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Saturday, Jul 4, 2009
Is A&E's "Intervention" the most exploitative reality show ever, or a necessarily brutal snapshot of the perils of addiction?
Mar 22, 2005 | "You're very generous, I love you, you're such a cool person to hang out with. You're like the coolest crackhead person to hang out with. Like, if we could be crackheads for the rest of our lives, I wouldn't get into fights." -- Alyson, 27, to her friend after her third or fourth hit of crack
For those of us who haven't been brutalized by an addict or by addiction, there's something deliciously awful about watching addicts do their thing: rationalizing, bargaining, cajoling and wheedling their friends and family. The addict makes a mesmerizing subject for the camera's eye because the addict is the most self-centered person on earth, caring only for himself because it takes every ounce of his strength and energy to beat back those bad feelings, that groundswell of unacknowledged emotions that threatens to drown him. Although the addiction itself might look, from the outside, like thrill seeking -- ducking into the bathroom for a line of coke, riffling through racks of clothes with a wide, manic smile, rushing off to the casino to play blackjack -- in fact, what you're witnessing is a battered human being looking for a dark, dry place to rest. It's hard to remember, when you see such self-pity and manipulation and bile in motion, that what you're watching is a struggle for survival.
A&E's "Intervention" (Sundays at 10 p.m. EST), which features the lives of two different addicts each week and the interventions by their families led by professional counselors, has drawn scathing reviews and accusations of exploitation. "It makes prime-time sport of vulnerable, desperate people and their spiral to the bottom," wrote Matthew Gilbert of the Boston Globe. Dusty Saunders of the Rocky Mountain News says the show is "scream-and-shout television at its worst, a depressing hour trying to pass itself off as a show offering helpful therapy." Kevin Crust of the Los Angeles Times calls the show a "vile little exercise in debasement" and an "emotional snuff film."
What these critics don't say is that "Intervention" is extremely engrossing, emotionally wrenching and impossible not to take to heart. When Alyson proclaims her so-called friend "the coolest crackhead person to hang out with," it's not just hilarious and absurd and devastating at once, it's also recognizable. Pretty much anyone who's ever been drunk recognizes a piece of themselves in Alyson -- the misplaced affection and gratitude, the self-aggrandizement, the delusional notion that you could stay in that warm, painless bubble and just float above reality indefinitely. The lie of a good high is laid absolutely bare in that moment, and anyone who's been caught up in that lie once or twice or 50 times can't deny the ugly place to which it so often leads.
But what about the poor addicts who agree to appear on "Intervention," having been told it's a documentary on addiction, only to find themselves surrounded by their peers and family, all insisting that they go to rehab as the cameras roll? Certainly it sounds like a nightmare for those of us who can't begin to comprehend the shame such a moment would induce in us. But my admittedly limited sense of addiction and recovery is that those who walk through the fire are, generally speaking, anxious to share their experiences with others in order to keep those people from having to suffer the way they have.
Twelve-step programs are often focused on the lowest moments in an addict's experience, in fact, and those in recovery tend to recount these moments freely if they think it can help someone else. Look no further than the glut of addiction memoirs, from Caroline Knapp's "Drinking: A Love Story" to James Frey's grueling "A Million Little Pieces," for more evidence of this phenomenon. Of course, it seems inevitable that there'll be a participant on the show who OD's, and their death will cast the entire project in an awful light, used by naysayers as evidence that such shows are crass and filthy and victimize their participants. But that doesn't mean that, on the whole, "Intervention" doesn't serve some greater good.
