The Amazing Race 20-09: Bollywood Travolta

Most episodes of The Amazing Race stick to the show's established formula pretty rigorously.  The challenges and route are created to give rise to a specific type of competitive narrative, and usually they do as they're supposed to.  This is why most Amazing Race challenges are only moderately challenging: they ultimately have to be surpassed in order for the narrative to progress.  Sometimes, however, things don't go according to plan, and the editors (the real authors of any given reality shows, if you have to pin it down) have to stitch together a different narrative.  These are the episodes where reality television is most fascinating, if not necessarily at its most entertaining.

This particular episode is set up to be a pretty harmless, disposable leg of the race, complete with the non-elimination anticlimax at the end.  It's the usual trip to India, a staple because of its crowded foreignness and ability to provoke mental breakdowns and bouts of racism from the racers, both of which make for can't-miss TV.  The Amazing Race has gone to this well so often that they're down to hitting up Cochin in search of a new city.  The challenges are pretty standard fare, with none of them seeming immediately difficult: they have to perform a Bollywood dance routine, then score a point in cricket or learn how to drive an Indian taxi.  This is the usual MO: use stereotypical "foreign colour" to provide an opportunity for your contestants to embarrass themselves.  This is especially promising on this season, full of hate-worthy characters.

But things get derailed at the seemingly innocuous dancing challenge, when redneck-caricature team Mark and Bopper fail over and over again.  What was initially an opportunity for some easy laughs now becomes surprisingly physical and brutal, as heatstroke starts to set in and Mark gets rejected again and again.  There's almost a deconstructionist tone to the episode, as the pratfalls and broad humour of the race are turned into something stomach-churning.  The repetition of the peppy Indian dance music starts sounding almost nightmarish.

The narratives of competitive reality are not too different from the narratives we associate with sports, the way we turn an objective, almost scientific competition[1] into a story.  Usually The Amazing Race draws on a competition story, revolving over who's going to win and who's going to lose, and whether or not good will prevail.  But in "Bollywood Travolta" that's all but dispensed with.  There's little suspense as to who will clinch first place, as frontrunners Dave and Rachel cruise to an easy victory, remaining ahead of their competition the whole way (with the exception of a confusing airport scramble that puts Ralph & Vanessa momentarily ahead).  There also aren't any of the usual editing tricks to build suspense as to who will come in last -- the cut-aways to the other teams checking in at the pitstop seem increasingly perfunctory as the story turns more and more towards the travails of Bopper and Mark.

What we get instead is the other sports story narrative, in which moral redemption is achieved through the act of playing the sport and not necessarily through victory.  These are mainly hard-luck stories in which simply making it to the game represents a triumph over adversity.  The most obvious examples would be the original Rocky and much of Friday Night Lights.  These narratives are really no less sentimental and silly than the more conventional version, but because of their association with underdogs have become associated with gritty urban realism.  And indeed, there's a kind of blue-collar dignity that makes you want to cheer for Bopper & Mark, no matter how stereotypical they act.  They talk constantly about their family, which seems designed to present them as having more real concerns than the pretty twenty-somethings that seem more like glamorous fairy creatures.

Of course, this doesn't necessarily add up to a more effective episode than the boilerplate Race standard it was designed as.  For starters, while the drama is genuinely affecting in the moment, further consideration makes it seem rather silly.  Bopper tells his friend that the race isn't worth his life, and this seems to be a sticking point, as though a dance competition would literally kill him.  This drama, with Bopper begging Mark to quit and Mark refusing, is repeated again and again until Mark finally does quit -- only for their positions to seemingly reverse, with Bopper urging his teammate to give the challenge one more shot.  This doesn't seem to have a diegetic reason, although  most fans have decided that it was producer interference outside the episode's narrative.

This is followed by the standard sappy goodbye montage of the eliminated team enjoying the race.  This is the kind of gross, affecting but entirely overplayed sentiment that has made The Amazing Race such a long-lasting series -- it plays to the cheap seats, and is unabashed in doing so.  In this case, the montaged team isn't actually eliminated, which makes the whole thing sort of silly.  There's a similar montage next week when they're actually eliminated, and I believe there was one the first time they were saved by a non-elimination.  Even broad reality shows can't show their editing tricks too often.

(Bopper & Mark have really gotten lucky with these things, which you think would invalidate them as hard-working underdogs, but for some reason it doesn't.  This is mainly because reality shows present their formal caprice as a reflection of the internal values of the team.  The fact that Bopper & Mark keep getting saved shows their never-say-die attitude, despite the fact that the teams that didn't get lucky never got a chance to never say die.)

The rest of the episode is pretty prosaic.  The race's ongoing storylines, such as a ridiculously petty squabble between Rachel & Dave and Art & JJ and the continued catfighting between the ex-Big Brother team and Ralph & Vanessa.  There's been an awful lot of drama between teams this season in a show that usually focuses more on the relationships between teammates, which makes it a bit more like a conventional trashy reality show but also kind of more entertaining in a guilty-pleasure way.  This culminated in an episode a few weeks ago that went over 20 minutes without a challenge, just a lot of drama and arguing between all the teams except the happy-go-lucky hillbillies.  (That was another episode that messed with the standard format, an encouraging sign at least in theory.)  Nobody comes out very well in these arguments other than Bopper & Mark for not getting involved in them, which is what makes them such clear heroes in this episode.  But they physically can't win, and that leaves us with a conundrum, as the finale seems set to be a showdown between four villains.

What other narratives do we have to latch onto, then, besides good versus evil?  "Bollywood Travolta" offers up a lukewarm battle of the sexes, a trope that reality television always falls back on when it's desperate.  Art and JJ make several bitter comments at the Roadblock about how the girls will have a natural dancing advantage over the guys ("I'm telling you man, dudes do not move like girls.  It doesn't look the same"), but are then hoisted by their own petard when Rachel (the redhead one) beats them at the sports-based cricket challenge.

This would be a standard liberal pseudo-feminist narrative if it weren't for the fact that the episode seems to suggest that Art & JJ have a point.  After all, the three male/female teams all send their female member to do the dancing roadblock, and all three finish before the two all-male squads (although Art and Mark are hardly the type of men you'd want in a dance contest).  The same Rachel that later triumphs in the Detour remarks at this challenge that "I'm a girl, of course I'm going to be emotional", making her hardly a feminist heroine.  She generally lives up to, or is edited into, the misogynist diva character that many reality-show women have inhabited before her.  To their credit, The Amazing Race casts plenty of tough chicks, fey guys, and generally vaguely gender-non-conforming individuals -- but it also casts plenty of meatheads and divas, and they're the ones that have survived this season.  The detachment of the format, which generally doesn't explicitly judge its contestants, here seems like a weakness -- it's possible to read this episode as a reaffirmation of misogynist principles, and indeed that's easier than any other reading.

In the end, "Bollywood Travolta" does strike narrative paydirt in the ongoing tribulations of Bopper & Mark, making the fate of a comedy team something serious.  But it's an unsustainable narrative -- the bad thing about underdogs is that, in the end, they usually lose.  And what's worse, it seems to come about almost entirely by accident instead of producer or editor creation.  The last thing a reality TV show wants to be is dictated by reality.

Next week: "Come on, I Dean / Oh my hands are so clean / And at this moment / I am stapling".

[1]This applies more to sports to reality shows -- the latter are often patently unfair, but sports are a regulated system designed to create an impartial test of athletic ability with no external variables.  Of course, this works great for a science experiment, but as people we require a bit more narrative oomph, which is why the ref is always screwing over our home team.

The Amazing Race 19-11: We Are Charlie Chaplin

By the time any given TV show reaches its nineteenth season, it's either gone beyond stale or become an institution -- usually both at once, and one could say that the two are simply different ways to describe the same state.  Indeed, it's slightly startling to be typing "19-11" in to the episode box.  To be fair, the count is a bit deceptive -- The Amazing Race has only been on TV for about a decade now ("only"), airing two shorter seasons each year.  A low-rated critical darling for the first few years of its run, it's become a stable presence that nobody bothers to cancel, one of the sedate elder statesmen of the reality TV world along with Survivor.

But is it still worth watching?  It's hard to think of a show whose quality persisted this late into its run -- the decline of The Simpsons is probably the most famous example.  It may be better (or at least more flattering) to view these competition reality shows less in the vein of fictional TV and more in that of competitions like sports.  After all, nobody wonders when they're going to get around to wrapping up that whole NFL thing.  But it's hard to deny that there's a sense of malaise setting in.  It's not so much that the recent seasons are that much worse than the initial ones -- you'll find people who say this, but it's mainly nostalgia -- but just that the formula has lost its power to surprise.  It's a comfortable show to watch, for me a bit of a family tradition, but the other side of comfort is complacency.

This episode is the penultimate one of the season, in which the final four is whittled down to the final three who will compete for the million bucks before taxes in the finale.  Geographically, it takes the teams from Belgium to Panama, as part of the continual quest for new destinations.  But it's most notable for the surprise elimination of perennial leg-winners and snowboarding stereotypes Andy and Tommy.  It's one of the few moments of genuine surprise this season has produced.

It also involves the perennial draw of competition reality shows: the joy of watching someone else fail.  I wish there was a more convenient word for that.  This is really what competition shows promise us: sure, every week someone will win, but more important than that someone will fail and be eliminated because of some monumental error that we're all sure we would never make.  With the exception of the finale, every episode is situated around the question of who will lose.  (Except for those non-elimination legs that everyone hates).  And this is very rarely presented as simply being the least good of a good group: it's always some kind of character or skill failing.

In a way this is a simple exhibition of cruelty, allowing the viewer to triumph in another's suffering in the way they are rarely invited to in fictional television.  Of course, this may just be my own individual reaction -- perhaps there are viewers out there who bite their nails hoping that everything works out for the best.  But in order to maintain the justice of the competition, the editing has to suggest that everything a team suffers is what they deserve -- effectively giving us permission to laugh.  And it's worth noting how comedic this show, and reality TV in general, is.  The Amazing Race occasionally highlights its contestants' stumblings with jokey music, but even when it doesn't it's easy to laugh at the pratfalls and slip-ups of the team.

Of course, as the omniscient viewers we're able to see the right path beforehand, and as such it seems obvious to us.  The best example is a tricky-to-find clue (printed on a dancing girl's skirt) at the end of this leg.  We receive narration of where it is, and the camera repeatedly flashes to it, but the teams are stumped.  What's obvious to us is not obvious to the contestants, making them seem dumber and weaker than ourselves.  Once again, a good deal of the pleasure lies in mockery -- seeing Andy and Tommy nosing around the docks of Panama in search of a nonexistant clue and laughing and saying "What the hell are they doing?"

On the other hand, "cruelty" is probably overstating things a bit.  After all, we're only watching people lose a game show, not be tortured.  In its genial family-friendly way, The Amazing Race doesn't even involve much humiliation, aside from the occasional eating challenge.  Still, it's important to keep in mind the pleasures these shows offer and to consider what it means that they're offering them.

The fist challenge for this episode involves the contestants dressing up as characters from the comic Tintin and trying to identify who it is they're dressed as.  I liked this challenge for a couple reasons.  It makes the racers actually engage in a limited way with the culture they're in, instead of just going somewhere and going through some motions.  And it also involves funny costumes.

Do you see what I mean about the comedic elements?

Of course, none of the racers have any idea who the Tintin characters are, and so rely on a combination of friendly locals and the Internet to learn the answer.  The co-operation of local passerbies is a big part of just about every episode of The Amazing Race.  Competitive reality shows have been attacked, with some fairness, for being advocates of dog-eat-dog neoliberalism.  But it's also worth noting how co-operation is an essential part of theses hows, especially The Amazing Race and Survivor.  There's a kind of reassuring note to the show, that the streets of every city on Earth are teeming with people who will help you if you get lost or just need assistance in some silly game show[1].

Amusingly, in this episode the cabbies of several of the teams end up working together and sharing direction, much to the chagrin of the racers trying to make it a competition.  Once again, co-operation occurs despite the focus on competition -- and the fate of the whole thing is, as usual, left in the hands of anonymous taxi drivers.

Having completed their comic book-character identification task, the teams can now take a plane to Panama, in order to walk a tightrope between two buildings.  If that sentence sounded like a string of non-sequiters to you, you're not alone.  The Amazing Race and many other reality shows take on a carnivalesque atmosphere, using their loose plot (a race around the world) to string together a series of disparate visual pleasures -- like, say, people dressing up in funny costumes or walking on tightropes.  In this way they're heirs to the legacy of variety shows, providing a little something for everyone, much more so than variety's official heir, late-night tak shows.  While the race provides a diegetic impetus for these performances, it usually doesn't provide a justification for them.  For instance, all four teams get on the same flight to Panama, so there's no

This accounts for the popularity of challenges which are visually striking but not all that, well, challenging or skill-testing.  Heights challenges, which usually occur several times per season, are the key example of this.  The only challenge is whether or not the teams will work up the nerve to jump or rappel or cross or whatever itis, which they pretty much always do -- although a shocking amount of people go on this show while being afraid of heights.  This episode's rendition is at least a little visually scary, although the tension is tempered by the fact that obviously none of these people are going to fall to their deaths in the middle of the episode.

The final challenge on this leg is a more quotidian one, a Detour that requires teams to choose between, to quote erstwhile host and certified choo-choo chrarlie Phil Keoghan, "two of Panama's oldest professions".  Fortunately, no prostitution is involved.  The actual tasks are constructing a sandal out of leather and transporting fish to the right stands in an open-air fish market.  Usually on The Amazing Race you end up with challenges that exoticize the country of the week, but here they just seem content to ignore it.  All I really learned about Panama from this episode was that it had tall buildings, shoes, and fish -- very distinctive traits.

In a way this is an extension of the humiliation factor -- affluent first-worlders forced to do manual labour in a developing country -- although this element isn't focused on in the editing.  But it's also the most competitive section of the leg, pitting the teams against each other in a contest that involves unusual and unexpected skills.  And somehow this shoe-making race is edited to actually create tension and excitement.  The Amazing Race never lingers on a single scene for more than a minute, always switching between teams and between tasks, so there's never really the potential for boredom.  The techniques used here are the conventional shooting methods of action movies (there's a reason Jerry Bruckheimer is a producer), which on their own are quite effective in making a dramatic narrative out of literally anything.

But after a while this narrative and this style grows thin, and nineteen seasons certainly qualifies as "a while".  Unlike most shows, a competitive reality show grows weaker the more you watch of it. The first season of Survivor or The Amazing Race or Top Chef seems amazing, dramatic, and almost iconic -- all of the characters are new to you, the tension seems genuine, and the format is fresh.  This is true even if you start with a comparatively weak season.  But as the format of the show repeats again and again, diminishing returns set in.  The new faces are edited into the same old archetypes, making them seem like nothing more than imitations, and you've already seen the drama a hundred times before.  That doesn't mean that watching more than one season of one of these shows is redundant, or that their current incarnation is neccesarily bad.  I still enjoy the show, albeit to a lesser extent than I did when I first started watching it.  But diminishing returns is endemic to the genre.

There are three pleasures that The Amazing Race promises its audience, then: schadenfreude, visual splendour akin to Andre Bazin's "cinema of attraction", and novelty.  The first two spring eternal.  The third is something that each episode of the show endlessly grasps for, constantly juggling between strange activities and stranger people, but something that is always fleeting.  If staleness is not inevitable, then I'd love to see a reality show that proves that -- and that show might just be a hit.

Next Week: A cornucopia of callbacks on It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia.

[1]The cameras may induce a lot of this charity, but that's certainly not in the text of the show.