Naked and Afraid

Like all reality TV shows, Naked and Afraid isn't real and, indeed, is scripted in large part.  That said, the show feels as if Samuel Beckett wrote the script and it's such a disheartening experience that I have never been able to watch any of the hour-long programs in their entirety.  Indeed, my guess is that most folks who tune into Naked and Afraid stay for a half-hour or so and, then, find something a little more cheerful on the tube.  The program is so relentlessly bizarre, however, that it's worth a look -- not for a while episode, mind you, but for maybe the space between two commercials.

Here is the premise:  a male and female contestant are each brought to a remote location.  They travel separately in a jeep or pickup truck.  The contestants boast about their prowess and stamina and, further, declaim that they will not be so weak as to "tap out" -- that is, abandon the adventure before their 14 or 21 day sojourn in the wilderness is complete.  The two naked protagonists meet on a beach or a tract of spiny-looking chaparral.  After greetings, they follow a map to some location where there is a source of water near which they can camp until it is time for their "extraction" -- that is, removal from the wilderness.  Each protagonist wears a necklace with a sort of plastic bead transmitter.  This necklace picks up their words and allows dialogue to be recorded..  The participants have a burlap satchel that they can sling over their shoulder.  This contains one survival item that the participants are allowed to use during their ordeal.  The satchel also contains a small mini-camera for shooting at night when the ordinary camera crew and sound personnel are not on-hand.  The premise is that the participants, who receive supposedly nothing but bragging rights for their pains, are all alone in a vast and forbidding wilderness.  They must bond, encourage one another, and work cooperatively to overcome the hardship of being "naked and afraid" in the wilderness.

Of course, the premise is mitigated by all sorts of factors, including, most obviously, the presence of a camera crew and sound men with generators, tents, and, apparently, plenty of provisions and medical gear.  The show features garish inserted shots of hazards -- venomous snakes, poisonous plants, huge spiders and centipedes, and, even, in some cases crocodiles and bobcats.  (We don't ever really see the protagonists interacting with hazards of this sort.)  The man and woman who have volunteered for this ordeal, tramp around gingerly, so as not to embed thorns in their feet, and spend their time squatting in the bushes -- they generally don't succeed in creating any more than a branch-thatched shelter and, if it rains, they seem to be out of luck.  During the day, they swelter and listlessly stagger around looking for seeds or roots to eat, but, most of time, seem to just huddle in the shade of their branch-remuda.  Nights are uniformly miserable -- biting insects torment them, they can't sleep, and, generally, are half frozen by dawn.  If they light a fire, the blaze roasts half their body while the other half is frozen.  Sometimes, the fire gets out of hand and burns away part of the chaparral.  The participants invariably bicker and, as they get more and more, sleep-deprived, become more or less catatonic, spending long periods of time just staring out into the distance.  The camera records the characters as they quarrel, fights that generally result in someone withdrawing to a sand bar in the lagoon or a rock pile in the desert to disconsolately sit with arms wrapped around knees, rocking autistically back and forth and sobbing.  There's lots of praying and petitions to God for assistance and strength.  Sometimes, the characters get so hungry that they become dizzy and lose balance, although ordinarily no one topples over.  Every night is a horror-show -- predators howl and the characters writhe on their stony or thorn beds as swarms of horseflies or mosquitoes whirl around them.  The nudity of the characters is neither heroic nor titillating -- the images are manipulated to conceal their private parts and, when the characters are filmed from a distance, they appear as basically heads and knees with the mid-sections of their bodies softened into a discrete pinkish or brownish blur (the show is multi-ethnic often coupling a White contestant with a Black or Asian person).  Buttocks are always on display.  If you like looking at naked butts, this is the show for you.

