Surviving Survivor:
Bill Vaughn's Loose Lips
Notes on episode twelve: For what is this rough beast, it's hour come at last.

By Bill Vaughn

Pathfinder Video

"Oh, shit!" he'll whine. "What's my friggin line?"

"Cut!" the director will shout. The crew will shake their heads. A clipboard will read him his line, and the show will go on. This happens all the time. But people are kind. Old Doc Sean is a trooper. Everyone knows he hasn't been the same since he got his first taste of camera back there in Borneo. And they can all see that he's never gotten over Commander Rudolph Boesch, his bunkmate in the debris shelter, his Tagi tribemate, the former Navy Seal who not only served the Rattana people their sticky-rice for thirty-nine days, but taught them about Teutonic honor as well, about what happens when you don't pay your dues to Klub Rudy, about the consequences of going around like some kind of fancy boy with little alphabet schemes and whatnot.

"If somebody gave me your word," the pride of the Atlantic Fleet explained, "that they are in this alliance with me, and I give my word, my word is good. And their word better be good. If they betray me I'll get even with 'em." The ejected waste of this penultimate episode could just have easily been Kelly Wiglesworth, nose-biter and fugitive from the law. But the Nevada river guide saved herself by winning the impossibly hokey immunity challenge involving the gathering of masks bearing printed questions about island "lore." Like, say, what happens when a snake visits camp? The snake is good luck, Kelly recited, filming herself with one of the camcorders oily and unctuous host Jeff Probst handed out. Do not taunt the snake because that's, uh, bad luck. Wiglesworth scored a double victory on Episode Twelve by winning the Luxury Challenge as well. Because certain parts of her anatomy were able to absorb more volcanic mud than the same parts on Susan, and thus the goo she transported from mud bath to bucket weighed more than that of anyone, Wiglesworth was awarded a Bud Lite and escorted blindfolded to the Survivor Bar on Pulau Tiga for a big pasta dinner and more brewski and a showing of the first minutes of Episode One. That was the good news, sort of; the bad news, she had to drink with Jeff Probst. (Like a brat who spins his sister's cats just to get them dizzy, producer Mark Burnett loves to see the contestants hammered).

When the Gang of Four meets next week will the center hold? Unless Kelly wins immunity again this chick is toast. Her immunity, on the other hand, would shatter Klub Rudy. But the victim would no doubt be Susan Hawk, the redneck truckdriver from Wisconsin. How red is Susan's neck? Well, she calls seventh grade her senior year, needs only one more punch on her Tattoos R Us card to get a freebie, and thinks that a good farm program for Wisconsin would be Hee Haw.

While I was watching Kelly film herself as she was being filmed simultaneously by three two-person teams of image workers, I began to swoon with the sort of vertigo you can suffer in a sideshow house of mirrors. What's real, you wonder, and what's not? How much of what we've seen on the screen has been baked and then baked again in Mark Burnett's kitchen? A better question, is there anything that's not baked? Although there have been federal laws on the books governing the production of game shows ever since the TV scandals of the late 1950s, these laws don't say anything about how a show is edited, about the light in which a producer chooses to cast a player based on artful rearrangements of footage. Very little of the truth of Pulau Tiga or Malaysia or what all those silly Americans did there for 39 days has survived Burnett's editors. The contestants themselves now emerging into the media glare are allowing that they're having trouble recognizing what they see every Wednesday night as part of their own past. And that brings up inevitable ruminations about reality television-a true contradiction in terms-and the nature of photography itself.

For me, all photographs, doctored or not, exist on a continuum of misinformation. Even a photographer who rigorously confines himself to just the facts, ma'am, can serve up only a thin and crooked slice of the world. In the same way that the fragrance of a gardenia communicates only part of the flower's beauty, a photograph can bear only one kind of knowledge, despite what we've been trained to believe we see. And the parameters of that skinny data have already been determined by some limited being just like me, who's chosen such factors as angle, timing, lighting and cropping along lines that can't be anything but subjective.

So where is Survivor on this Big Phony Curve? Live sporting events, of course, are much closer to zero, if zero is absolute reality, whatever that is, as are events like the superlative documentary from the 1970s about The Loud Family in Santa Barbara. And moving in the direction away from zero are excellent game shows such as Win Ben Stein's Money and the truly awful Taiwanese offering I saw in Borneo in which contestants cram themselves into clear plastic balls so they can compete against each other in an enormous pinball machine. Network news shows are much further out, somewhere in the same neighborhood as Survivor and that dismal CBS disappointment, Big Brother.

But in the end, since it's all been cooked one way or another, either in the oven, in the wok or the microwave, what matters is how tasty it is. Survivor, as it turns out, is delectable.