The Quiz Show : Episode 2

The Quiz Show (Season 2) – Spring 2009 [NTV - http://www.ntv.co.jp/quizshow]
Subbing Groups : SBK Fansubs & JE Mix Fansubs as well as STORMY team. Otsukaresamadeshita! (お疲れ様でした!)

I am now watching the 704×396 .avi version of The Quiz Show brought to us by the collaborative efforts SBK Fansubs & JE Mix Fansubs. (There is a 1280×720 version available) JE Mix is hardcore about their love of Johnny’s Entertainment media and since there is a yummy Arashi member as The Quiz Show star, I can see why JE is involved in this project. SBK has been around a long while and are a dedicated group. I greatly admire their continued focus on completing projects that are clearly labors of true love through all of life’s ups and downs. Hardsubs are always a bonus when the subs are styled well and I really love the typesetting work done here. The font works perfectly with the drama’s overall look and is not distracting at all. Thanks to a sweet, thick stroke and a nice drop shadow, the subs float nicely atop the video. This technique makes it much easier when when trying to absorb everything happening on the screen and read quickly. Note to sub groups … float your subs! My eyes suck! *laugh*

Anyone who has already watched the first episode of Quiz Show, probably has the same burning question on the tip of their tongue at the beginning of this episode … “WHO THE HELL WOULD GO ON THIS SHOW AFTER SEEING WHAT HAPPENED TO ANDOU-SAN??” The show is broadcast on LIVE television and clearly, if this was based in any kind of reality, the media frenzy over what happened to Andou-san would have popped up on every web blog, cellphone text, newspaper, and television show in Tokyo. Before Honma-kun could even begin stroking his imaginary, gravity defying mustache like a silent movie western villain, there would be very few people who didn’t know that Quiz Show was a soulcrushing deathtrap much worse than anything Jigsaw could come up with.

Being on Quiz Show is exactly like one of my all time favorite books and movies, Hellraiser (The Hellbound Heart).

Allow me to explain:

Step 1. First you acquire a Lemarchand box – i.e. Get your invitation from the creepy Inviter.
Step 2. Then you solve the Lament Configuration – i.e. Answer the first few easy, innocent questions.
Step 3. Reality crumples around you and the Cenobites appear – i.e. Kamiyama-san starts getting creepier and more sinister.
Step 4. The Cenobites start yanking your skin off or hammering nails into your skull or drilling power tools through your brain - i.e. The questions get more and more revealing of your sins and ridiculously painful to answer.
Step 5. Eventually there is nothing left of your human form and you are reduced to an empty soul trapped in your own private version of Hell - i.e. You get to the Dream Chance and “win” the game.

Am I wrong? You just wait *grin* The next movie will be … Hellraiser: Quiz Show – Your dream WILL come true!

The beginning of episode two starts off in a slightly different manner. While this difference might be small, it opens up a whole new emotional compartment in our Lament Configuration *grin* and this may or may not be a good thing. I have mentioned several times already that melodrama is supposed to be emotionally manipulative. That’s it’s job. The three Es : Entertaining and Evoking Emotion. Part of the process of absorbing drama is to experience a variety of emotional experiences that you have to navigate internally while allowing yourself to be lead externally through the story as it plays out. One of the things I enjoyed most about the first episode is that you’re setup to believe Andou-san is the same kind of person internally as he appears externally. If you are clever and have had a lot of experience with this kind of storytelling, you know that this type of character is hardly what they seem and in fact is probably projecting their own inner turmoil on those around them. Having Andou-san’s true motivations revealed at the very end of the show doesn’t absolve him, but it does offer you, as a viewer, a completely new direction to go in emotionally depending on whether you empathized, sympathized, or were indifferent to him. Conversely, episode two DICTATES, right from the start, how you should feel about the contestant and goes even further by offering a suggestion as to WHY. By dictating, as opposed to manipulating through clever storytelling, you are forcing the viewer into a specific box that they may inherently reject.

I know it’s a bit early in my commentary but …

Character relation usually falls into three base categories that I have already mentioned: Empathy, sympathy, and indifference. I would say that probably 80% of the population mixes up, or misuses, empathy and sympathy, whereas most people know what indifference is. Here is a crash course … Sympathy is selfish. (Akira shock!) Yes, selfish. To sympathize with someone means you feel what the other person is feeling through your own experience first. The emotion is primarily internalized and your response has more to do with how you feel than how the other person feels. Sympathy goes through you first and to the other person second. This usually means you vomit all over them about how you would feel if you were them and what you did when you were in a similar situation and other unnecessary talking. Empathy, on the other hand, is selfLESS. To empathize with someone means you FIRST listen, experience, and process the emotion only through what they are communicating to you before processing it through your own experience (if at all). Keeping this in mind, think about how you relate to, and feel about, characters in a drama. In a healthy sense, you should probably feel a bit of both. You probably experience empathy first; absorbing the story, the situation, the character’s reactions, and then imagining how the character feels based on all those factors and your own comprehension of them. Then, you probably become sympathetic by connecting on an emotional level and accessing how you might feel if you were that person in the same situation. By that time, if the drama is written and performed well, you have formed a strong empathic connection with the character to the point where you are feeling nearly everything they are feeling; crying when they cry, laughing when they laugh and having your soul crushed with a wrecking ball when they do.

