The 'Death Game Show' Genre: Interview with Newsweek

In  one of his most famous essays Oscar Wilde wrote: “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” The essay, written as a platonic dialogue, was designed to invoke Aristotle’s, perhaps more standard, view that art imitates life. However, in the most recent spate of TV and movies, it isn't always clear that there is a difference between these two positions.

With Edgar Wright’s adaptation of The Running Man slated for release in November, Newsweek reached out to Jordan Conrad, Lexington Park Psychotherapy’s founder and clinical director, to discuss our ongoing interest in media that place an individual’s life on the line for others’ enjoyment. In “The Appeal of the Running Man and Squid Game – and What it Reveals About Us”, Jordan sat down with reporter Melissa Afshar for a wide ranging interview about the psychology of anxiety, depression, and how art plays a role in their expression.

Jordan discussed how the distinctive challenges of our own era all seem to be represented in media and some people, in turn, seem to embody the themes and values contained in media. This is perhaps most prevalent in the 'death game show' genre - think, Hunger Games, Squid Game, and The Running Man - which treats life as a kind of commodity, the value of which is views, follows, or likes. In these shows, the sole value humans have is not their dignity or contributions to others or relationships, but the ability to accrue viewers. While obviously representing our hyperdigital age (art imitates life), it also seems to have informed a series of influencers who have adopted the same value system for their own lives. "Many prominent internet 'celebrities' have become famous for doing awful things—spraying vegetables in supermarkets with poisonous chemicals; licking ice-cream in the store and putting it back; giving unhoused people Oreos filled with toothpaste," Jordan told Melissa. "These are also the behaviors we see in the 'death game show' genre—people enhancing or maintaining their position by getting others, often vulnerable people, to perform degrading and dangerous tasks for the camera."

While some movies like Parasite, Triangle of Sadness, Hunger Games, and The Running Man, fit more neatly into this genre than others as they focus on a hyper-realized income disparity creating a disposable lower class, Jordan explains that “While there is some intrinsic attraction to violence at play, perhaps the larger component drawing audiences to the ‘death game show’ genre is the increasing sense of alienation felt by so many people, [...] Because the essential features of the 'death game show' are the commodification of humanity […] and the feeling of the meaninglessness of life, many other movies join the genre.” For instance, Bo Burnham's one man "comedy" Inside, which grapples with the isolation many people feel living in and through digital media, attempting to balance the increasingly inapt dichotomy between real life and what happens online, and the feeling that many have of impending disaster, fits the genre nicely.

"Our social interactions are increasingly mediated by programs that we know are surveilling us; our romantic lives have been taken over by apps, and stable features of the 'good life' feel ever out of reach for the average person. The sum total of this is that our lives feel commodified—the most-important thing about us is our data."

Indeed, as Jonathan Haidt has compellingly argued, the increased rates of depression and anxiety that we are currently observing, are highly correlated to the emergence of social media where people are encouraged to compare themselves to others and where many young people feel like they under constant surveillance.

Jordan worries about the effect this has on mental health: "When prestige is synonymous with value … life can feel futile when you are so far away from having any." Although more adults are seeking therapy for anxiety and therapy for depression, this has perhaps had the largest effect on adolescents and college students. The commodification of humanity we see in media appears to be increasingly internalized by Gen Z who have expressed a worrying cynicism about life.