So imagine this. It’s 1998. You want to be a comedian, and you’re desperate for work. You strike out for the big city and start going to auditions. Then, to your utter joy, you’re cast on a reality show.
When you show up to set, though, things get weird. You’re ordered to remove all your clothing and you’re handed a stack of blank postcards and a pen. The goal is to use them to enter magazine contests — lots of them — and win prizes. Once the prize value totals a certain amount, you’ve won. What have you won? Well … you’ll see.
This is a real thing that happened to Tomoaki Hamatsu, known as Nasubi: He was selected by Toshio Tsuchiya, a Japanese reality TV producer, to do just that on a nationally broadcast TV show. (If the story sounds familiar, it’s because it was the basis for a popular “This American Life” episode.) If you can believe it, Nasubi’s story gets weirder from there, and is now the subject of Clair Titley’s new documentary, “The Contestant” (available on Hulu).
The film was made with the participation of a number of figures involved in the original production, including Tsuchiya and Nasubi. It retells the story using interviews and a great deal of footage from the actual show, which underlines how innovative it was. Nasubi’s life inside the room was broadcast before voyeuristic webcams were common, and it began running the same year that “The Truman Show,” with its oddly similar plot, was released.
“The Contestant” is worth watching for the strangeness of the story. I found it curiously underdeveloped as a documentary, though. It’s been more than 25 years since Nasubi’s ordeal, years in which questions of exploitation and ethics in reality TV — surrounding everything from Bravo’s “Real Housewives” empire to “The Jinx” and a whole lot more — have been, if not at all solved, at least explored at length, relitigated every time news surfaces about the manipulation of subjects or the truth behind the scenes. (“UnReal,” a scripted drama based on the machinations on a “Bachelor”-like show, is a revealing way to dig into those questions. It’s available on most major platforms.)
The big question isn’t why arguably unscrupulous reality TV keeps getting made, because we know the answer. The bigger question is why we keep watching it, and what kind of human qualms and compunctions we have to push aside to indulge. “The Contestant” has at its fingertips a rich text for exploring our current reality landscape, not to mention our fascination with social media meltdowns. But it doesn’t really go there, preferring instead to reassure us that Nasubi is OK.
But the film’s failure to dig into its story further doesn’t mean we can’t — and “The Contestant” is a great starting point for conversations like these. That’s why it’s worth watching and thinking about. Because it’s not just a crazy story: It’s an important one in our media-saturated, always-on, can’t-look-away age.
