A few days after the public learned the US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem had, in the works, a reality show that featured immigrants competing for US citizenship, the show’s producer Rob Worsoff asserted that it would not be like the Hunger Games. It would instead be a “celebration of America in the most positive possible way.” The show, called The American, would involve immigrants digging up “clams in Maine or rafting down the Arkansas River in Colorado.” These are, one gathers, fun, wholesome things to do; whereas the contestants in the Hunger Games were thrown into a life-and-death struggle. The games on the reality show can, in Worsoff’s view, be characterized as utopian; the ones in the popular movie series, and the novels on which they are based, dystopian.
What can we say about this? I want to first point to an insight found in a philosophical work that influenced The Matrix, Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation.
Baudrillard writes: “Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe the rest is real, whereas all of Los Angeles and the America that surrounds it are no longer real.” Described in this passage is a powerful and even bewildering form of concealment. The truth hides the truth as not the truth: we are always in Disneyland. We never enter or leave it.
Though the target of Baudrilliad’s critique is the actual status of American reality (he believed we all lived in a simulation or The Matrix), I prefer to see it in structural terms. Meaning, there is nothing one does in Disneyland that is essentially (or structurally) different from what one does outside of it. You cannot draw a line between Mickey Mouse and Chuck E. Cheese. Visiting the Magic Kingdom costs money; buying goods at Walmart also costs money. And so on.
Disneyland is not even the kind of space that the 20th century Russian literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin imagined existed in European medieval carnivals. There’s no inversion or subversion here. The fool becoming a king; and the king becoming a fool (the paradigm of Baktin’s carnival)? Not all. Disneyland compliments and even reinforces the prevailing social order. Secretary Kristi Noem doesn’t become a fool in Disneyland. She remains a queen.
So, why do people pay for something that is already available to them outside of the theme park? Because it hides the fact that you are already in it. And what is the use or function of this obvious concealment? The answer is the point at which Baudrillard’s ”real” becomes visible and political: Because it tells you that buying a Barbie doll at a Walmart or losing access to food stamps is real; but hugging Minnie Mouse is a fantasy. And if you accept this distinction, it naturalizes the forms of exploitation that, if carefully examined, have as much reality in them as the walking brooms in the “Sorcerer's Apprentice.”
And this is what makes The American even doubly strange. For years, we watched The Running Man, The Hunger Games, Squid Game from a comfortable distance. They appeared to be fantastic, and we appeared to be in reality. This distinction, of course, served the same ideological function as Disneyland. The games on our movie/computer/phone screens concealed the fantastic fact at the heart of our everyday world: It is, actually, all a game.
This is what makes The American so innovative. It will abandon the concealment part and tell us, yes, you have been nowhere else but in Panem. Our society has reached a point when the illusion is no longer needed. It may even be a bad distraction. A part of the reason for this development finds its explanation in what Seattle writer and filmmaker David Shields calls “reality hunger.” What MAGA wants most from life, as Jan 6 revealed, is a real experience. But an experience of this kind, such as the Black Lives Matter protests, requires demolishing a considerable part of the present structure of our society. So, instead of breaking the spell of the unreal, we have the unreal leap from the screen and into the everyday unreal: ICE kidnapping international students from the street, Venezuelans being flown to a post-apocalyptic maximum prison in El Salvador, law abiding laborers being detained indefinitely at the ICE’s detention centers. This is The American.
