TV REVIEW/Kathryn Holmquist: The Experiment, Tuesday and Wednesday, BBC2 Primetime: Leaders' Debate, Tuesday, RTÉ 1 True Lives: Murder in the Forest, Thursday, RTÉ 1 Blood On Her Hands, Tuesday, UTV
We're an audience of sadistic voyeurs. We get a power-rush from witnessing the psychological agonies of others. Whether we're watching soaps, sex, Jerry Springer or violence, our enjoyment comes from seeing other human beings writhe on a burning emotional spit. This instinct motivates Edna O'Brien's art in her requisition of Imelda Riney's life (True Lives: Murder in the Forest); it makes easy viewing of such sensationalist schlock as Real Crime: Blood On Her Hands; and it's one of the reasons 800,000 of us watched Primetime: Leaders' Debate and it's the only justification for The Experiment.
No reason to feel guilty about it - the desire to objectify the pain of others is embedded in the dark side of our humanity.
And why blame TV when you can cite Greek tragedy and Shakespeare? We can cloak this ugly impulse in art, enlightenment or science, but we can't deny it.
The Experiment, ostensibly a "science" programme, is psychological voyeurism at its most refined. Two media-savvy psychologists - Steve Reich and Alex Haslam - have staged a repeat of the infamous Stanford Prison experiment of 1971.
We were told in the preamble to the first programme that the ugliness released by the 1971 experiment forced the experimenters to vow that the exercise must never be repeated. So repeat it, we must.
What we see are 15 men divided like lab rats into two groups - prisoners and guards. The division appears arbitrary, but is not. The nine prisoners include two natural-born leaders - a Christian evangelist and a cunning martial arts expert. Most of the guards are weak characters, the most compelling of which is Mr Quarry, a computer entrepreneur who foolishly believes that you can control people by making them like you.
What does having power do to people? The Experiment seems more inclined to tell us what being powerless does. "This is not the study of 15 men, it is a study about every institution you've ever lived in, and every organisation you've ever worked in," says the BBC. It's also about the power of psychologists to justify mental torture with science. The guards get uniforms, keys and gourmet food; the prisoners have hot cells, shaven heads, bare feet, mind-numbing tasks and poor quality food that is deliberately cooked badly. It doesn't take long for the prisoners to realise that the guards are uncomfortable with their arbitrary power. The prisoners soon undermine the guards by constantly nipping at their authority with verbal snipes until the guards themselves lose confidence.
By episode two, the prisoners have stolen the master keys to the prison, although they don't know what to do with them.
Quarry has "fundamental thoughts" about replacing the guard-prisoner relationship with a new order while his colleagues wonder if the keys "fell into the custard". The psychologists, who observe their quarry from a CCTV centre, send in a professional trade-union negotiator as a late arriving "prisoner". It takes the trade-union expert only six hours to organise his fellow prisoners into a strong position of negotiation, successfully using the keys to bargain for an amnesty for bad behaviour, as well as the shoes, tea and soft drinks the prisoners have been deprived. Once he has sown the seeds of rebellion, he mysteriously departs due to a "heart condition". Neither guards nor prisoners realise that they have been manipulated.
The point of the experiment? The psychologists and the BBC may say that it's a public education effort designed to teach us about the evolution of democracy, but we don't believe that, do we? The Experiment is really about two psychologists selling out to entertainment values, and the viewers going along for the ride.
If we were to divide politics into cunning prisoners and naïve guards, which would Michael Noonan and Bertie Ahern be? It's fairly obvious that Noonan would be the wily prisoner who attempts to erode the leadership with caustic words, while Ahern would be the benign guard uncomfortable with flaunting his power. Like the guards in The Experiment, Ahern rules by consensus.
Lacking any real challenge - such as unrest amongst the rabble - consensus works.
CONSENSUS is not what debating is all about, which is one reason why we saw anarchy in Primetime: Leaders' Debate on Tuesday. A power struggle is entertaining only if one of the powerful has a remote possibility of being dethroned. There was no chance of this happening. Ahern - sedated by weeks of being adored by the masses - was nearly somnambulistic, like a man being pestered awake from a beautiful dream who couldn't quite understand why he was being tormented so early in the morning. The super-charged Noonan was not the Rottweiler of reputation, but a renegade piranha cut adrift from its school, taking dozens of tiny bites, many inaudible and none of them deadly. Death by slow bleed may have been remotely possible had the debate taken place earlier in the election campaign, but only a neck-biting Rottweiler could have changed the course of the result and Noonan was no attack dog.
