Repo Games: Just Keep Blaming the Victim

(I'm not yet sure what this blog will end up looking like. Most of the posts, such as this one, will probably end up being rants, but I'll try to be positive once in a while. I've also registered dinerschiveinsandchives.blogspot.com,¹ where I'll document the more exciting food-related happenings in my life, time permitting. Also, blogger is incapable of accepting proper HTML code, so if you see any incorrect formatting, it's because I can't fix it. If anyone has some tips on how to fool blogger into not ruining my HTML, I'd very much appreciate them.)

A few weeks ago, I saw a commercial for a new² show on Spike TV. Repo Games struck me for two reasons: first, how many tow-truck-themed shows can the public take? Operation: Repo and Parking Wars have been on the air since 2008. Lizard Lick Towing and South Beach Towing are still going strong, though it seems Bear Swamp Recovery met its demise after just one season.³ Apparently, viewers positively revel in schadenfreude.
Repo Games, however, ostensibly offers a less sadistic take on the repossession business. Contestants on the show are asked a series of trivia questions; if they get three correct, their car is paid off in full. If they get three incorrect, their car is repossessed as it would have been anyway. This basic premise makes the show seem charitable, and I should admit that to a certain extent, it is—after all, it gives the contestants an opportunity they wouldn't otherwise have. Going from a repossession to complete loan forgiveness is a tremendous turn of fortune, and it would be unfair not to recognize this. However, after watching an episode out of curiosity (which turned into several episodes to do research for this post), I learned this program is as pernicious as it purports to be magnanimous.

A typical repossession goes like this: a horde of cameramen sprints into the yard of some unsuspecting person,⁴ yelling "Repo!"⁵ A tow truck driver hooks up the target vehicle and lifts it, preparing to depart. One of the two hosts (each of whom I thought was based on an opposite coast, but seem to work together sometimes) bangs on the door of an often sleepy, confused tenant, who is bewildered not only at the sight of their car attached to a tow truck, but at a swarm of television cameras documenting their every move. Somehow, the host is consistently surprised when the tenant fails to greet him calmly. This distress is often framed so as to make the tenant seem especially poorly educated or unhinged. Spike has graciously uploaded several previews to its YouTube channel, with creatively titled episodes such as "Two Random Hicks" and "Soul Brotha Chicken Wing."

A glance at these videos reveals the show's true motive: to make fun of contestants who are already down on their luck enough to have their car repossessed. To this end, the host does whatever he can to try to disparage a contestant, even if it's completely nonsensical. The full effect of these comments is lost when you cannot hear the host's derision, but I documented a few anyway:

Host: What do you do for fun?
Contestant: I [play] bingo sometimes.
Host: Bingo? Aren't you supposed to be at work? How do you pay your bills? Oh, wait, you don't.

Contestant: That's a ridiculous question.
Host: For a stripper, maybe.⁶

Host: Vince, guess what, buddy? Fuck you, I've got your truck.

Host: Word on the street from my intel is that Margaret is a bus driver. So if she loses her car, it should be pretty easy for her to get a ride.

The host and producers try their hardest to make the contestants look as bedraggled as possible, making them appear on the show in whatever state they were in when they unsuspectingly answered the door. When one mostly toothless woman is confronted in the morning, she turns to go inside, saying "Let me go comb my hair." The host attempts to dissuade her, saying "You don't gotta worry about that." Despite his entreaty, she goes inside, and he takes the opportunity to turn to the camera and say "Why do I get people with no teeth all the time?" Boy, I wonder.

Each contestant is profiled in a "Repo Report," with predictable results.

The questions on the show are a blend of pop culture and general trivia. Though more difficult questions are peppered throughout, I imagine most people would find it very easy to get three of five correct. Examples include:

• How many legs does a spider have?
• On a standard clock, the small hand is on what number at noon?
• Known as the red planet, what is the fourth planet from the sun?
• What political party does Barack Obama belong to?

Nevertheless, the contestants often struggle mightily with these questions, and through a variety of postproduction sound effects, the producers attempt to squeeze every ounce of humor they can out of an uncomfortable situation. This "common knowledge" is obviously not common to some segments of society, and perhaps that is why the audience—assuming one exists—laughs. It's difficult for me to comprehend an educational system that would so completely fail me, and I would assume it's similarly incomprehensible to the show's target audience, comprised largely of people far more fortunate than the contestants the show depicts. Each episode is essentially a 22-minute victim-blaming party, a way to justify the conditions in which the poor live because they're just too darn stupid to escape it. I doubt this is intentional; Spike TV is not waging a war against poor people. But everyone involved with the show—and that includes its regular viewers—share a mindset that perpetuates this victim-blaming ideology without their even trying to do so. They don't stop to think about why this person doesn't immediately know spiders have eight legs, or what that implies about the failures of our economic and educational systems. The contestant should know, because everybody knows that. Well, a lot of people get left out of "everybody." I suppose it's easier to laugh at these answers than to recognize them as symptomatic of a grave problem. It's easier to conclude this is the natural result of a meritocracy than confront a far more uncomfortable truth.

At the risk of wearying my readers,⁷ I'll remark one last time upon the procedure of the show: the worst part of the program comes when the host drags out the questions to excruciating lengths, sometimes pausing for twenty seconds before revealing the answer. (There was even a commercial break before revealing that Barack Obama is a Democrat.) These pauses exists so the audience—again, most of whom undoubtedly know almost every answer in an instant—can jeer the contestants. There is no suspense when we wait for the host to tell a contestant he incorrectly named the cards in a royal flush or was 200 years off in trying to name the year Columbus came to America. But we wait and watch the fear and uncertainty in the contestants' faces, and we are supposed to enjoy it. It doesn't matter how many cars they pay off—this is a show that celebrates suffering, plain and simple.

Of course, this is not the only show of its genre. Other trivia shows thrive on watching the contestant struggle to come up with answers; think Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?, The $(insert-dollar-amount-here-depending-on-when-you-watched-the-show) Pyramid. But Repo Games is nothing like those shows. These contestants didn't choose to be here. They weren't pre-screened with an intelligence test, as is required on other programs. The producers want the least educated people possible, because that makes the best television. Laughing at someone who messes up an easy question on Jeopardy! is perfectly understandable—it's hard to get on that show. Criticizing a contestant's clues on Password is to be expected. Those contestants aren't fighting for their cars. Finding out that someone who really ought to be smarter than a fifth grader, what with their college degree, actually isn't, might be cause for laughter.

With this show, however, laughing is repugnant, and laughing is exactly what it encourages. Every institution around these contestants has failed. They did not choose to be in this position.

Yes, it's just one show on one network, but it is indicative of a greater cultural bias against historically oppressed groups. It's part of a discourse that perpetuates inequality by recognizing it as natural, when in reality it is anything but. Little would be solved by eliminating Repo Games, but it remains a sad reminder of a severe problem.


<sup>1. Credit to Kelsey for that URL idea.↩
2. As I did research for this post, I discovered the show is actually in its second season. New to me, at least.↩
3. Thanks for that info, Wikipedia.↩
4. The contestants are invariably socioeconomically disadvantaged, often to the point of poverty, and are disproportionately African American.↩
5. I've watched far more of this show than I ever cared to, and I still don't understand the yelling.↩
6. The contestant was, indeed, a former stripper. The host wasn't so callous as to make things up.↩
7. All five of you.↩</sup>