The Contestant Turns Away From Reality

Much of The Contestant plays out as a chilling meditation on the grotesque dynamics of reality television and celebrity. At the heart of the new Hulu documentary revisiting an outrageous stunt on Japanese television from the late ’90s lies a psychodrama between two individuals or, rather, a psychological vice imposed by one on the other. On the one side, there’s Tomoaki Hamatsu, an aspiring comedian who goes by Nasubi — meaning “eggplant,” a stage name meant to reclaim an epithet historically levied against him due to his irregular head shape. On the other, there’s Toshio Tsuchiya, a television producer obsessed with “real” human drama and, ultimately, the architect of all the torment Nasubi will go through in the name of fame.

“If there is a god of television, he gave us a gift,” Tsuchiya says to the camera, decades after the 1998 competition that made Nasubi famous and ruined his life. The stunt in question was part of Susunu! Denpa Shōnen, a popular turn-of-the-millennium Japanese reality show that specialized in dropping unwitting participants in extreme situations. In a challenge called “A Life in Prizes,” Nasubi was confined to a small apartment with the task of accruing ¥1 million worth of prizes through magazine sweepstakes while living off whatever he earned through those competitions.

It’s excruciating to watch Nasubi endure the numerous indignities of the challenge. He eats dog food. He’s deprived of clothing for most of his ordeal. His body withers under malnourishment. When he beats the original ¥1 million mark, a feat that took him more than 300 days, the production spirits him away to South Korea for a day of feast and fun, only to shove him back into another apartment where he’s made to compete all over again, this time in Korean (a language he does not know). What Tsuchiya did to Nasubi was unambiguous torture, and the comedian was forced to do it with a smile.

Nasubi’s story, and the footage captured on “A Life in Prizes,” is simply incredible, and as directed by the British documentarian Clair Titley, The Contestant is an utterly transfixing retelling of events, one that evokes all manner of questions about the fundamental cruelty of reality television as entertainment. But evoke is all it does. The documentary almost completely declines to say anything specific or provocative about the subjects it’s looking at. Instead, Titley opts for a closing act that’s so tidy it’s hard not to feel shortchanged by The Contestant’s unwillingness to capitalize on the questions it brings to mind.

Still, that footage. We watch Nasubi go from winning a lone bag of rice to scoring an array of supplies. Some are useful, others not so much; at one point, you can see a bike propped up in the corner of the apartment, an ironic trophy for a trapped man. For the experienced reality-television consumer, the footage will likely evoke all sorts of other contemporary touch points. Witnessing Nasubi’s body gradually wither as he lives off piecemeal winnings, you might think of Survivor or, perhaps more pointedly, the survival competition Alone. His being trapped in a contained environment brings to mind Squid Game: The Challenge, The Circle, Big Brother, or even The Real World, which first debuted six years before “A Life in Prizes.” Whenever the doc flashes on a montage of Nasubi’s greetings to the camera, it’s hard not to see the faces of so many YouTube or Twitch streamers broadcasting from their bedroom.

But the specific cruelty imposed on Nasubi rises to a whole different level. To begin with, there’s the fact that his entire journey was packaged for public consumption entirely without his knowledge. The poor guy was instructed to record his experience with both a journal and a video camera, not knowing that the footage would be rapidly edited into a weekly broadcast that reached 17 million viewers and that his journals would be published without his involvement, eventually becoming best sellers. Worse, still, is the fact his experience was portrayed on Denpa Shōnen in a purely upbeat way, with the segments cutting out any instances that would suggest an individual under severe duress. As The Contestant pushes on, a yawning gap begins to grow between the comedian’s obvious internal anguish and the theatrical jovialness he tries to maintain on-camera.

Tsuchiya’s occasional appearances on “A Life in Prizes” adds further agony to the managed cruelty. They reach peak morbidity in the sequence where he attempts to inform Nasubi that he achieved his ¥1 million goal by repeatedly triggering party poppers in his face, which plays like a grim torture scene. It emphasizes the complete power Tsuchiya has over Nasubi. The producers claim that the comedian was always free to leave throughout his 15-month captivity, but it’s never so simple in practice. A power dynamic locked Nasubi into place, and Tsuchiya — his producer and tormentor — took every measure to keep him there. Of the relocation to South Korea, we’re later told Tsuchiya spent hours convincing Nasubi to go through with it. But did Nasubi, malnourished and broken, ever have a choice?

