Survivor and the Endless Gaze

Sallie Tisdale

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781982175894
• eBook ISBN: 9781982175917
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Television History & Criticism

The author of the acclaimed Advice for Future Corpses (and Those Who Love Them) brings “her singular sensibility, her genius for language, her love of our deeply imperfect world” (Karen Karbo, author of In Praise of Difficult Women) to this insightful exploration of reality TV and the shifting definitions of truth in America.

What is the truth?

In a world of fake news and rampant conspiracy theories, the nature of truth has increasingly blurry borders. In this clever and timely cultural commentary, award-winning author Sallie Tisdale tackles this issue by framing it in a familiar way—reality TV, particularly the long-running CBS show Survivor.

With humor and in-depth superfan analysis, Tisdale explores the distinction between suspended disbelief and true authenticity both in how we watch shows like Survivor, and in how we perceive the world around us. With her “bold and wise, galvanizing and grounding” (Chloe Caldwell, author of I’ll Tell You in Person) writing, Tisdale has created an unputdownable, thoroughly entertaining, and groundbreaking book that we will be talking about for years to come.

LOSERS (OR, THE THINKING SEAT)

In the opening moments of season 10 on Palau, the contestants struggle to get their boat to shore. Wanda Shirk, a 55-year-old English teacher from Pennsylvania, stands up in the stern and begins to sing. She’s written a lot of songs about Survivor and she wants the game to be “a big party as long as it lasts.” Willard Smith, a lawyer from Washington, later says, “We’re sitting there, it’s a really hot day, rowing the boat, and this lunatic jumps up and starts singing songs. I wanted to knock her off with the oar.”

Such is the “loser edit,” what Colson Whitehead calls “the plausible argument of failure.” When a tribe loses an immunity challenge, the film shifts into slow-motion close-ups of their disappointed faces—because this is war and they lost, because they are losers. Certain players are “doomed to perform personality deficits episode after episode,” wrote Whitehead. “It has been written, by fate or the producers, pick your deity.”

There are a lot more ways to lose Survivor than to win. Far more ways: getting angry, gloating, whining, saying you’re tired, saying you don’t feel good, saying you’re lonely. Choosing to have your bowel movement in the shallow water by camp on the first day, as Darnell did in Kaôh Ro¯ng. If you want to win, don’t talk all the time. Don’t be too loud. Never say, “I’m in control of this game.” Don’t act paranoid. Don’t start a romance. Never say you are the weak link. Don’t share your hard luck story. Don’t be too confident and never predict you will win. “I was counting my million,” says Boo, on Fiji. Oops. You will lose for not working and for working too hard and for asking others to work and for not doing the specific work that others want you to do without being asked.

Crying. You do not win by crying. (I cry when I’m angry or frustrated and I know I would cry on Survivor because getting angry and frustrated is part of the game. One more strike against me.) I think the crying prize probably belongs to Gabby, on season 37, who cried because she was in an alliance and cried when she thought she was out of one, cried on Christian’s shoulder (literally, leaning on him and weeping in one scene after another), cried at challenges and cried at meals, cried when she decided that Christian was “playing up” the role of “comforter” and cried because she couldn’t let herself be seen as a victim, and then cried when she sucked up to him later. In a confessional interview, she cried about making a big move. She cried when she tried to make her big move, cried when she was inevitably relegated to the jury, and then she cried when she voted for a winner.

You lose for complaining, you lose for not sharing your complaints, you lose for being sensitive, you lose for being insensitive, you lose for getting emotional, and you lose for being stoic. Don’t be annoying. Such a simple, obvious rule. On season 35, one player described Patrick this way: “It’s like you’ve got a newborn baby. You really want to like it, take care of it, but it’s really, really annoying, because you’ve got to watch every single second.” Ali takes him aside and tries to get him to play a more social game, but Patrick is convinced that he already has a great social game. He says to the camera, “Ali telling me to cool it is difficult because it takes away from my personality.” Exactly. At Council he pleads to stay because he can “make people feel loved and comforted.” When they vote him out, he says, “You guys are awful.”

