Koh-Lanta and Existing Knowledge About Construction of Reality TV

It seems important to question the “reality” of reality TV in the context of Koh-Lanta and its insular depiction. Mark Andrejevic coins the term “illusion of reality,” referring to the self-conscious ability of the show to display capitalist features while simulating a survivalist dimension.² In Koh-Lanta‘s case, this potential is doubly misleading because the deserted island plot immerses the viewer in a fiction more than any other reality TV show. Jost suggests that perhaps the first reality TV shows in France were displaying too much artifice.³ Koh-Lanta regresses towards the seductive format of the archaic lifestyle, pretending to get rid of these artifices. Notably, the illusion of a natural set would influence the audience into viewing the contestants’ performance as natural as well. Koh-Lanta is based on an authenticating promise: that of offering us a documentary-style TV program on the birth of a society, to draw on Jost’s words.⁴ In other words, Koh-Lanta‘s viewers, caught in the illusion of reality, accept to watch the construction of an ex-nihilo society while pretending not to be aware of the presence of the cameras, the team, etc.⁵ Because of its fictional dimension, the show is a simulacrum within the simulacrum. Eventually, Koh-Lanta is no longer about reality; in fact, the (un)reality of the island itself is not in question, considering that the TV show’s crew fabricates the landscape.⁶ Rather, reality TV is a social construction and enacts the “modern-day storytellers in the discourse of the real.”⁷ Drawing on this notion of “modern-day storytellers,” I will analyze the host’s voiceover, which shares features with the literary oral traditions.

In “Surviving American Culture Imperialism,” Jennifer Delisle compares Survivor to 19^th-century colonial fiction. She argues that the show reenacts the moment of encounter between “primitive” cultures and the modern world and examines closely the process of transformation and aestheticization of the island’s myth, from the plot to the production conditions. For example, Mark Burnett, Survivor’s producer, has received criticism for the way that Black men have been portrayed at least in the first four seasons.⁸ Beyond the colonial dimension of the show, the place, and the performance of contestants, the neo-colonial context thus extends to the treatment of participants; the production conditions of the show raise colonial and imperialist issues. Andrejevic also explains that Survivor’s cast members need to master the tribal myths invoked over the course of the show and “stories about the beliefs of the tribes that inhabited the Survivor Island and its environs.”⁹

Similarly, the treatment of the islands’ inhabitants in Koh-Lanta is neo-colonial as well. Although I will focus on the plot, and on elements that contribute to turning Koh-Lanta into a neo-colonial narrative, it seems important to point at other elements about the show: notably, native inhabitants are excluded, replaced, silenced and the French contestants, organized in tribes with native names, speak in their place. Moreover, the show reappropriates native music. Thirty minutes into the first episode of La nouvelle édition,¹⁰ during the first confessionals, the participants’ voices cover the music, a traditional Kikuyu chant; Kikuyu is a West-African tribe and has nothing to do with Malaysia, Thailand, or Philippines, placing colonized territories under the sign of the interchangeable. The music is rhythmic, jerky, and may reflect the contestant’s stress, but it can also be read as an appropriation of the original inhabitants’ land by the crew. These various appropriations point at the existence of native people and simultaneously erase them; this principle shows another aspect of the way Koh-Lanta takes part in the paradox of the island’s “desert”.

I would add to Jennifer Delisle’s argument that precedent island depictions in fiction and literary texts influence reality TV and therefore increase these issues. I will examine how intertextuality operates at different medial levels. Certainly, Koh-Lanta shares a Western imaginary with colonial literature and the theme is transmedial, moreover, the circulation operates within the genre of reality TV. As Andrejevic notes, Survivor inscribed itself in a series of shows taking place on an island, including Temptation Island and Mole Hawaii.¹¹ These various TV programs constitute the intertext of Survivor (and thus, Koh-Lanta), enact the dialogue of the illusion of reality and therefore maintain the island in its aestheticized version. Finally, the circulation operates throughout the various countries and within each of their versions of Koh-Lanta, or rather, Expedition! Robinson (1997), the Swedish and original version of the show. There are forty-seven different countries and versions of the program,¹² including forty Western versions. Regardless of subtle differences in plots and locations, these reality shows remain trapped in the colonial myth.