Nasubi’s ordeal culminates in a surreal climax. After finally beating his South Korean goal, the production ships him back to Japan like a piece of cargo: transported by boat to avoid attention, so completely sequestered from the world he even believes he’s being whisked away to North Korea. When he arrives, he’s blindfolded and led onto a stage in front of a live studio audience eager to witness the end of his journey. But Tsuchiya has one more act of cruelty up his sleeve. Nasubi is led into a simulacra of a small apartment, and when his blindfold is removed, you see anguish flash across his face as he thinks he’s being prepped for a third round of hell. He’s prompted to strip down to nothing once again, which he does. As he blankly settles in, the room’s fake walls fall over, and he gazes, uncomprehendingly, out into a sea of cheering people. It’s so hard to parse out what Nasubi is thinking at that moment: He’s dumbfounded, numb, ravaged, yet he ends up smiling amid the adulation. But the footage is irrepressibly hypnotic. You might even come close to seeing what Tsuchiya had been obsessing over all this time.

It is at this very point in the documentary that The Contestant sets itself up perfectly to connect the dots between “A Life in Prizes” and reality television as we know it today: how it’s evolved, how it’s stayed the same, what it says about us as a culture shaped by reality television, what Nasubi’s ordeal forecasted about how the genre went on to shape the world. But Titley opts instead for a closing chapter that feels closer to a rosy, gauzy bio-doc. The Contestant opens with shots of Nasubi overlooking his home city of Fukushima, and it concludes by tracing Nasubi’s journey from traumatized individual — one who has lost faith in humanity and was unable to parlay his experience into an actual entertainment career — back to a kind of wholeness, when the disastrous Fukushima earthquake in 2011 jolts him into action and self-discovery as a person made full by serving his community. We are shown the incredible nature of Nasubi’s second act as he increases a campaign to summit Mount Everest in the name of his hometown. Here, Nasubi comes across as a person who converts his trauma into something beautiful and powerful.

It’s a heartwarming arc. But at the same time, it’s hard not to feel like The Contestant was hunting for a clean conclusion. That pursuit of narrative closure even appears to extend to Tsuchiya, Nasubi’s unambiguous tormentor. We’re told that Nasubi long held an intense hatred toward the guy, but within the text of the documentary, their dynamic receives something approximating resolution when Tsuchiya helps Nasubi hold a fundraiser for a second effort to summit Everest after the comedian’s initial excursion was scuttled by another earthquake. (Nasubi was described as having spent the bulk of his savings on the first effort, itself a reflection of how he barely benefited financially from his celebrity.) There is even the suggestion that Tsuchiya feels at least some remorse. “If he asked me to kill myself, I’d consider it,” he says of Nasubi near the end of the documentary, despite his obvious pride over the television he produced. Whether he’s honest in this statement, or just a man who knows how to position himself onscreen, is never terribly clear. Titley doesn’t press him.

Nasubi was a man exploited to every inch of his bone. His naked body was beamed out for millions to laugh at, his torment distorted into a feel-good story of triumph. In the late ’90s, he had none of the remunerative affordances that reality-television culture spent decades developing: the way a Real Housewife or Bachelor contestant, made into a clown on television, can nevertheless make a killing selling products and endorsements on social media; the way long-running competition franchises like The Challenge can draw players back to roll around in the mud for season after season of potential prize money. There are so many ways The Contestant could’ve been about something bigger, so many compelling interior questions it could’ve explored. Why didn’t Nasubi just leave? What do we make of his eagerness for celebrity? How has reality television changed in Japan since, and how has it stayed the same? How should we grapple with the genre’s ethics today? How do we configure the line between reality television as an inherently cruel enterprise and reality television as a genuine conveyor of human drama?

The Contestant only gestures toward these questions, and instead of going large with the inquiry, it chooses to shrink its aperture. “A Life in Prizes” distorted Nasubi’s experience by leaving out the complicated fullness of his ordeal. By tying his story up with such a tidy bow, it’s hard not to feel that The Contestant commits a similar distortion. It’s a move fit for reality television.