What makes this show compelling is its utter, stark minimalism -- there isn't generally anything like drama.  The participants just sit among the thorns or, sometimes. listlessly forage in a tangled thicket or patch of desert about the size of a small backyard.  They sometimes weave fish-traps that don't work or build dead-falls that don't catch anything.  On occasion, if there is water around, they try to catch fish, but never with any success as far as I have seen.  Sometimes, they cut gourds or calabashes to collect filthy water that they try to boil to drink.  Most of the time, they hope for rain and suck droplets of water as they fall of branches and twigs.  The men usually whittle some type of lance or spear that turns out to be totally useless.  More practically, the women pleat twigs together to make shelters, but those seem to be wholly useless as well -- they don't keep out the cold or the rain or, for that matter, provide much shelter against the sun.  The men enthusiastically inhale bugs but whether this provides them with any meaningful sustenance seems unlikely.  The women are more picky about their food and, generally,just use the ordeal as a two or three week starvation diet.  As the show progresses, the horizons of the protagonists shrink -- pretty soon they are confined to a tiny space where they just slump against one another on the bare earth, waiting for the day to end and the night to torment them with sleeplessness.  Everyone seems too tired to talk and, after a few days, there's next to no dialogue -- the characters conserve their energy by just squatting motionlessly on the ground.  Sometimes, one of the contestants will tap out.  About half of the time, the participants complete the ordeal, trek to some beach or lagoon or hilltop where they are rescued and the whole pointless thing ends, not on a note of triumph but with a sense of utter, dispiriting absurdity.  The show has an idiotic gimmick of rating the protagonists according to their primitive survival index.  This PSI seems totally meaningless -- we don't know the criteria used for the rating.  A character who walks into the wilderness, naked and afraid, with a PSI of 4.6 will leave, usually about three to seven pounds lighter (inadvertently the show displays how difficult it is to diet), with an enhanced PSI, if the ordeal was successfully completed, of 5.9 or something -- on a scale of what to what, who knows?  In King Lear, the titular character roams a moor in a thunderstorm, rips off his clothes at one point, and wishes to reveal to the audience what man is most fundamentally:  "unaccommodated man is such a poor forked animal as thou art," the fool says. This show relentlessly exposes the sheer meaninglessness of life in the wild, the bizarre and hopeless idiocy of pitting yourself against nature -- an endeavor that involves vast amounts of sitting in one place and trembling either with cold or shock induced by starvation.  It's like a visit to some kind of concentration camp -- the parameters of survival are the heat of the sun, the cold at night, the degree to which you can find water, and how well you will endure two to three weeks of starvation.  None of the participants does very well at all -- I've yet to see a contestant who thrived in the wild.  (But, of course, I have to admit that I've only seen fragments of the show, although many of them -- the program has run now for ten years and episodes are pretty much ubiquitous on the Discovery Channel.)

It's, more or less, fake, of course, although I guess the insect bites, thorns, sleeplessness, and discomfort are real enough.  A tent full of food is always about just off-screen and contestants observe that crew-members would often give them water and victuals to keep them going.  In fact, one of the contestants who almost perished got sick, not from eating beetles or snake innards, but from dining on curry that one of the cameramen shared with her.  Women have been provided with emergency tampons.  One woman who ate some poorly prepared turtle had severe diarrhea -- we don't ever see any of this sort of thing on the show -- and had to be given two infusions of fluids and antibiotic by IV.  If you complete the ordeal, you're paid $20,000 or $25,000 so there's an incentive to suffer.through the whole thing.  In fact, contestants are allowed four or five survival items, not only one as the show proclaims.  The producers hover around the campsite and try to goad the participants into fighting with one another -- usually successfully since the protagonists are severely sleep-deprived.  Far from being remote, the campsites are generally within a mile or two of a town with a Walmart and a clinic -- contestants recall often meeting locals in this notional wilderness.  Of course, those encounters are edited out of the show.  None of this makes the show less existentially dire and threatening -- in fact, these details make the ordeals suffered by the protagonists all the more depressing.  It's one thing to perish in the remote jungles of the Amazon, another thing to suffer completely inanition and coma due to thirst and starvation within a half-mile of a Walmart.