A Contemporary Tribute to Robinson Crusoe

At this moment, it would be useful to provide a few definitions to explain how the colonial depiction of the island is transposed onto an unexpectedly neo-imperial context. Koh-Lanta does not display the classical elements of colonial literature but rather, performs political colonization for economic and cultural hegemony.¹³ For example, it sells the fantasy of entering an “anachronistic space, to imagine (…) traveling to a far away and exotic location.”¹⁴ Traveling, tourism, and participation in Koh-Lanta becomes a way to consume the island fantasy, whereas Robinson stayed (at least in the first volume of Defoe’s work) on Despair Island and built a capitalist society. Rebecca Weaver-Hightower also raises this difference and notes that nothing fundamental has changed, rather, a shift in the original formula of the island narrative. Characters (she takes the example of Chuck Noland in the film Castaway) and contestants of reality TV eventually return to the United States, or to France, in Koh-Lanta‘s case.¹⁵ In other words, the means to settle on the island between Defoe’s time and ours are different, but they both justify the hegemonic end. Koh-Lanta naturalizes “the condition of contemporary capitalism”¹⁶ the same way as Defoe justified colonization through his novel.

It is indeed, arguably, to the postcolonial world what settling used to be to colonialism. In Mapping men and empire: Geographies of adventure, Richard Phillips explains that adventure literature in Europe was a popular genre in the 19^th century¹⁷ because it was accessible and had entertaining plots. To the same extent, Koh-Lanta’s format is appealing and has attracted one of the largest audiences in French TV history. Moreover, the critic discusses the dilemma facing readers and writers of adventure literature today:

Do we throw adventures (from books to computer games) into the recycling basket, or do we give in to the seductive violence and exoticism? (...) There are, it seems, no real alternatives to violent adventure.¹⁸

There is indeed a discrepancy between shows such as Koh-Lanta and the contemporary postcolonial revisions of the Robinson myth. Unlike J.M. Coetzee’s parody Foe, or Michel Tournier’s Friday, or the other Island, for example, Koh-Lanta does not seem to be challenging the castaway story to subvert its power.¹⁹ In other words, one can wonder why the transposition to reality TV allows for the possibility to return to the performance of colonial values. Unlike twentieth or twenty-first century novels, Koh-Lanta is not attempting to be deconstructionist nor parodic; in last year’s official depiction of the adventure,²⁰ on TF1‘s website, the Robinson myth explicitly persists: contestants are qualified of “apprentice Robinsons”, suggesting that the producers (and viewers) acknowledge the myth. Beyond the format, both works explicitly share values. As Jost points out, Koh-Lanta inherits from Robison’s Protestant principles, for example, the importance of hard work and effort.²¹ Participants, during confessionals, attempt to convince the viewer that they belong because they share these values as well. For example, in the sixth episode of Le Feu sacré, contestant Tanya refers to her ‘warrior’s mentality’ several times and emphasizes: “what characterizes me is my determination and willpower,”²² hinting at the idea that she will not disappoint us and fill out these criteria that contribute to the success of the adventure.

On the one hand, this vertiginous intertextual web around the genre of adventures triggers the readers and viewers’ nostalgia, who are caught up in the island fantasy narrative, on the other, nostalgia becomes a performance within Koh-Lanta. I have chosen La nouvelle édition as a relatively older point of comparison specifically because it gathers contestants from previous seasons while flashbacks of preceding seasons and islands create a metatextual web within the show. Flashbacks reinforce the island fantasy’s powerful intertext and metatext and resonate uncannily with the “nostalgia for a history that never really existed”, in Delisle’s words.²³

Nineteen minutes into the first episode,²⁴ the contestant Sara explains with emotion why it would be so important for her that a woman succeeds to make fire by herself for the first time in Koh-Lanta‘s history. She confesses that she was close to succeeding two years before, but had a sunstroke and was forced to stop. Flashbacks from the 2012 season appear on the screen along with a sepia effect reinforcing the feeling of nostalgia (figure 1). On the same note, earlier in the episode, Philippe confesses about the totem²⁵ he hopes to win while his thoughts are materialized into one image next to his head so that the viewer visualizes his thoughts (probably a snippet from scenes that happened in his first adventure), like a bubble in a comic book (figure 2).

