Image: Hulu\/Everett Collection<\/cite>
\n <\/figure>\n<\/div>\nThe Contestant <\/em>doesn\u2019t draw out any of these larger ideas, and Titley\u2019s handling of her subjects seems gentle and cautious rather than probing. There are a lot of unsettling revelations in The Contestant<\/em>, including that Toshio encouraged Nasubi to keep a journal about his day-to-day life \u2014 which was then taken away and published, without Nasubi\u2019s knowledge. (It became a four-volume national bestseller.) But the film doesn\u2019t explore how that happened, or question the ethics behind it: It just notes the publication of Nasubi\u2019s diary as a data point in establishing the scope of his fame in Japan.<\/p>\nIt might be considered admirable how firmly Titley sticks to the facts, rather than trying to draw out a moral from the entire situation. But it leaves the story feeling more like a quirky, isolated human-interest story than a watershed moment in the development of exploitative, stunt-driven reality television. It plays like a feature-length version of the \u201cHere\u2019s a wacky story from Japan\u2026\u201d news items that Titley excerpts at the beginning of the film, more a curiosity than a bigger discussion-starter. And when Nasubi enters his post-Denpa Sh\u014dnen<\/em> life and embarks on a radical personal project, the film morphs into something more like a slick, inspirational feel-good story. It\u2019s certainly a relief to see Nasubi healthy and happy after the early going, but there\u2019s a constant sense of a film skating across the surface of a remarkable story, rather than exploring its depths.<\/p>\nNone of which makes The Contestant<\/em> any less of a compelling watch. We seem to have moved past the peak of grim cautionary documentaries focused on the seemingly endless environmental, technological, and societal apocalypses looming in the near future, maybe because they\u2019d piled up in such numbing profusion that audiences were turning away. In spite of the guilty voyeuristic lure of a naked guy who doesn\u2019t know he\u2019s being filmed, the \u201cWow, this guy\u2019s so wacky!\u201d framing of Toshio\u2019s game show, and the big, bright uplift of the ending, this movie is as frightening as any of the doomsaying docs of the last few decades. <\/p>\nThe Contestant<\/em><\/small> is streaming on Hulu now.<\/small><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Image: Hulu\/Everett Collection How a Japanese comedian sealed naked in a room for more than a year helped ...<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":581,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=579"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":585,"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/579\/revisions\/585"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/581"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=579"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=579"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/dulcipass.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=579"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}