You need to at least appear to listen to and care about the others, be moved by their story, but not be dramatic or over-involved. It’s a faint line, and many people never find it. Robb, a young bro with big hoop earrings playing in Thailand, never shuts up. He grooms himself in his own reflective sunglasses. He cheats during a challenge by choking a member of the other team, and he comes back to camp in a loud, sour mood. He makes fun of the man he choked, calling him a “backwoods hick” and a “weak little whiny punk.” He’s disgusted that the other tribe won. “We lost,” he adds, “but we lost by a bunch of rules.” One night, after the tribe has won a bit of alcohol—Robb won it for them, almost single-handedly—the tribe stays up late. Robb lets it all hang out: how the game has changed him, how he’s been selfish and immature and he’s sorry and it’s all confusingly about his father in some way, and it goes on for a long time. On some level, I think he’s sincere; on another, his confession feels about as immature as everything else he’s done. But Tribal Council is designed to take advantage of such moments. After Robb explains his change of heart, Jeff says, “Clearly you guys have experienced some real spiritual growth.” Then Robb is voted out.

Sometimes there’s a health nut who disdains white rice or a vegetarian who refuses to eat a snail and collapses from hunger instead. You can’t be a picky eater and you can’t get sick. People are looking for targets, so the smallest things get latched onto and blown up until people can rationalize their way to the vote. A single word turns into “he’s whiny” and a single look becomes “she’s mean.” Or so it appears; who knows how many words and looks are left on the editing room floor?

In the season called Worlds Apart, where tribes were divided by perceived social class, Nina claims during Tribal Council that she’s on the outs because of her deafness. Her tribemates claim that she’s on the outs because she’s not chill enough. Nina can’t just “take life as it comes” and doesn’t “ride the highs” and “ride out the lows.” Hali says, “Nina doesn’t have that same flow going.” She’s always begging for reassurance that she’s not on the outs because of her deafness. Jeff says, “There’s something that happens on Survivor where perception becomes reality. No matter what perception the group has, it is real and it is true, to them.” This deep thought does not just apply to Survivor, but it certainly applies there. Nina is voted out.

Don’t be too pushy. Vince, on Worlds Apart, spends a lot of time asking other people for reassurance.

“He’s got a lot of issues,” says Joe.

He certainly does. Before the game, Vince described himself as a “pillar of support.” During the game, he is all over Jenn like a cheap suit, hugging and petting and stroking and ick. He tells her that he always forms very strong attractions to women, apparently thinking she will be flattered by this. Within hours, he is asking Jenn for “evidence” of her feelings for him. “I know how to handle him, I think,” she says, and does; he is voted out first.

One of the tropes of the game is the big move, which often involves taking out an alpha player, so it works only if you don’t tell everyone that’s what you’re doing. A big move is part of jury management, which involves building your resumé, not showing up with a blank resumé. You can’t be game-y or “strategic,” but you’d better play strategically.

You can’t be disloyal, at least until everyone else is. Leslie Nease, the Sunday School teacher who so annoyed Courtney in China, admitted to her tribemates that she had bonded with the “other Christians,” who happened to be on the other team. In writing about office politics, Erving Goffman considered how people surreptitiously attempt to create intimacy with a member of a rival group or a superior. Goffman calls “catching the eye of a member of the other team” a “betrayal” that is both common and dangerous. If you’re invited into such an intimacy and refuse, you offend a rival who may come after you. If you accept, you risk everything. Leslie was voted off third.

All through the season, every season, I see a train wreck, a loser, a saboteur, and wonder, why is he still there? And then I remember. Who would I rather sit next to, facing the jury, than a train wreck? (Would I be sitting there at the end, blithely unaware that I was the train wreck?) Good players are wise to protect the unpopular, the lazy, or the mean player for this reason. Shane, talking about Courtney: “She’s a dream to take to the final two. Anyone could win against her. Anyone! She’s a dream.” Believe me, so is Shane. At one point, he threatened to kill Courtney “in her shitty little apartment” if she ever voted for him. Not a winner’s arc.

You don’t want to be a goat, though goats can make some serious bank. A goat may be crazy, weak, or passive. There’s a goat in every season, and the goat never, ever knows he is a goat. Not knowing is the nature of goats. On season 37, Dan, a SWAT officer, says he used to be a fat kid (he tells his tribemates this many times). He is a little anxious all the time. During a challenge, he whispers to himself without ceasing: “All day, baby. All day. Focus. Keep telling yourself how awesome you are. You are the man.” Such insecurity can never win. Linda Holmes, a culture writer for NPR, said that having a goat nearby “is like sitting next to a bag of rotting dead leaves: You may not enjoy it, but you won’t lose a popularity contest to it.” Boston Rob bulldozed over the entire cast in Redemption Island, hauling famous goat Phillip to the end, essentially to use as a pillow.

