The Substance, Sam Hyde, and the failures of reflective media.
Media about media is usually quite boring, and when the piece in question is critiquing the industry behind media, the message feels more masturbatory than revelatory. This is particularly true for the inherently static plastic and still arts, automatically limiting their capacity for self-criticism. There is only so much one can do with large-scale sculpture, for instance, to capture the exploitation inherent in the art market without extensive, experience-breaking explanations, and the limitations of the mediums tend to lend themselves to more absurdist, performance-adjacent commentaries on the insanity that is contemporary fine art. It makes sense then that artists tend to turn to film and television when looking to critique the forces bearing down upon creation. The problem is that these artists tend to focus only on external forces, ignoring the things within us that lead to the art that is created for us. Television seems to offer us a better avenue for this type of reflection, but funny enough, the pieces that tend to do this well seem to be those which have the least interest in intentionally reflecting on anything.
2024’s The Substance is a surprisingly fun piece of new body horror. It is also a near perfect example of the limits most artists hit when trying to say something about how art is made. The movie sees aging actress Elisabeth (played by the thoroughly depressing Demi Moore) injecting herself with a mystery serum that promises to give her a new, younger, more beautiful self — as long as she can balance the new life with the old. This begins with Elisabeth convulsing as her back splits open and a wet, nude, 20-something version of herself (played by it-girl Margaret Qualley) slips out before admiring herself in the mirror, extracting a week’s worth of “stabilizer fluid” from the seemingly lifeless Elisabeth’s spine, and sewing her old body up before stashing it and hitting the streets. It is a not-exactly-subtle critique of the eternal demand for youth in Hollywood and the lengths women (young and old) are asked to go to remain relevant. The heavy-handedness is made easier to endure by fun scenes of bodies rapidly aging, Moore gorging herself while destroying her apartment, Qualley showing off as a bubbly tv dance instructor, and a ridiculous balletic ending reminiscent of something out of the Troma archives. It’s fun in the way classic body horror was, and was a welcome addition to this year’s film lineup.
Less welcome, though, has been much of the discourse the film sparked. Those who praise the movie have called it everything from a fun movie “uncovering” hidden issues to a near documentary, while its detractors claim it lets the beauty industry off the hook or doesn’t sufficiently critique women’s complicity in the beauty/ugliness dichotomy. Any movie regularly touted as explicitly “feminist” is bound to draw loud responses, but what is particularly obnoxious about so much commentary surrounding The Substance is that it operates out of a perspective that treats television as anything but what it really is — a place for us to gawk at the types of freaks who would allow themselves to be onscreen in the first place.
Yes, Moore and Qualley are beautiful, but they — along with all the other stars and starlets who regularly grace our screens — are, at a base level, deeply disturbing. What is wrong with these people that makes them want to live this way? Billie Eilish and Chappel Roan have been praised for calling out the difficulties of life in the spotlight — so what of those freaks who seem to want nothing more than to experience it all? We know that some people debase themselves to be on television, but we tend to reserve the open gawking for the “grosser” side of television in the form of reality tv, feigning sympathy for the rich and beautiful stars of movies and mainstream television when they become the objects of extreme observation. It is the “reality” in reality television that makes it alright to engage with.
But isn’t all film and television, at some level, reality? Contemporary literary fiction is functionally just autoficition, so why isn’t a similar thing true for actors and actresses? Is Sydney Sweeney’s constant sexualization, even on primetime television, somehow less honest than her apparently self-actualizing Rolling Stone music video strip-teases? Is I Watched the TV Glow — a fictional story of two friends who become obsessed with a sapphic 90s television show — really fiction, if the whole thing is a self-insert gender exploration story from the author? Even something as fantastical as Wicked has basically become a reality form of product, with the strange, strained relationship between its starts offscreen seemingly becoming a central to the Oz-story itself. So what’s the difference between all of this and the obsessive, mocking followings given to the various Real Housewives?
Based on what and how we consume, we seem to want real people to suffer, feel discomfort, and bear all (figuratively or literally), but we have pretended that it is only in reality television where this applies. This transmogrification from enjoying abstract to particular instances of suffering occurs the second we engage with any media with real stars, but it is only when the stars are obviously willing to be the targets of our exploitation that we become comfortable with our own participation, as if paying for the freakshow is ok if the freaks have pay equity. It’s all woefully dishonest, but does force the question — what would we get if we were honest about what we wanted?