Figure 1.

Figure 1.

Looking back on Sara’s painful experience (“Koh Lanta : La nouvelle édition EP1”, Youtube Video, [online], 01:30:00, April 22, 2021, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wFazZwNwwrc.)

Figure 2.

Figure 2.

Philippe’s materialized nostalgia (“Koh Lanta : La nouvelle édition EP1”, 00:08:11)

Thus, the contestants play a role in creating a nostalgic atmosphere, but perhaps they are caught in the illusion of reality as much as the viewers, thanks to the meticulous production work behind these confessionals. This rearranged composition emphasizes the nostalgic dimension of the confessionals and maintains the plot in a colonial fashion.

Confessional as Fiction

The confession is perhaps the most important aspect of reality TV, and yet, this literary practice crosses genres and epochs. “[Monologues are] a sight common in early modern theater, but rarely used since the eighteenth century,”²⁶ and “reality shows have reintroduced this out-of-date talk situation into the context of television,”²⁷ thus creating another interesting link between Koh-Lanta and Robinson Crusoe.

This performance recalls the privileged moment when the characters-colonizers first arrive on the colonized land in literature. For example, in the same first episode, contestants are interviewed at the end of the first day. We thus have access to Sandra’s point of view, a former contestant who lost in 2009 and has decided to come back to this season. Sandra, who has just won the day’s contest uses vocabulary such as “to be honest”²⁸ when describing how she feels or how she felt during the trial. This sentimental outpouring evokes Robinson’s logbook, the character’s diary in which he formally and meticulously reports his daily adventures, successes, failures, and techniques to tame the island. In both situations, the two individuals are addressing an audience, viewers or readers, to share their experience of the island. I perceive the confessional as the occasion for reflection and self-discovery and as an echo to the self-reflection principle pervading colonial literature.

Christopher Grobe contends that the practice is, in some shows, authentic behavior (he takes The Real World as an example), and at other times, the simulation of a performance. “Survivor’s contracts presume that the show is a fiction,”²⁹ contends Grobe about Koh-Lanta‘s American version, and the explicit mention of fiction is of particular interest since the fictionalized world contributes to the overarching fantasy. Besides, the show has all rights to reshape the contestants’ personalities as it sees fit and makes it explicit when they sign their contracts.³⁰ More specifically, the production is entitled to choose which parts of the confessionals will be aired, which makes contestants fictionalized characters more than the authors of their own confessions. Survivor‘s participants must “cede to CBS all stake in their own personalities.”³¹ The confessionals are thus cut, modified, switched, etc.; in short, they no longer reflect the contestants’ performance at the time the show is aired. This appears ironic when Sandra claims: “I ain’t an extra in real life, therefore, I won’t be an extra in the game,”³² tracing a parallel between her real personality and her performance and pointing at the paradox of reality TV. Koh-Lanta‘s (and Survivor’s) confessionals thus experiment with two levels of inauthenticity: first, contestants must act like characters, second, the production modifies these forged performances.

As I mentioned in the introduction, less information on Koh-Lanta than Survivor is accessible: there are either short articles in online newspapers or summaries of lawsuits or revenge against the series by some participants. One case in particular caught my attention because the contestant’s concern was about the show cutting off the part of his confession dedicated to his deceased brother.³³ The contestant took his revenge upon the show releasing confidential information and subsequently lost his confidentiality bonus. Although the official contracts are not accessible to the public, this information points at the ability of Koh-Lanta‘s producers to “portray [the contestants] and [their] Life Story (…) with such liberties and modifications as Producer determines necessary.”³⁴ Thus, Koh-Lanta‘s production forges the contestants’ performances as much as in Survivor, and the French show is subject to this double level of inauthenticity as much as its American cousin.