On Island of the Idols, Dan says of Noura, “It would be statistically improbable to get on everybody’s nerves, and she’s accomplished it.” Cut to Noura flailing around, laughing, shouting advice at a couple of the men about the fire, and saying, “I’m gonna be the biggest train wreck of Survivor ever. Just kidding.” Noura has too much confidence, too little insight, schemes constantly, and can’t keep a secret. She spends hours working out “what-if” scenarios, to the point where she uses leaves to act out possible votes. At one Tribal, there’s a lot of whispering between alliance members, then Noura just blurts the plan out loud, shows the idol, and totally screws it up.

Yet she thinks she’s in a great position to win: “My game has been bold, zesty, flavorful, interesting, unique, healthy, fun, different,” she says as she checks each word off on her fingers, and that kind of talk is part of the problem. At the final Tribal Council, she describes her strategy, talking loud and fast: “Don’t be bland, don’t be bossy, don’t be lazy, don’t be annoying, don’t be not trustworthy, and don’t be dead in the water at a challenge.” Be zesty. The entire jury interrupts her and tells her to stop talking. At the finale, when the votes are read and she gets none, her eyes well up. She thought she had it in the bag.

Goats don’t understand what’s going on. But dumb is different. Dumb is just dumb. On Fiji, Mookie, Alex, Edgardo, and Dreamz formed an alliance they called “The Four Horsemen,” apparently confusing the Musketeers with the apocalypse. Maybe it’s just me, but Kaôh Ro¯ng had more than its share. Caleb says he is “murderalizing” a tree with an ax; Alecia, trying to make a fire, says, “We had an embryo, but it went out.” Nick, a chiseled male model on the Beauty tribe who isn’t half as clever as he thinks he is, announces during the immunity challenge that one of the three remaining Brains will be voted out. But meanwhile, he tries to manipulate Aubry into joining a Beauty alliance and he directly asks Julia if there’s a women’s alliance. You can see her light up. The women’s alliance didn’t exist until he suggested it. Nick and Kyle are expecting the vote to split between Aubry and Debbie, but boom, blindside, Nick’s gone. You can see it in his face as his torch is put out and he walks away—“Damn. Didn’t see that coming.” (I like Aubry, who says in a later season when her tribemates are hugging, “I hate Kumbaya Survivor. It’s the worst.”)

In Africa, on day 28—day 28!—Frank starts talking at great length about gun rights and liberal stupidity, just in time to piss people off before Tribal Council. Even his longtime pal and ally, Teresa, votes against him, the way a person in a shipwreck will push away a drowning person trying to drag them down.

You can survive for a while by finding a hidden immunity idol, the talisman that protects you from being voted out once. Men find idols more often than women do; they spend more time looking and look more frantically. (Tony Vlachos single-handedly raised the frenetic level by 50 percent.) In Game Changers, Tai found a hidden immunity idol. When the tribes got switched, he thought, what the heck, and used the same clues to find the second idol in the new camp. But just looking makes you a target. People standing idly at the campfire look around and say, Hey, where’s So-and-so? Are they looking for an idol? Saying you have an idol makes you a target and denying you have an idol makes you a target. (On Blood vs. Water, people are given clues to hidden idols after the Redemption Island challenges; one after the other, they publicly drop the clues into the fire. No target on me, thank you very much.) People search each other’s bags for idols, offer to let others search their bags for idols, and drop their trousers to prove they don’t have an idol (but only after burying their idol under a rock). A lot of people have been voted off with idols in their pockets. Once in the hand, the idol’s power seems to cloud the mind. If you find an idol, you should never tell anyone. This is a fundamental fact of the game; everyone knows this. Never tell. But people have to tell someone; they can’t stand not telling people. Sometimes they tell everyone.

Having an advantage in Survivor often isn’t an advantage; advantages make people nervous, and nerves show. People lose their balance. In Game Changers, Culpepper (Brad, former NFL player) promises to take Tai to the end if Tai will give him an idol. Culpepper’s real plan is to vote Tai out once he is idol-less. Tai puts his head on his knees and cries from the pressure. But he smartly holds on to the idol and Culpepper is furious. Somehow he has become the victim; he says, Tai “done me wrong.” This kind of twisted-panties revision of history is one of the most common delusions of the game. (The most common has to be the idea that you’re in charge.)

