This article is the one that convinced me to add years to the titles of my film reviews. Because when I think of the film Open Season, I picture animated woodland creatures since that was the one I saw most plastered across various forms of media. Older crowds may have mistaken it for the Peter Fonda flick from 1974. But the film I’m referring to is from 1995. I came across it through my favourite means of finding films: searching and surfing random TV channels at odd times of the day or night.
I’d never heard of it before, but the premise intrigued me and the more we move further into the 21st century, the more appreciation I have for those films from the 20th century. Essentially the story asks what would happen if the mechanism that derived the data for TV ratings went awry. In the 1990’s how these figures were figured was as miasmic and magical as a sorcerer’s premonition or precognition. No lay person really knew how they worked. All they knew was that the ratings explained what was popular on TV and that inspired the execs to make more of what had proved to work. Whole generations grew up on far more Westerns than was necessary. White kids in the South African 60’s could name Wyatt Earp more than they could prominent members of the PAC.
Anyway, in this film the mechanism for figuring out the ratings is a machine. A box. It gets put into a few thousand households in the United States and then monitors what they watch. The parallels between this concept and what became to be known as Surveillance Capitalism are pretty clear. We watch what you watch to learn how to feed you more of what you watch the most. The attention economy.
But the TVs and the boxes start to malfunction and the data that the big execs start to get tends toward public broadcasting, which is notoriously mocked in mainstream American media for its bumbling, low brow execution of its high brow ideas. In Open Season (1995) one such topic that gains traction according to the false ratings is Limoges china, from France. I’d never heard of it before then but I know about it since (and have actually run into a few references that would have flown over my head before).
So the execs see the data saying that people like watching cultured programming and so they begin to produce more cultured programming. Suddenly the United States is plunged into a kind of cultural renaissance as the general population starts to engage more and more with topics outside the scope of crime fighting nuns. It’s not what they want of course, but the effects of being fed this high cultured media diet meant that they became more cultured themselves.
It’s a fun comedy with a decent subtext and a fairly solid plot as you follow the bumbling Stuart Sain along his journey from being part of the corporate shit-peddling machinery to the public broadcasting side of TV production life. I enjoyed it and would recommend giving it a watch if you have 1h37m and you’re into satirical humour. The cast worked well since I didn’t really know any of the actors. I love it when the anonymity of the cast enhances the film by imbuing it with people you believe to be the characters in the story rather than the stars on screen. I don’t know if I’ll rush to watch it again but if I’m channel surfing and I see it on I’m likely to stop and give it a second look.