The paradox of the confessional pervades the first episode of La nouvelle édition and is ideally illustrated through the act of whispering. In the episode, the six female contestants decide to unite against the men. Moundir, a male contestant confesses that he knows about their strategy because he overheard their discussion. He is whispering, which creates a paradoxical situation as he has just discussed the matter with another male contestant. Thus, even at the first level of comprehension of the show, his performance seems inauthentic because all the contestants are aware of the women’s strategy: the information is anything but a secret. To the same extent, during the vote at the end of the episode, Sandra whispers while explaining her choice to the camera; this sequence is abbreviated (and falls in the category of the double level of inauthenticity I just mentioned above) and added in the middle of the vote. That said, it was probably shot after or before as it seems unlikely that contestants would be interrupted for interviews while voting. These two sequences are paradoxical in many aspects and reinforce the fabricated dimension of the show. The island is subject to a double fiction: not only is it presented as a deserted place but the production work around the contestants’ confessions magnifies the mythology at work.

These confessions are addressed to the audience who, as “the gaze as asserting authority,”³⁵ has the power to validate the fiction they are watching. The reception of these confessionals thus maintains the island entrapped in the myth, and bearing in mind that most of Koh-Lanta‘s audience is Western,³⁶ it reenacts the neo-colonial dimension.³⁷

Reality TV Rewriting the Island as Exotic Other

Koh-Lanta‘s narrative, commented by Denis Brogniart, the host, conveys the idea that the island is a wild, dangerous place that needs to be tamed. From the beginning of La nouvelle édition, the host plunges us into this atmosphere when he qualifies the island as a place “as beautiful as inhospitable.” The comparison exacerbates the dangerous dimension of the island, and, at the same time, he qualifies the place as “paradisiac”, cut off from the world, hinting at the idea of non-place:³⁸ it can be either infernal or wonderful, but it must be extraordinary. Besides, these extreme depictions raise the question of tropicality,³⁹ that Clayton and Bowd define as a discourse “of power by dramatising the distance between ‘us’ and ‘them’, and ‘here’ and ‘there’.”⁴⁰ Denis Brogniart dramatizes the distance France and the island when he compares it to hell or paradise: one is not sure how to depict its otherness,⁴¹ but it certainly is drastically different from metropolitan France. This is emphasized when the opening credits introduce the contestants as “castaways [who are] 10,000 kilometers away from Paris,”⁴² thus placing the islands in opposition with Paris, colonial center of the Francophone world. Considering that all seasons take place in Asia, South America or in the Pacific, tropics appear as a necessary condition for the adventure.

Similarly, Le Feu sacré is centered around the danger of the Philippine island’s volcanoes. The first seconds of the sixth episode immediately introduce the island as a threatening place; the contestants must go through hardship “where tectonic plates clash, where volcanoes rise to the sky and make the earth rumble”.⁴³ This newest episode belongs to the middle of the season and yet, the references to the deserted island myth do not exhaust as the season progresses. Each episode of the show begins with these exoticizing depictions and reveal that the myth, rather than an optional ornament, is the foundation of the show. The modulation in the speech, nine years later, is discreet, and even nonexistent.

Hyperbols pervade the host’s speech and remind the viewer of the show’s literary dimension (“this forest is one of the wildest in the world,” “Malaysian bears climb to the top.”)⁴⁴ He also claims that “these adventurers [the contestants] will struggle in a natural theater to their own dimension.”⁴⁵ This quotation raises a paradox; on the one hand, he romanticizes the adventure and the plot of the show by using hyperboles (‘struggle,’ for example), on the other hand, the staged performance, the mise-en-scène is explicit with the mention of the theater. One thus witnesses how Andrejevic’s concept of “illusion of reality” applies here: the show is both a survival experience and a simulation of this experience. Finally, the whole episode is centered around the danger of the tiger prowling into the jungle: “the Malaysian tiger haunts this still wild forest.”⁴⁶ In this quotation, the tiger and the jungle serve as metonymies for the island, and the adjective “wild” points at its untouched aspect; this aligns with a recurrent colonial topos: the contestants will be the first ones to explore this blank space. The host’s speech is thus rich in exaggerations and paradoxes, meant to keep the viewer on edge and pointing at the dramatic performance of the reality TV show.