Fishtank Live (or just Fishtank) is an online, 24/7 live streamed reality show hosted by alt-right provocateur Sam Hyde, director Jet Neptune, and other collaborators from the quickly-canceled Adult Swim show Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace. Each season, over the course of 6 weeks, a number of contestants (the “fish”) are brought into a house with no access to the outside world, tasked with a series of increasingly nonsensical and intentionally offensive challenges, and ground down emotionally and physically until one winner is crowned and awarded the grand prize (or, in the case of season 3, not given the prize). Over the course of the show, non-contestant “freeloaders” are brought in to further antagonize the fish, and the audience — watching through the shows official website — can pay money to interact with the in-screen world in various ways. In the words of its creators, it’s always on.
To get a better sense of what exactly happens on the show, it can be helpful to look at a few particular events that happened across the three seasons. One fan favorite is the “Drunk Piece of Shit Challenge,” wherein the fish are tasked with getting as drunk as possible and generally being belligerent, earning money and audience favor for destroying their houses and harassing each other. Another recurring bit is the “Disability Challenge,” where each contestant is tasked with acting as if they have a particular physical or mental disability, from being schizophrenic to just being “fucked up.” Contestants are also frequently tasked with boxing each other for one reason or another, and physical altercations are all but explicitly encouraged. As for the aforementioned text-to-speech feature, it is probably the most unique element of the show. The audience is encouraged to be as abusive as possible, a responsibility they are happy to fulfill with slurs galore and pointed hate comments about contestants personal lives and families — all of which cost $35 a pop to send. The hosts regularly physically and verbally abuse the contestants, and each season sees the return of Frank Hassel — a real-life troll who went viral for incessantly harassing strangers in public and is brought on specifically to be cruel to the fish.
The absurd interactions between the fish is the primary draw for the show, but we cannot undersell just how important the audience participation is to the very structure of the program. Audience influence on reality shows has been central since basically their inception through things like voting and audience polls, and some shows even allow audiences to participate more directly. Darren Brown’s “The Experiments” had an episode where they placed people in odd situations and gave anonymous audience members the ability to directly influence what they could and could not do. Gameshows, those proto reality programs, use the studio audience as a player in games in themselves. But, to my knowledge, there has never been a television show that has offered such unrestricted (and impactful) access to the participants, giving anyone willing to pony up a bit of money the ability to send direct messages, force contestants to smoke cigarettes, handcuff people together, host a date between contestants, and even join the show. There are also the mini seasons, including The Cell and Bitchtank, which were intensified versions of the locked-in-a-room challenge with shortened timeframes and a more explicit call for maximum audience aggression. And the audience-to-participant relationship becomes even stranger when one considers that, as the seasons go on, more and more of the crew of the show are simply past season contestants who the staff liked enough to hire. It is not a show of perverse incentives or pseudo participation layered on top of a predetermined outcome — it is a show that promises a particular level of engagement to its audience, and which often over delivers.
Now, if I were shooting for the preening, obtuse media analysis common in contemporary tv criticism, this would be the point where I would bring up all the positives of the show. There would be conversations around the personal growth of the fish, the weight loss one of the freeloaders has experienced through the show, the legitimately life-changing impact of the $50,000 prize, or any other number of positive occurrences. But that is not the point of Fishtank, and the reality is that any show that streams for a collective ~1,000 hours per season is going to have positive arcs and negative arcs. It is simply an outcome of putting people in a house for the equivalent of one half of a work year. Kindness and growth happen, but spontaneously and in spite of the format of the show, by virtue of this being a house full of people, and people on the mean trending towards interpersonal kindness. The show is not secretly kind or good, but it allows people to be people, which often means them being kind or good.
This structure — of forced socialization, hostile external forces, and interpersonal kindness in spite of it all — is not one that was meticulously crafted and controlled for Fishtank and which the host shave to carefully manage. If anything, it is perhaps one of the least artificial, most loosely structured experiences to ever appear in the television medium. In the ongoing dialogue between television and culture, each forming one another and each trying to outpace the other, staging themselves in response to the staging of the other, the only honest expression of the form and function of television is something like Fishtank. It is entertainment that gives its audience the permission to do what we all secretly know television is hinting at, inviting cruelty and telling its viewers “we can’t do this without you.”
