robwit.net

So I've got a bunch of dots, but I can't connect them.

The dots encompass a major theme of the American Psyche . . . and a Briton who sees it better than we do.

The theme is boxing . . . or at least it looks like boxing.

The Briton is ex-paratrooper, ex-Hollywood nanny Mark Burnett -- producer of TV's reality show smash hits Survivor, The Apprentice and, now, The Contender.

Starting with his Eco-Challenge series --- which follows teams in an endurance race as they tremble, vomit, bleed, exhort and weep their way through gorgeous landscapes --- Mark Burnett has emerged as a minor genius at telling TV stories of competition that gleefully trigger fists-full of mythic echoes.

Another dot is likely Oscar Grand Champeen Million Dollar Baby, a relationship movie in a boxing setting say critics, about a grizzled old trainer and his reluctant help to an aspiring female fighter.

Two more dots are the recent documentaries aired on PBS about heavyweight champions Jack Johnson and Joe Louis.

Johnson the unapologetic black champion who joked in the ring and strutted like a peacock outside it in the dawn of the 20th century, notorious for dating white women, and whose victory in the "fight of the century" sparked race riots all over America.

Louis the quiet man, the new black champion, determined not to repeat Johnson's "mistakes,"surprised and defeated by Hitler's favorite, Max Schmeling, and then victorious over Schmeling in "The Fight," a rematch touted to settle the "supremacy of the races" question once and for all, a fight followed avidly on radio on both sides of the Atlantic.

A final, personal dot, a line of my own, penned during the Rude Trip Hamburg/Chicago Literary Expedition project as I looked at my upbringing through foreign eyes: "In America you're born with boxing gloves; what I want is hands."

So what to make of all this?

First, the genius of Burnett.

"Both The Apprentice and Survivor have something in common," says Burnett in a Hollywood Reporter interview, "which is dealing with the emotional pull that all humans feel from being excluded from something. That's done through either being voted off, in the case of Survivor, or being fired in Apprentice. . . . I'm a huge fan of Joseph Campbell. Both of those shows take that feeling of exclusion to a level of death. When you're fired, or in the case of Survivor, when the torch goes out, it's like being killed."

OK, so the man has a sense of the psychology of fear. But there's more. Much more,

Survivor and The Apprentice are morality plays, witting and unwitting. In Survivor, the one person not voted off the "desert island" by peers wins a million bucks. In The Apprentice, the one person not fired by Donald Trump wins a job working for him. If you call that winning.

Survivor, with its alliances and strategies, its ploys and double-crosses, is a morality play that opposes money and personal relationships --- the same dynamic that plays out in millions of American lives every day.

The Apprentice, with it's business-esque tasks and petulant meetings in the board room, is a morality play about pleasing a fickle boss, whose absolute and whimsical power is unquestioned. Also, obviously, the exact world in which most working people live.

The major technical achievement of Burnett (besides the love of helicopter shots he got from his Eco-Challenge days, and his sweet tooth for ritual and catchphrase --- "Tribe has Spoken; It's Time for You To Go " "You're fired") is the editing of his "unscripted dramas" as he calls the genre. Part of his genius lies in hiring clearly outstanding producers and editors, who build dramas out of tiny facial expressions, perfect cuts, red-herring clues, and a quiverful of brilliant visual tactics.

"In Survivor," says Burnett, "we go to the audacity of blue lighting on a long pathway. You're disappearing into the blue light (when castaways are voted off the show). These are the emotional hooks the audience relates to. . . . (After) someone is voted off each week, typically the lighting comes back to orange-y from blue, and (host) Jeff (Probst) will say, 'We'll see you tomorrow.' The tribe is living on. It's death and rebirth. That's totally what I'm operating off of, those belief systems."

But what is the morality tale that will be triggered by the new Burnett show, The Contender, a boxing show hosted by iconic Sylvester Stallone of the iconic Rocky films? What story is waiting to tell itself through the capable hands of medium Burnett.

Is the story the vaunted "purity" of boxing . . . the idea that bullshit gets left outside the ring and that, within the squared circle, one person clearly bests another person . . . without all the ambiguity and spun retellings of the rest of life?

Is the story the pure cruelty and catharsis of blood sport? The explicit purpose of boxing, after all, is to cause head trauma. Is it merely a legitimatized outlet for all that American anger? Anger about the American Dream's promise that you could be somebody, and you turned out to be nobody. This, of course, is the theme of Kazan's On the Waterfront, reprised almost word for word in Rocky and the promotion for The Contender.

Is the story a class story, but not the rags-to-riches one it thinks it's telling? Is it a class story about the time when, once the basic resources of our Island Earth have been divided, Survivor-style, and the task of managing them for their owners has been apportioned, Apprentice-style, all that's left to us losers is to fight to be the entertainer of the moment American Idol-style or Contender-style?

Is a boxing champion still a somebody these days? After the disgraceful. ear-biting, prison-bound, mental illness of a Mike Tyson? Or is a boxing champion merely a historical type, entirely mythic, an archaic ideal of a somebody, based on golden-age movies?

Is it a story about training and hard work? Jogging and dieting, working nights and weekends? In Burnett's tales, success is kind of about hard work . . . but only kind of. His fierce supervision over the casting of his unscripted dramas is the final component of his genius --- the ground rules are tilted toward larger-than-life personalities and more-gorgeous-than-life bodies.

The real competition in Burnett's universe is in the casting, and it is over by the time filming starts. Training and hard work? No. Training and hard work plus luck-of-the-draw genes? Yes.

Is it a story about luck, then, about gambling? Protestant predestination?

Is it a story about social skills and getting along in a diverse society? Not if the producers can help it. Burnett's "tribes" are assembled according to a screenwriters' psycho-demographic typology ("embattled single mom," "belligerant ex-marine with a heart of gold" "innocent farm girl") for their volatility and their likelihood to produce the screen 's two favorite moments --- the perennial Oscar-winning scenes --- yelling and sobbing.

Is it a gender story, like Million Dollar Baby, helping America get its mind around all the female soldiers engaged in combat right now in Iraq?

Or is the story simply that we Americans are culturally, mythically, doomed to fight? That we are perennial sore losers? (And we'd better get used to losing, as the Chinese Century begins.)

Dunno.

Yet.

Shall we watch The Contender together and see if we can connect the dots?