Japanese television personality Tomoaki “Nasubi” Hamatsu has lived an incredible life.  As with anyone who’s lived an incredible life, that means he’s doomed to be immortalized in a bland documentary or biopic, often one after the other.  The British documentary The Contestant has bravely stepped forward to get the ritual going, sitting Nasubi down for talking-head interviews about his traumatic years in the public eye, supplemented by late-90s archival footage of the horrors he describes.  The details of his life make for a great Wikipedia page but not necessarily a great feature film, as evidenced by the final half-hour of the runtime spinning its wheels detailing Nasubi’s post-fame charity work instead of sticking to the subject at hand.  Most Wikipedia biographies aren’t illustrated with video clips, though, so I suppose The Contestant saves you the additional time & effort you’d spend opening a second tab for YouTube searches while you’re scrolling on the toilet. 

It feels cruel to refer to Hamatsu by his nickname, since it started as a schoolyard insult.  Bullied for being born with a “long face”, the name “Nasubi” refers to the “eggplant” shape of Hamatsu’s head.  That bullying followed him into young adulthood too, as the aspiring comedian struggled to find a healthy balance between making people laugh vs being laughed at.  His desperation for approval led him to becoming the star of the “A Life in Prizes” game show segment of the Japanese variety show Danpa Shonen, in which his bullying escalated to full-on torture.  At the instruction of producer Toshio Tsuchiya (an obvious villain that the film nudges you to boo & hiss at in his own appearances as a talking head), Nasubi was isolated in a room with nothing but postcards and a rack of magazines for fifteen maddening months, with the goal of earning ¥1 million’s worth of prizes from sweepstakes contests.  Provided no clothes and no food (beyond an occasional packet of crackers to keep him alive), Nasubi’s semi-voluntary imprisonment for “A Life in Prizes” was presented as an experiment to see if someone could survive on magazine contest winnings alone.  Really, though, he was televised as a one-man geek show for an entire nation to mock, often with a nightmarish laugh track underscoring his daily suffering.  As you’d likely assume, the experience fucked him up psychologically, and it’s taken him decades to find any joy or mutual trust in humanity again.

The late 90s and early 2000s were an ugly time for pop culture, most vividly reflected in the early stirrings of reality TV.  Nasubi’s 15 months of fame only slightly predate the most obvious Western comparison points for “A Life in Prizes”—Big Brother and The Truman Show—and it doesn’t feel much eviler than most of what followed that decade.  I’m sure someone could slap together a sinister montage of Jerry Springer clips that would make America look like a vicious hell pit, for instance, and maybe someone should.  Still, even if Tsuchiya’s manipulation of his pet reality star isn’t more extreme than behind-the-scenes stories from the sets of shows like The Bachelor or Below Deck, that doesn’t mean he’s not a monster.  Nasubi barely survived his time on Danpa Shonen, winning over a huge audience of fans with his goofball celebrations of receiving prize packages of car tires, camping tents, and dog food, but that micro-celebrity did not translate to a sustainable career once Tsuchiya ran out of ways to extend the gimmick of his imprisonment.  It took a long time for Nasubi to rebuild his identity and his sense of place in the world after the entertainment industry spat him out, so it’s easy to forgive The Contestant for its third-act cheerleading of his charitable work in the years following the Fukushima nuclear disaster.  That doesn’t make for great cinema, necessarily, but it’s at least a kinder impulse than what guided the last camera crew to center him in the spotlight.

The Contestant is not a great documentary, but it is great trash TV, in that it allows you to indulge in several of the most popular genres of trash TV (reality, game show, true crime) while still feeling morally superior to them.  No matter how much disgust the film expresses for Danpa Shonen‘s exploitation of Nasubi, it can’t get around the fact that its own existence perpetuates that exploitation.  The reason most people will watch The Contestant is to see the bizarre, out-of-context clips of a naked, lonely man starving to death on TV for mass entertainment, so it’s a little rich for the movie to act as if it’s above its subject.  If I learned anything about Nasubi that I didn’t retain from reading his Wikipedia page, it’s that he’s credited for inspiring the association of the eggplant emoji with the penis, since his nudity was censored by producers with a floating eggplant symbol.  Otherwise, the only reason to watch the movie is to watch Nasubi suffer, as opposed to just reading about his suffering in plain text.  It’s the same perverse enjoyment that true crime obsessives get out of looking up crime-scene photos and serial-killer mugshots after hearing about them on podcasts.  I can’t claim that I’m above that impulse either, since I chose to watch this documentary out of my own morbid fascination with its subject; I just wish it had chosen to challenge me a little more and indulge me a little less.

-Brandon Ledet