are the remarkably popular Big Brother shows presented as ‘reality TV’. That denomination suggests that off-screen life, ‘the real thing’, is just like the on-screen saga of the Big Brother competitors. Here, as there, no one playing the game of survival is guaranteed to survive, permission to stay in the game is but a temporary reprieve, and team loyalty is only ‘until further notice’ - that is, it won’t outlive its usefulness for the promotion of individual interest. That someone will be excluded is beyond dispute; the only question is who it will be; and hence what is at issue is not abolishing exclusions (a task that would favour joining forces and solidarity of action) but shifting the threat of exclusion away from oneself and towards the others (a task that prompts self-concern, while rendering solidarity unreasonable if not suicidal). In Big Brother, someone must be excluded each week: not because, by some curious coincidence, regularly, every week, one person shows themselves as being inadequate, but because it has been written into the rules of ‘reality’ as seen on TV. Exclusion is in the nature of things, an un-detachable aspect of being-in-in-theworld, a ‘law of nature’ - and so to rebel against it makes no sense. The only issue worthy of being thought about - and intensely - is staving off the prospect of myself being excluded in the next round of exclusions.
Why don’t the housemates get this? Perhaps their real education would lie in coming to realise that Big Brother is just our lives writ small (not large) - there is no “Australia” out there to give its blessing, and no collectivity inside to certify their moral ascent. As with Margaret Thatcher, the core belief of Big Brother is “there is no such thing as society”, and they all believe that too.
Nice loud condemnin’.
Thanks!
One of them’s called ‘Saxon’? :o)
It’s a tradition, Lefty E:
[link]
(Though series 3 Saxon wasn’t really called Saxon.)
The true battle will be for Bianca’s mind: I can see her all too easily as an Op/Ed columnist railing against this or that contemporary bugbear, but could she perhaps be more? Can her reactionary energy be channeled into a critical voice? Or will she become just another angry voice in the mass-mediated scramble for position, unwilling to interrogate the politics of representation, or try to offer alternative ways of seeing the world? Frustrating as I find her, and as much as I enjoy Corey’s mini-Rotten ‘front’, I don’t see much intellectual potential elsewhere in that crowd.
Watcned BB really fot the first time last night, apart from a couple of minutes on Friday. So Corey is your normal 16/17 year old. (I don’t even know how old he is.) Some girl doesn’t like him. Big deal. They quarantine the One Nation Grandma so no-one can vote her off, They put poor Travis, him of the squeaky voice, in a position of embarassing choice. Saxon gets kicked off - I thought for an argument abour religion and being a pr*ck but it seems it was because he believes in UFOs. Hell, I know quite a few people who believe in UFOs; in fact I know at least one person who swears they’ve seen one. (Don’t we all?) Would have been more fun if he’d been kicked off for being an atheist. Maybe he was. I came in late on the conversation.
It wasn’t tense. It wasn’t exciting. It didn’t have that horrid fascination the shows used to have when the characters were exposed in the wee hours of the morning. Perhaps cutting that for cricket, for Chrissake, was where the producers went wrong.
Paul, it’s always hard to know why housemates get evicted - especially when in this case they were evicted by a vote of their fellow housemates - but when Saxon brought up the UFOs on the Daily Show, it was in the form of a comment “There’s more scientific evidence for the existence of aliens than there is for the existence of Jesus Christ.”
There have been some terrible stuff-ups on the show in the last few days - it really doesn’t make the all-powerful Big Brother persona convincing when he gets a name wrong and reveals who’s been ’saved’ (and thus who’s been evicted), the changes to the eviction process were uniformly bad and atmosphere-destroying, they had a contest to see who would get the ‘power to affect evictions’ although out of the two finalists only one was eligible (so after the ineligible guy won, they had to awkwardly give the powers to Travis anyway i.e. why bother).
Thanks so much for this piece, Mark. You have summed up how I’m feeling after the first two weeks perfectly.
Particularly fascinating for me so far has been Bianca’s narrative as the ‘moral voice’ for people her age (and with only six months between them, she is certainly in the same age category as Corey, as much as she is trying to deny it).