The Italian-suited Ahern wasn't about to be broken by Noonan's barrage because the power balance was clear to us all beforehand.
Noonan as much as admitted that the power-play was a charade when he answered O'Callaghan's question: "what is your weakness?". Noonan smiled and squirmed, then answered that he probably wouldn't win enough seats to be a player in the formation of the next government. Asked the same question, Ahern confirmed his status by admitting that his greatest weakness was overwork. For him, the debate had been an exercise to be endured rather than a challenge.
As a TV event, the debate was badly stage-managed. The two leaders were placed across from each other, out of chairperson Miriam O'Callaghan's eyeline, giving her little chance of control. She resorted to stretching out her arms and tapping on the table to try to get their visual attention when what she needed was a big stick.
Much of the debate was anarchistic and incomprehensible as the two men talked across each other and O'Callaghan failed again and again to restore order. Pundits have been muttering that a Brian Farrell or a John Bowman would have put manners on the debaters with devastating questions and maybe so, although the format of the debate put O'Callaghan at a disadvantage. Whether it was intentional or not, it appeared as though the format was never intended to be a challenging interrogation by a journalist of two competing leaders and was instead designed as a showbiz face-off with the presenter merely introducing the topics.
O'Callaghan handed power over to the debaters, who misused it by failing to listen or to respond to each other in a civilised way.
Edna O'Brien is more than powerful; she's omnipotent and very comfortable with that, thank you. Goddess-like, she has assumed possession of Imelda Riney's life and after-life with frightening confidence. Riney and her son, Liam, were murdered by Brendan O'Donnell in the Craig Forest in east Clare in 1994, an event stolen by O'Brien for her latest novel.
An RTÉ/BBC Omnibus co-production, True Lives: Murder in the Forest showed us all the traits for which O'Brien is famous - her red-haired beauty, her doomed sense of love, her taste for young men, her utter artistic selfishness. The scenes of a weepy O'Brien standing by Riney's shrine in the forest were intended to show the author's empathy for her subject, but could have been as easily interpreted as O'Brien was weeping for her own lost youth.
O'Brien seems to believe that she has the right to subsume Imelda Riney's life into her own aesthetic vision because she, O'Brien, is Imelda Riney. O'Brien grew up a few miles from Craig Forest, where Riney was murdered and both were artists. Murder in the Forest nurtured the impression that the two women also shared "fiery Irish tempers", "fiery red hair standing out like there was electricity in it", "scandalous" reputations and "too much beauty for luck". These comparisons come not from Riney's family and close friends, but from O'Brien and three men who knew Riney from a distance.
O'Brien seemed to be putting words into their mouths as she entranced them. She takes similar artistic licence with the life of Brendan O'Donnell. She becomes him too, identifying with his testimony that he was violently abused as a child, as O'Brien herself was. While Riney's family did not contribute to the documentary, O'Donnell's sister offered heart-wrenching testimony of a disturbed brother who the system harmed, rather than helped.
Abused by a priest, among others, and imprisoned by a succession of institutions, O'Donnell took power into his own hands and used it against Riney, her son, and the priest he killed later, Fr Joe Walsh.
Murder in the Forest is no more or less cheap than Real Crime: Blood On Her Hands, a docu-drama that simultaneously re-enacted and analysed the murder of Lee Harvey by his fiancée Tracie Andrews, who initially convinced police that Harvey had been killed in a road rage incident. Blood On Her Hands at least had the advantage in that the families of Harvey and Andrews contributed their insights, so that you felt you were receiving some genuine understanding, rather than the projections of a novelist. Andrews and Harvey had a troubled, violent relationship based on mutual obsession and jealousy.
Andrews felt compelled to constantly reassert her power over Harvey, whose mother was helpless to dissuade him from returning again and again to the abusive relationship. As he asserted his independence, Andrews became more violent. As Harvey's sister said: "if she couldn't have him, nobody else would."
After this week's viewing, the cynic would have to believe that power over the lives of others is the sole motivation in relationships, politics and art.