Deal

So I watched the documentary Deal yesterday. I truly enjoyed it. I was hipped to it through a review in the Onion's AV Club,* which complained that there was a hint of cynicism that could have been stronger, and that there could have been more footage of the warehouses of prizes and stacks of money laying around waiting to be given away. (Yes: The Onion guys were complaining, essentially, that there weren't enough money shots.)

I didn't think so. I found the flick endearing in oh so many ways. The best thing-- and trust me about this-- is that it showed off the single most disturbing thing about the show: the people who crowd into the audience wearing the bizarre costumes are, for the most part, completely normal, reasonably intelligent, white suburban middle-class people. I don't find it disturbing, say, the way spotting a dead dog by the side of the road is disturbing. I find it disturbing the same way it used to disturbed me that perfectly reasonable and reasonably well off people used to go to K-Mart. (And now to Wal*Mart.) (Or, even worse, to Family Dollar. Eeeew.)

The cynicism in the flick, as I saw it, laid strictly with the people who created and maintained the show. Not Hall, who came off as a relatively clear-eyed optimist, but rather the writers and producers whose job it was to come up with the gags and routines Monty would run on the participants. And it wasn't real cynicism at that: it was that macho, bravura, painted-face kind of cynicism, that gee-look-what-bad-boys-are-we, surfer-boy cynicism that doesn't seem to approve of logic or reason. The doc itself, I thought, was fairly even-handed: here's the spectacle, here are the participants on both sides, and then, towards the end, captions alerting us to how much money was paid out, how many people were on the show over the course of how many years, etc. etc., and finally ended with some awkward cum shots of winning participants telling underwhelmed family members what prizes they won and what they were worth. Which, I suppose, is like ending a porn flick with an ad for mouthwash.

Anyways, I enjoyed it.

*In my own defense, I do read the Onion AV Club, but I am not, in fact, a smarmy bastard. I let the Onion AV people do my smarmy bastarding for me.