I am struggling to hold much sympathy for her, and my opinion of her has sunk, through the current ’story’ of her Corey condemnation.
At the most base level, this is (in part) because he has managed to hold exceptionally well to his (very obviously predetermined) persona of “I’m just an average kid, I don’t expect people to look up to me, I’m just like all boys my age… don’t hate me”, even in the face of her loud complaint. I have a grudging admiration for his easy defeat of her while retaining his onscreen persona as the nice-version-Corey that we havent’ seen before (as Kyle keeps telling us).
Partly it is because she is trying to have 50c each way. On one hand she wants us to believe that she is against all that Corey stands for. On the other, she wants to make clear that she doesn’t dislike Corey personally - she thinks he has proven to be different from how he was represented in the media.
But here is the kicker for me; if he is different from his representation, why still berate him as if this is still his fault? He didn’t create the media fury, he’s just capitalising on it however he can. What else do you expect from a 17 year old who clearly lacks strong guidance and is in a stage of rebellion?
She has stepped, clearly and willingly, into the narrative most useful to create further fuel for the Corey fire. Created sympathy for him with people who believe he has been unfairly judged by a narrative created for him by current affairs programs (and that ever-blamed beast, The Media). Where Corey keeps to a few key soundbites (kudos to his management, who clearly gave him great training on how to present himself from the minute he arrived in the house) that further the story of himself he wants Australia to see, Bianca is blindly allowing herself to become a tool in telling the story she claims to be refusing to support in the first place.
In their bedroom brawl she told him she didn’t want to argue as she would “destroy” him, however she has managed to do the opposite. Corey has won. Public opinion has shifted, as is obvious from the difference between opening night (where the studio audience boos were obvious and overwhelming) and last night’s show (where the audience cheered every time Corey made it to screen).
For all she credits herself on being so much more intelligent than irresponsible party boy, she is showing that her perception and understanding of The Game is lagging far behind that of her nemisis. And after all, isn’t that why they’re all in there? To play their own version of The Game?
Yep!
That seems to be the most important aspect of it for her - distinguishing herself from Corey given that she’s only a little bit older. The fact that her Corey-hatin’ started before Corey even did anything (leaving aside her criticisms of his behaviour after a week had elapsed) suggests that she just may have thought that being the “responsible” kid was a sure fire way to cement her continuing spot in the House, which goes to the point you make in your last para, madeinmelbourne.
Rodney C,
Thanks for that background. I’m amazed at myself that I even remember their names (apart from Corey) this early on.Will probably catch up on it more when the boring 20/20 cricket finishes, if there’s only sport or garbage on the other channels and I haven’t bothered to get any DVDs.
Can somebody explain why Corey Delaney is now Corey Worthington?
When he first shot into the public eye, he appeared to be known by both names, but I really don’t have a clue.
By the way, here’s Tim Brunero’s bizarre column where he argues that if you’re concerned about Corey being on Big Brother, YOU’RE JUST AS BAD AS JOHN HOWARD!
[link]
Make sense of it, if you can.
Well, Mark, I agree its a manifestly supreme piece of lateral thinking or something, but I loved it! And he is 100% right about JWH.
Well, then, Paul, you must be a Corey lover by Tim’s *il*logic!
Yeah. I’ve always liked the kid. He put it up the MSM 7pm fiction shows, and all the wowser/hypocrites who’d all forgotten they were probably just as irresponsible at his age. (I know I was.)And while I haven’t watched much of BB I gather he’s well and truly holding his own. They shoulda let him keep the sunglasses on though.
When I hear people criticising Corey, I think: let he who was not an utter knob at 17 cast the first stone. That disqualifies me, anyway.
“When I hear people criticising Corey, I think: let he who was not an utter knob at 17 cast the first stone. That disqualifies me, anyway.”
I think pretty much the same thing when Bianca is criticised, although I’m happy to hold her to slightly higher standards because she does seem to be almost demanding that. Her conduct reminds me of what a happy-go-lucky middle-aged psychologist suggested to me once: that worrying about maturity is the preoccupation of the immature. I suppose it depends on how you define maturity. Bianca doesn’t seem to have learned yet that ‘maturity’ does not have to mean adherence to certain conservative strictures, or to the accoutrements of ‘adulthood’. Or that the desire to be taken seriously can proceed through other paths than constant seriousness.
