the point of Beast Games The first 60 seconds of its premiere are laced with chilling starkness. One thousand people are vying for a $5 million grand prize that we’re told is, “the largest in entertainment history.” But its host, 26-year-old Jimmy Donaldson, who goes by the wildly successful YouTuber style “MrBeast,” refers to this pile of money in a different way: “generational wealth.” That might sound like a strangely academic way of describing a jackpot, but only if you’re unfamiliar with Mr. Beast’s defining quality: his willingness to test just what people are willing to do for cash.
The next thing the audience will hear Beast Games Contestants describe their motivations for competing on the show. The first is a black woman who says she grew up homeless and will use the money to help other homeless children. The second is a young white man who says, “If I won $5 million, I could use it to make passive income for the rest of my life.”
beast games, The first four episodes of which are now streaming on Amazon Prime, know what it’s doing when it shows you one contestant is probably worthy of the award and another is presented as far more terrible in comparison. It knows what it’s doing when it shows you pink-haired millennials crying hysterically as they trip over tower blocks, or any other example of older adults behaving like children. It knows what it took squid game, How, in fact, our glee at seeing poor people degrade themselves for money can be a bad thing, and the exact opposite conclusion was drawn.
Beast Games You exist to hate it and other people and see you regardless. In this case, it is a tremendous success.
The gist is that 1000 people in tracksuits compete in challenges to win prizes in 10 episodes. They start the competition in a giant warehouse before moving on to “Beast City,” which looks like a life-size Brio train set, then “Beast Island,” a private $1.8 million Panamanian island. Future episodes take the rest to Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas. Although known Cost over $100 million To build, it’s characterized by nonsensical writing, ugly graphic design and frequent ads for MoneyLion, a payday loan company that markets itself as a cool fintech brand. Every moment of the show is designed to capture and hold your attention, and in doing so, you even hate yourself more with each passing second.
Beast Games You exist to hate it and other people and see you regardless. In this case, it is a tremendous success.
The show’s logic is so toxic that moments designed to strengthen the audience’s faith in humanity — like when the four team captains choose to forgo a $1 million offer rather than betray their teammates — had me screaming them out of my couch. “Don’t you know that literally the only reason you’re here is to win a bunch of money?” I wanted to say, before reminding myself that I was looking at a grown woman Beast Games.
But this cynicism is justified when one of said team captains then becomes a cult-like figure among a section of his fellow contestants, delivering eccentric Christian sermons to further his identity as a martyr. Jeremy, with the big beard, claims that it is actually God who guides him beast games, And God who told her to take her fellow male teammates with her to the next round, even after she promised to help the women. This leads to a hilarious moment where one of the female contestants says, “I talk to God every day and I know he didn’t tell her that.”
Those who are Beast-savvy know that Donaldson generally shies away from more complex narratives about gender and race, preferring instead to maintain a tone of toddler-level simplicity: “Mr. Beast Give the poor guy money, Mr. Beast God!” Many of his YouTube videos have an almost shocking lack of controversy; Any tension is only surface-level.
This is where Amazon innovates the show, pitting male and female and white and non-white players against each other, creating the show’s central narrative. It’s terrifying and disturbing to witness two brothers happily convince a crying woman to sacrifice herself for them, or when a white man reneges on his promise to share a prison with two black men. (God, this shit. A multi-billion dollar corporation with a long track record of exploitation.
Mr. Beast, famously uncharismatic, is useless when it comes to comforting contestants who have been cut from the show (or in some cases, thrown into the abyss). The scenes that require him to show human emotion are painful to watch, and not just because he spends the entire show wearing a hideously shiny suit over a black hoodie.
His crew — Donaldson’s friends-slash-employees known as the “Beast Gang” — are even worse. they are awkward soyfacing Bros who do nothing more than try to convey a sense of wonder about a game they designed while repeating whatever Internet slang they think is the most popular (drinking every time they shout “Locked in!”). None of them are able to interact with other humans normally, which I guess makes sense when you have to interact with normal people while they’re begging you for money.
This, again, is the logic of the Mr. Beast universe, which is made up of rich 20-something hustle-bro influencers of various tastes and their army of wannabe copycats. Here, the kinds of money words used by Mr. Beast and his competitors – “generational wealth”, “passive income” – amount to gospel. Mr. Beast and his men are obsessed with both their own and other people’s rags-to-riches narratives and dangle the audience’s dream of “financial freedom” by showing off their success with Lamborghinis, Rolexes and women. To them money is the key to everything; It is the be-all, end-all of human life. As Katie Notopoulos wrote in the thread“’Beast Games’ is money-obsessed; The first AP challenges are mindgames about winning money, not physical challenges. It’s a game show where ‘wanting money’ is the whole entertainment.”
Nihilism at heart Beast Games Of course, nothing new. As Emily Nussbaum catalogs in her history of the genre, Cue the Sun!: The Discovery of Reality TV, Bowing down poor people in an attempt to win cash is older than color television broadcasting. 1945 saw its debut Queen for a dayA radio show in which working-class housewives shared their sob stories with listeners to compete to win a prize slate, who would determine the winner via an applause-o-meter. Importantly, she wrote, “You could not be queen if the prize was for you. It should have been for your preemie baby, your sick aunt – and the more demonstrably you sacrificed yourself, the more likely the other women would let you win.”
You could argue that plenty of reality TV shows are more satanic than that Beast Games – The 2000s alone have seen such a moral disaster Swan, Kid Nation, Cheater, Biggest Loser, And John and Kate Plus Eight. Such as ugly Beast Games To watch, it seems to have gotten uglier behind the scenes. Competitors allegedly Had to sign the agreement acknowledging that “I understand that such activity may cause me death, illness or serious bodily injury.” in a case In filings against the show, several contestants said they were sexually harassed, “humiliated” by the experience and lacked access to food and medicine. (Neither a representative for Amazon MGM Studios nor Mr. Beast would comment on the lawsuit.) Some contestants were also carried off the field on stretchers, while others were hospitalized. “We signed up for the show, but we didn’t sign up to not be fed or watered or treated like humans,” one contestant said. told the New York Times.
Over the past few years, it’s started to feel a bit like many of us are contestants on a reality game show, where our job is to sell sob stories to maximize attention and money. It’s been enlightening to see what kind of people thrive on this particular show beast games, At the very least, it helped me better understand the dark, brooding desires at the heart of the American id. It’s Mr. Beast’s world now. game on
