Mayonnaise Dispatch 002
Alone, naked and struggling: LIVE!
On May 17th, after more than 166 hours of unbroken streaming and 1701 deaths, all-time most-subscribed Twitch streamer, Kai Cenat finally beat Elden Ring. His marathon stream covered everything from gameplay to chatting as well as including hours of him sleeping, reminding me of the first few seasons of Big Brother in the UK, when we collectively decided that watching people sleep was must-see TV.
It also brought back memories of Nasubi: the Japanese man who, in January 1998, was chosen to be a contestant on a game show where he was put in a tiny apartment room, stripped naked and left in isolation for 15 months, surviving off of mail in sweepstakes whilst unknowingly being broadcast to a national audience. It’s worth noting that 5 months later The Truman Show was released begging the question: what was going on in the collective subconscious at the end of the 20th century? See: Adam Curtis’ Hypernormalisation, specifically the part about the slew of disaster movies that came out just before 9/11.
Last month, Hulu released The Contestant, a documentary about Nasubi and the gameshow he fell victim to, Susunu! Denpa Shōnen. It’s already a widely known story, told through heaps of articles and video essays, but I wanted to check out the new doc because I was curious about what a deeper investigation looked like. Mild spoilers below.
Sadly, the doc is a shallow retelling of a truly shocking story that doesn’t add any real insight or revelations. The hokey localization of the show footage that acts as the backbone of the film is extremely distracting and the music and score is ham-fistedly deployed to do more storytelling than the story producers could. The message, understandably, is ‘Producer Bad, How Terrible’ but with 25 years in the rear-view, is there nothing more to add? What was really happening behind the scenes? What was changing in media and pop culture at the time in Japan? The reasons why this thing happened are pinned to a sadistic producer and disappointingly left at that.
It was great to hear Nasubi’s side of the story though nothing he said was that unexpected and the producers predictably attempted to make him seem a bit pathetic through editing and score. There were some moments that began to be thought provoking - especially regarding the aftermath of Nasubi’s experience - but the producers never scratched more than the surface.
I’d say watch it if you know nothing about Nasubi but if you know the story, you won’t get much more than you would by reading the wiki.
Standout moments:
Juliet Hindell from the BBC: “[Denpa Shonen] was a show where unknown people could make their name and become celebrities overnight.” In 1998 it took a producer picking you out of a group of applicants. In 2024 fame like this can be entirely self initiated, sometimes taking nothing more than a meme.
I kind of like the producer. He’s absolutely unhinged and sociopathic but he has this very romantic way of looking at why he did what he did and of his bond with Nasubi.
It turns out Nasubi was the first streamer after the producers started a live feed during his captivity to debunk rumours of the whole thing being fake.
It wasn’t covered in the doc, but Nasubi is also considered to be the first video game streamer after playing Densha de Go! on Playstation during the live broadcast.
My Own Private Panopticon
Nasubi wasn’t in control of his situation so his story plays out as a victim being imprisoned, manipulated and abused by a third party (the producer and the appetite of pop culture at that time). With streamers today, like Kai Cenat and others, the control is entirely theirs: they’re choosing to set themselves wild challenges; they’re letting people in on their most intimate moments; they’re performing on camera for 8+ hours a day every day; they’re both the producer and the subject.
Nasubi’s reason for why he never left a room that was never locked was that he didn’t want to let himself or others down and felt a pressure to deliver for the producers - and although his situation is clearly not the same as a modern day streamer, it’s hard not to wonder whether they’re feeling the same pressures - making them both captives and captors in their own way.
This comes to mind most acutely when thinking of sleep streamers, which is exactly what it sounds like: streamers sleep live on camera, letting their community into their most private space and giving them access to their most vulnerable moments. Sure, there’s money to be made and there’s the pressure of growing and pleasing your community but to be watched at all times is to be imprisoned.
The Spread
Each time there’s media innovation, we revisit a fan favourite: watching people struggle. From the stocks in the town square, to a naked man in an apartment in Japan, to a gamer dying to the same boss 432 times; seeing people struggle just makes good entertainment. The producer in the Nasubi doc claims that people love watching people. If that’s true, is it because we love them? Or are we programmed to like to see them suffer?
Either way, if things really are cyclical and we’re back to watching people sleep, I think I need to see a Big Brother house full of twitch streamers on network TV. Who would you pick as the 16 contestants?
Last thing: the loneliness epidemic is real and it’s pushing people to finding intimacy online: sleep streaming is one of many examples of this. But is mining more of one’s life for content just deepening the isolation that it’s meant to combat? Socializing online is easy and it can be really good for you at times but like everything, moderation is key. Plus you never know if the next time you go to touch some grass may be the time you initiate an accidental hand-hold with your IRL soul mate.
Related Links:
This Esquire article from 2020 on Big Brother and it’s legacy.
Goon-addicted editors are responsible for VTubers, apparently.
I’m Only Sleeping on Twitch
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