On Worlds Apart, Rodney, a contractor from Boston, was mouthy and sarcastic, easily offended, playing as (or simply being) a type of profane, misogynistic, hot-headed party hound of no more than average intelligence who still lives near his “Ma.” Rodney has a tattoo for his murdered sister. “I knew I could get to any girl’s heart with that story,” he says. “My strategy from day one, get the girls. Girls, they want to sit back and let a man take the lead and all. So I want to get the girls, I want to be their leader, and I’ll take them to the merge with me.”

To the camera, he says, “I don’t start nothin’ wit’ nobody. If you just start one fight with somebody, you’re 100 percent target on your back.” Then his team doesn’t win a reward challenge, and he’s really upset. “It’s my damn birthday,” he complains. He begs one of the three going on reward to give it to him as a gift. They refuse. “They’ve just turned me into the psychotic person that I am,” he says later. “Bunch of scumbags who neglected me on my birthday.” He won’t let it go, pacing around camp and grumbling, cursing, throwing things. “Rodney is slipping off into that abyss,” says Dan. He won’t stop bitching even after the winners return, the rain is pouring down, and everyone is stuck cheek to jowl in a leaky shelter. Not much later, Tribal Council ends in a tie between Carolyn and Rodney, which means they must compete to make fire. Rodney goes out swinging. “I wish I coulda gone to the final three. It woulda been a breeze, I woulda easily won this game.” (This is so not true.)

A player claims to be an “Federal Secret Agent” or seems to think everything is real or simply believes she is running the game up until the moment her torch is extinguished. In Panama, Shane supposedly was a marketing executive but acted like the lifer you avoid in the prison cafeteria. He says to the camera on the first day, “I don’t really fit in with the older guys, they just want to work all the time, and I’m exhausted and I haven’t had a cigarette. I’ve smoked three packs of cigarettes a day for twenty years and I haven’t had a cigarette in, like, thirty-one hours. I mean, I’m just at the end of my rope, I’m fried. I’m not in a good place, man. I’ve got to get through this detox stuff. I can’t lash out at anybody, I can’t, I can’t, I can’t.” Shane chooses a rock as his “thinking seat” and starts shouting at everyone to leave it alone: “No one else sit on my thinking seat. Please. You want this one? I’ll go get another one! I want one, this one! If you want this one, I’ll go get another one! I just want mine, this one!” Later, Shane takes Aras aside and unloads his intense resentment of Cirie. “I’m disappointed in her in a big way,” he whispers intensely. “It was wrong yesterday. It was wrong. Listen, I’m not worrying about anyone but me now. That’s why everyone is in big trouble. You and Cirie may believe it’s still the three of us, but I’m turning the whole game. Look at me. Look at me. Game on. I’m in the game now. Everyone’s got a big, big problem.” Aras is listening as though Shane might have a weapon; he nods solemnly, because that’s what you do when the crazy guy has hold of your shirt.

Coach may be the most delusional player ever. Season 18, Tocantins, was a good season, in part because it featured the first perfect victory with one of the most charming winners. The season also introduced the world to Tyson, the king of Survivor snark, described by one critic as “a four-tool player in a three-tool game.” You could tell that playing with Coach made Tyson happy. Call him Coach or Coach Wade or let him call himself Dragonslayer. He really is a soccer coach, but his autobiography includes being related to Pocahontas, surviving a hurricane, getting abducted in the Amazon, being attacked by both a shark and a crocodile, and holding some kind of world record in long-distance kayaking. For most of the season, he believes himself to be in charge of the entire game. When Brendan gets nominated to be the tribe’s leader, Coach takes it hard.

Coach calls ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• This Isn’t Welfare
• Perception Is Reality
• Working Backwards
• Evolution
• Fans and Scholars. Mostly Fans.
• That’s Not How You Play the Game
• The Host
• Losers (or, The Thinking Seat)
• Hunger
• Mirrors, Cameras, Binge-Watching, and Making a Scene
• Hell Is Other People
• Bosses and Little Old Ladies
• Sex
• Race
• The Terrifying Natives
• Swearing, Loyalty, Betrayal, and a Lie About a Truck
• Winners (or, This Is the Part Where I Outwit You)
• Jury Management
• The Biggest Villain, the Worst Person, and the Best Player Ever
• Transformation, Celebrity, and a Very Special Moment
• Resources
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright