As I said in my previous post Reading Against the Grain, the interpretive work of reading is not limited to books: a text can be a film, a building, or a TV program. Reading against the grain, or resistant reading, is when try to find a new and often opposing interpretation of a text than that of the dominant reading. This is often done by reading the text against itself. Let's look an example of how we can do this in the case of Big Brother.
The Big Brother TV series when it was first launched in the UK was presented both as entertainment and as a social experiment on the inhabitants of the house. (This latter element was still there in later series, but was much reduced in place of the entertainment strand.) The contestants were tested, rewarded or punished, and were watched 24 hours a day by ‘Big Brother’, the audience and the show’s producers. Every week there would be sociologists and psychologists on the highlights program to explain housemates’ behaviour in light of their various theories. So, the intention of the program was as an experiment on the inhabitants of the Big Brother house, which would then tell those outside the house (the audience) something about themselves.
Let’s read against the grain, and say that the program was an experiment on those outside the house, which then told the Big Brother contestants inside something about themselves. How can we support this?
First, we may look at what in science is called the observer effect. This is the theory that the thing you wish to observe or measure changes in the observation of it. The Big Brother contestants are obviously not in a natural environment: they know they are on TV and act accordingly, changing their behaviour in better or worse ways for the cameras. The intended experiment on the housemates would therefore give bad results. However, if the experiment was actually on the audience, then a very effective method of tricking them into thinking they are not being observed would be to place them in the apparent role of observer. Throughout an episode of Big Brother are reminders of the hidden cameras watching the housemates – a few frames of a camera lens, the Big Brother ‘eye’ logo, the CCTV-like footage of empty rooms before the camera ‘finds’ the housemates. Why have these reminders if it is patently obvious the housemates are the ones being observed? The answer is that it is a misdirection on the audience to fool them into thinking that the social experiment is not, in fact, on them.
In this reading, now it is the contestants inside the house who are observing the audience. The way they do this is through the public vote every week. The contestants nominate the two people up for the vote, and are voted out of the house accordingly. The contestants’ experiment on the public is in fact a much better model than the one of the audience on the contestants: not only do the public not know they are being observed (reducing observation bias), but there are also a lot more of them (providing a bigger sampling group), and there are only two possible options to measure in who gets voted out (limiting variables).
The results of this experiment are delivered to the contestants weekly by who is evicted from the house. The results are revealing to the contestants what kinds of people they need to be like in order to win the money at the end (in this reading, the best ‘experimenter’ or interpreter of the results will succeed). Not having watched enough of the series myself to say, I can only guess at what kinds of people these are: funny, yes, but not offensive, and certainly not racist; homosexuality fine, transgendered no; attractive yes, but not in a threatening or overtly sexual way.
The results of the Big Brother experiment are actually much less surprising or sensational than the program's advertised motives. From a program that experiments on the contestants in front of an audience with controversial results, we now have one that experiments on the audience in front of the contestants with uncontroversial results. With this reading, it is perhaps unsurprising that the program's producers were forced to throw the contestants into ever more bizarre scenarios, in order to prop up the waining interest in the experiment strand with entertainment, and ultimately for the program to be cancelled as this side reached the limit of its effectiveness with the audience.
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