It is this honesty, accessibility, and egalitarian approach to cruelty that makes something like Fishtank a much better commentary on (and reflection of) media and its participants than The Substance or any other “message” driven project. And, whether people like to admit it or not, it is also just a good show. It is gripping. The characters that emerge are unlike anything that a television writer’s room could cook up. The challenges are simple to understand but incredibly taxing on the participants. And throughout the series, there are glimmers of legitimate artistic genius, in things like the “Famous House” arc from Season 3 (wherein the initial contestants were brought in thinking the show was a serialized, Hulu-based, conventional reality show, with the reality of the program being revealed over time) and the spinoff vampire-themed live action roleplay season “FishTank All-Stars: Bloodgames.”
The show primarily stumbles when the creators attempt to turn it into what people accuse it of being — a right-wing morality play. Sam Hyde is a deeply hateful, far right comedian. The show is openly hostile towards contestants. It mocks ethnic and sexual minorities, incentivizes cruelty and violence, and earns millions of dollars by doing so. These things are all true and are core to the Fishtank experience. Whether we like it or not, the current media ecosystem is so thoroughly captured by liberal ideologues that they’ve opened a space for legitimate right-wing artists like Hyde to reenter and create something actually interesting and transgressive. But as with any political artist, they sometimes cannot help themselves.
Bringing on Alex Stein each season shows a laziness and desire to do counter-programming to liberal television that honestly makes portions outright unenjoyable. Hyde’s need to take a stand against “degeneracy” leads to incredibly boring episodes each season, including an aborted “Famous House 2” in the third season where a new batch of unknowing contestants were brought in. The cover was almost immediately blown in this second attempt due to one of the contestants being brought on specifically to be humiliated for making drag gear for children. Hyde’s contempt for many of the lifestyles lived by the fish — whether they be hypersexual gay men, twitch streamers, OnlyFans models, or apparent disability scammers — comes through to the point that he often breaks challenges to punish the people he likes the least, shortening audience enjoyment.
When one speaks about legitimately transgressive artists, there is always the risk of what Camille Paglia (herself accused of seemingly senseless provocation) called “obtuse attempts to aestheticize intentionally shocking content” which she (echoing Rochelle Gurstein) calls “[an insult] to common sense.” In Paglia’s case, she was discussing the works of maximalist photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, whose defense became a cause célèbre when conservative protestors got an 1989 exhibition of Mapplethorpe’s works at the Corcoran Museum canceled. Paglia’s criticism was not leveled at the conservative outrage towards Mapplethorpe (of which Paglia seems almost appreciative), but of the sterilizing liberal attempts to turn Mapplethorpe into little more than a “gay Norman Rockwell” by “[whitewashing] him, [denying] his cunningly perverse motives.”
A similar risk is run when talking about people like Sam Hyde and Jet Neptune. As with Mapplethorpe, these men are not liberals — their art is not secretly liberal or left-wing, and neither are its creators. The groyper right (of which these two are undeniably part) has fallen almost completely out of favor since Elon Musk’s multiracial cringe-MAGA takeover, but their nastiness perseveres. To paraphrase Paglia herself, their work is a scandal to the progressive humanitarian ideals of so much of the media ecosystem. I accept Hyde and Neptune as extreme social conservatives, but for me, David Lynch, the Coppolas (both father and daughter), and Andrew Dominick are all various strains of conservative. I do not believe that Hyde and Neptune have created a masterpiece, but then again, neither did three of my four aforementioned conservatives. Similarly to what Paglia felt about Mapplethorpe, however, I do believe that what they have made in Fishtank will, in the emotionally hollow state of television today, live on as something bigger. Something with feeling.
Despite its regular fumbles, Fishtank is a triumph of the live television medium, and it provides a largely democratic experience for viewers and participants alike. With the exception of the original cast from Season 3, we must remember that almost all contestants are people familiar with Sam Hyde and his work, so they ostensibly agree to what they will be experiencing. If Ana de Armas is simply being allowed to exercise her autonomy by knowingly participating in a violent, hyper-sexualized film about Marilyn Monroe (a sentiment which I would agree with), then does the same not apply to Tayleigh having her underwear stolen and paraded around by Frank Hassle after giddily applying for the show with a neo-nazi themed application tape, whether she sees it that way or not? These people want to be famous in the strange way that Fishtank allows, and all the show does is give them that opportunity. If we were honest with ourselves, we would admit that Fishtank succeeds in doing what television promised so long ago. And we clearly like when we get opportunities like this — we just don’t like the type of people giving it to us.
Jitter 