Very good point, Klaus.
Hello - sorry if this seems a little spammy… but I’m hoping for some support and think that this post in particular would be a great addition to our new Australian blogcircle. I mean, you actually got me wanting to WATCH Big Brother to see what you’re saying on the screen! I wouldn’t have bothered otherwise.
Hello!
I’m writing because we’re doing the final round-up of blog entries for the first Skeptics of Carlos site - [link] - and was wondering if you’d like to submit any entry so far this year that you think could be profiled?
The site is hoping to promote Australian blog authors, who are interested in writing about science, issues in science, skepticism and current issues. We have a few entries already but were hoping for some more.
If this sounds at all appealing, please send over a url of the relevant post to this email address (skepticsofcarlos at gmail.com) and it’ll be featured tomorrow.
Thanks for your support, hoping to hear from you - and any other readers who are willing to contribute. Thanks!
podblack, that comment might fit better on our open thread:
[link]
I want to see Tim Brunero watch!
Spammers are canny!
I just deleted a comment which included the phrase “as seen on tv hair straightener”. How did they know of Corey’s obsession?
At the risk of being labelled a purse-lipped prude, one of the important points to remember with Corey was that he was completely unrepentant and felt no guilt at the fact that his neighbours had had their cars damaged and so on. That, to me, was the point. I would be pretty unhappy if my kids mucked up and threw a party which got out of control but if in the cold clear light of the next day (or week) they demonstrated a lack of empathy and an inability to feel remorse for people who they’d injured and/or inconvenienced, I’d hear some psychological alarm bells ringing.
A late reply to the Delaney/Worthington thing: his mother has remarried and one or other of those is his stepfather’s name. There was some confusion in the meeja at the time as to which name he went by. I’m not sure Corey himself knows what his name is.
Fair enough Helen, although the ‘unrepentant Corey’ is as constructed as the ‘ordinary kid Corey’: in both cases we don’t have the benefit of unmediated testimony (as if we ever could), so it is difficult to assume anything about the psychological ‘truth’ of Corey.
Big Brother is interesting to me re Dave ex BB being on. So far he has said nothing about his life in the cult. He seems quite normal though the way he was talking yesterday with other housemnate, including Travis, about where they had “done it”. Doube if some have though! Bravado talk! Saxon came across as intelligent and it would have been interesting to hear what he had to say on UFOs. We hear nothing of Rima now, wonder why. Corey - did he fix up with his mates, the damage to neighbors’ cars and property? If he hasn’t apologized, why is he on the show.
I dunno, Klaus K, I saw a TV interview with his mother and stepfather the morning after the party, recorded at the warm northern place where they’d gone on hols and left a 16 year old kid alone in the house. His (very carefully coiffed) mother just kept saying ‘We’re a good family!’ — not ‘Oh God, [insert names of neighbours here], I’m so sorry about the mess and the disturbance and of course we’ll pay for the damaged car’, or ‘Corey, you little arse, you’re grounded till 2020′, both of which would have been excellent television and were therefore probably not said and then edited out. And now they’ve let him be on Big Brother, presumably as a reward for his behaviour. I’ve got a bit of an idea where some of Corey’s psychology is coming from.
I don’t think that it was all that realistic to expect Corey to play along with the script of “grovelling apology” written for him by the tabloid tv shows the morning after, and I’m not sure why people seemingly would feel better if he had! But his “redemption” on BB has nothing to do with the ostensible narrative - “look! Corey’s not that bad!” and everything to do with using him for commercial gain - Channel Ten’s in that he adds a twist or two to what had already become another *dull* BB and no doubt improves ratings, and thus the vast money making machine that is all the product placement, phone voting and online spinoffs of BB, his management’s and perhaps his.
Whatever psychological state “the real Corey” is in by now has everything to do with his mediatisation and probably nothing to do with expectations of an “ordinary teenager’s behaviour”.