Unyielding 130-degree heat surrounds your body. Hurricane-force winds exfoliate your skin. Your muscles are subjected to earthquake-level vibrations. Your body is turned upside down.
Now, answer quickly: What company makes the Xbox?
If you answered “Microsoft,” you’re correct, but you’re cheating. You’re just reading a newspaper.
“The Chamber,” in which players are actually subjected to these conditions, debuts Friday night on Fox, and the “sneak preview” Sunday was almost sickening. Almost, but not quite, because it was sort of freaking cool.
In broadcast TV’s latest reality program cum torture extravaganza cum quiz show (think “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” meets “American Gladiators”), the assaults on players’ bodies in the chamber are just for fun; they must answer relatively easy trivia questions in order to win money.
One thing detracts from the whole concept: The top prize is approximately $100,000 (the total varies depending on the number of questions answered correctly). The game would be more entertaining if there was real money — maybe a couple of million dollars — on the line.
Fox’s new shock-TV gamble could pay off, if people find the near-torture compelling. For my part, it was fun in a gruesome sort of way, akin to watching the classic indie film, “Man Bites Dog,” where viewers are forced by the filmmakers to laugh out loud at serial murder. It’s a disconcerting feeling, like laughing while being punched in the stomach.
More likely, though, is that “The Chamber” won’t be able to stand the pressure. It’s over the top and overdramatic in a classic Fox way. Think, for instance, of all the raging success that accompanied “Who Wants to Marry a Millionaire?” My guess is “The Chamber” will shortly be forgotten. But it’s still freaking cool — for a minute.
Watching “The Chamber” reminded me of an ignored movie, “Series 7,” which was released last year in silence and came out on video recently to even more silence.
“Series 7” is a fictional depiction of a reality game show where contestants must murder each other to survive. Players are forced to participate, and all they win is their freedom — if they make enough kills.
That movie was made by an experienced reality-TV producer, Daniel Minahan, and it shows; all of the TV production values are there, and every 20 minutes or so there are cutaways and upcoming scenes, as though a commercial break were taking place.
The problem that plagued “Series 7,” and that will, I think, ultimately kill “The Chamber,” is that they both seem really tame. Perhaps it isn’t a sign of psychological health that I think a movie about players slaughtering each other is tame, but it came off that way. It just doesn’t seem that farfetched, nor that gruesome.
Why is this? My guess is that reality shows and the incredibly violent fiction that dominate American entertainment have inured viewers to the shock value of killing, or of torture. During “The Chamber,” for instance, one contestant yelled, “Ow!” twice and then, “Son of a bitch!” I ooh-ed and giggled. Maybe it was because I had just watched “The Simpsons.”
“Series 7” might have seemed a frightening, biting portrayal of the future if it was made 10 years ago, when viewers were first getting used to “The Real World.” “The Chamber,” by comparison, might have seemed on-the-edge a few years ago, before viewers were assaulted with reality shows of increasingly upped stakes.
The truly sickening part of this is that both productions seem a bit blasé at this point in history. Maybe I’m just a sicko. I hope so, for everyone’s sake.