A scene from Le jeu de la mort (The Game of Death). (Metropole Films)

Is television powerful enough to make people kill? The makers of Le jeu de la mort (The Game of Death), a controversial documentary currently playing in Quebec, believe it is.

'Reality shows make people violent. They encourage people to follow their base instincts.'

— Christophe Nick, director of Le jeu de la mort (The Game of Death)

“Reality shows make people violent,” says Christophe Nick, the movie’s French writer-producer. “They encourage people to follow their base instincts. We decided to take it one step further. Why not have a program where someone could die on air?”

Nick's film, which first aired on French public television, chronicles a phoney reality show called La Zone Xtreme (The Extreme Zone), where participants appear to torture a contestant with electrical shocks each time he or she gives a wrong answer to a word-association question. While the show wasn’t real, the participants thought it was. Nick’s goal was to find out whether regular folk would follow orders to inflict extreme pain in the name of good TV.

To answer this question, Nick tried to replicate Stanley Milgram's famous 1960s study on authority and obedience. Interested in why millions of ordinary citizens became complicit in the Holocaust, the Yale University psychologist studied whether people would follow orders from an authority figure who instructed them to do things that conflicted with their moral values. Essentially, Milgram was exploring the I-was-just-following-orders explanation often put forward by perpetrators of large-scale violence.

In a lab setting, Milgram set up a fake study on learning and told the “teacher” (i.e. the unwitting test subject) to give electro-shocks to the “learner” every time he or she gave the wrong answer. The learner was actually an actor hidden from view, but whose cries of pain were audible. The teachers were encouraged by a man they believed was a scientist to continue administering the shocks, even when the learner screamed for them to stop. After banging on the wall several times and complaining about his heart condition, the learner no longer responded.

Sixty-five per cent of participants who took part in Milgram’s study continued to give the shocks, ultimately administering the maximum 450-volt jolt even after they heard nothing from behind the wall.

For La Zone Xtreme, Nick recruited subjects from across France by email to participate in a new reality show pilot that likely wouldn’t be broadcast. All of the participants signed contracts agreeing to inflict electric shocks on other contestants — and all of them were advised that they should not expect to “win” anything.

Like game show contestants, the players were escorted onto a pulsing television set by a sexy host (Tania Young). With their backs to a cheering studio audience, they sat in front of a panel of electric switches. As in Milgram’s study, the person on the receiving end was an actor. He was supposedly strapped into a chair inside a compartment on stage — in Nick’s documentary, we don’t see him, but we do hear him. While Young doesn’t have a whip in her hand, she relentlessly pressures hesitant contestants to keep increasing the voltage of the shock despite the screams of pain from their fellow subject. “Just ignore him, continue,” she repeats.

The set of La Zone Extreme, the fake reality TV show that forms the basis of Le jeu de la mort (The Game of Death). (Metropole Films)

And most of the participants push forward. Any time a would-be torturer seems ready to walk out on the proceedings, Young enlists the studio audience to help egg him on. Of the 80 candidates, only nine refused to keep punishing the man. (A few of these contestants, clearly troubled by the situation, break down in tears on set.)

Why did most of the participants keep at it? The Game of Death’s heavy-handed “scientific” conclusion is that television made them do it. According to Nick and the very serious-looking scientists providing pithy commentary, walking onto a TV set makes people fragile. They’re in awe of the host and have been conditioned to view television as a moral authority. As a result, they do what they are told, says Nick.

“We don’t see how powerful television is. We aren’t armed to question it, or to resist it. We need to educate people about television industry, so they understand what’s behind a TV program,’’ he says.

Those who did walk away from the game were from minority groups — gays, visible minorities, or immigrants. “It may be that they have already had to say no in their lives and are more comfortable resisting authority,” says Nick.

While The Game of Death is a fascinating premise for a documentary, its science is far from credible. From the booming, didactic voice of the narrator to the comments provided by a bearded university professor, the film often feels more like a mockumentary than the serious analysis it intends to be.

Nick is a TV producer, not a scientist, and he manipulates the medium to fit his simplistic hypothesis. The question the documentary didn’t answer was how many people really believed that they were torturing someone. When I asked Nick this, he brushed the question off; he doesn’t believe those players who told him they thought the show was a fake all along.

In the decade since Big Brother, Survivor and their numerous offspring have polluted the TV universe, I think watchers have started to understand that reality shows aren’t a reflection of reality at all — they are staged dramas involving non-actors. It’s likely many of the participants in The Extreme Zone implicitly understood this. To conclude otherwise is to underestimate their intelligence and to overemphasize the power of television.

Patricia Bailey is a writer based in Montreal.