I didn’t reject the dictated emotion at the beginning of the drama. I was rather intrigued by it and I was really looking forward to how it would tie into the overall story. As it turns out, it doesn’t exactly give you a new emotional path to explore, but rather it deepens the one you should already be traveling on. Mika-chan, as a contestant, is very different from Andou-san for a variety of reasons that you will have to watch the drama to find out. As I mentioned in my first commentary, because of the self-loathing and anger Andou-san felt, his determination for achieving his dream became tainted. Instead of being something he wanted to do for himself for the benefit others, it became something he felt he deserved to do for himself at the expense of others. Mika-chan, on the other hand, reached for her dream in the most honest way she knew how. It was something she wanted to achieve, rightfully so, for herself for the benefit of others. While it’s easy to see Mika-chan incorrectly, the facts are not so mundane when you apply the proper emotional value to her motivations. Mika-chan’s dream is more about reacquiring something she mistakenly gave up with good intentions, not something she intentionally gave away for greed. She brings to the show a different kind of internal struggle that is actually closer to selfNESS than anything else. She stumbled from her path oddly because of a sense of selflessness and because, in the desperation to do something good for someone she cared about, she forgot that you first must always be true to yourself. It is impossible to make healthy decisions about those around you when you are misguided in your own choices.

There is something beautifully tragic about Quiz Show that makes it hypnotic and sick to watch like boxing or Nascar. There is no real sport in waiting for someone to collapse in a bloody, concussive heap or waiting for a spectacular car crash that injures or kills the drivers. Usually though, deep down, that very desire to witness tragedy and destruction is what draws a lot of people to said sports and even to drama. To sit back, from a place of safety, and watch another person suffer as a kind of entertainment, has to carry with it some sense of emotional consequence, otherwise it becomes just plain wrong. To watch melodrama with a sense of indifference defeats the purpose of what the genre was created for and, aside from being grotesquely self-serving, would make me wonder how one could find such upsetting circumstances (fictional or not) empty and devoid of emotional merit. Still, with all that said, while Mika-chan’s circumstances, decisions, fears, and mistakes are things that, in some way, we all can relate to and want her to overcome, there is still a part of us that shrinks back and is thankful that we aren’t in her shoes.

I mentioned that Quiz Show, as it stands right now, would actually make an outstanding stage play and I think about the theatrical elements often while watching it. Earlier I talked about Jigsaw – the now iconic mastermind behind the “Saw” movie franchise – and it would be easy for me to write an entire essay on the similarities between the psychology behind Quiz Show and the underlying Nietzschesqe themes found in each Saw movie.

Honma-kun is a kind of “dark therapist” and Kamiyama-kun is his puppet. Together they create a setup that “saves” each contestant from themselves while unlocking some deep secret within Kamiyama-kun’s damaged mind. Each “patient” on Quiz Show is reborn, often painfully, through a stripping away of their illusions; their flesh if you will; and exposing them to the terrifying, but soothing, reality of redemption. There are 9 rings in Dante’s Inferno and 8 questions in Quiz Show. If you concede to the idea that the each participant is already on their own ring, in their own version of Hell to begin with, then they only have 8 more rings to traverse before emerging from the televised moral allegory Virgina Woolf style. Does Mika-chan belong in such a place? The only “sin” she is truly guilty of is a lie that is so pervasive that it is told in every corner of the world. It is a lie so common and accepted, in fact, that it is taught to every child as something positive that they should spread to as many people as possible throughout their lifetime …

It’s called “hope”.

…

…

Just kidding!!! (Not really)

QUIZ SHOW EPISODE 2 – THE USUAL SUSPECTS!
The epically creepy “Inviter”	The “Cut To A Commercial” button.	Honma-kun’s crap attitude
Saejima-san running and/or apologizing	Contestant “Oh shit” or “I’m screwed” face.	Kamiyama-san’s ingeniusly sarcastic backhanded eye-smirks

• Favorite Scene: Saejima-san's rant!
• Favorite Line: Learning about the mosquitone was cool. I'd never heard of that before!
• Song Playing On Winamp: "Fire" - 2NE1 (YEAH YEAH YEAH BABY!)

• The Quiz Show : Intro
• Majo Saiban : Intro
• Hancho : Continued ... (Eps 2 & 3)
• Mr. Brain : Intro
• Monster Parent : Complete
• Orthros no Inu : Intro