Finally, these various depictions of the island portray it as much a character as the contestants. The island is not just in the background and is often shown to the viewer without participants nor crew members. For example, in the beginning of the episode, contestants are not yet visually present, and the camera provides us with an overview of the place for several minutes (figure 3). The contestants then visually supplement the landscape in the opening credits (figure 4): a series of close-ups suddenly give advantage to the players and the island is almost erased from this sequence. Finally, before the ordeals begin, another sequence is exclusively dedicated to the environment. The interest of the camera thus alternates between both sets of characters and these opening sequences create a visual contrast between the island and the contestants, as if they could not share the screen – or, in other words, as if the participants could not live in harmony in this context without winning over the island first. One observes the same phenomenon in the most recent season, and the seductive sequence of depictions follows the same pattern: the characterizations of Caramoan Island, shot without any contestants, frame the opening credits and the otherness of the place is illustrated through cinematic techniques such as low-angle shots (Figure 5).

Figure 3.

Figure 3.

Characterization of Sibu Island (“Koh Lanta : La nouvelle édition EP1”, 00:02:47).

Figure 4.

Figure 4.

Introduction to the contestants and erasure of the island (“Koh Lanta : La nouvelle édition EP1”, 00:03:01).

Figure 5.

Figure 5.

Characterization of Caramoan Island (“Koh Lanta : Le Feu sacré EP6”, part 1, My TF1 Video, [online], 00:04:20, https://www.tf1.fr/tf1/koh-lanta/videos/koh-lanta-le-feu-sacre-du-28-mars-2023-partie-1-49511428.html).

In both episodes, a variety of filmic techniques contribute to the construction of an enemy figure. For example, the hyperlapse shots show the immensity of the landscape and, simultaneously, capture its totality, foreseeing at the contestants’ ability to tame the place. To the same extent, the soundtrack, rhythmic, jolting, worrying, reinforces the island’s otherness. For example, five minutes into the first episode of La nouvelle édition, two contestants suddenly emerge from the forest and push aside a leaf, as if they were starting a duel to win the right to appear on the screen; the troubling music begins simultaneously and translates the fear of fighting against the other. Therefore, the show identifies the island as dangerous, different, and separate from the French contestants and crew members; it is portrayed as Other both visually and literarily, through the host’s speech.

The myth does not exhaust in the newest season, it is even magnified through repetition. While comparing both seasons of interest, one notices that the narrative attached to the island depiction is developed and embedded in the twists and turns of this newest adventure. The island’s volcano is depicted in great detail: its fire is “sacred” and the lava would rise if contestants dare to trigger the “wrath of the God”⁴⁷ inhabiting the volcano. Moreover, their main objective is to find a talisman supposedly made of the rock of the volcano, that would help them overcome the hardship of the contests.⁴⁸ A few minutes into the episode, one contestant confirms: “the talisman’s weight scares everyone”⁴⁹ and thus corroborates this fictionalized twist: contestants, host and viewers share the legend that would haunt the island. Moreover, the talisman appears as a materialized symbol for the neo-colonial adventure: the newest season’s mission is to conquer the native object from the island. Koh-Lanta does not deconstruct, but rather polishes the fiction throughout the seasons as synchrony settles between the representation of the island and the sequence of events.

On the other hand, when the contestants are rested and replete, the camera shoots a luxuriant nature, at peace (figure 6). These soothing shots reflect on the comfort of the team who just spent a night of truce in a hotel. The peaceful chant of the fauna plays in the background and contrasts with the worrying soundtrack; and images of harmless animals contrast with Brogniart’s speech about the tiger: the tamed island is no longer wild at this particular moment. These extreme representations of the island show that it depends on the progress of the various contests, and not the opposite: in this sequence, the island’s status shifts from an enemy figure to background representation of the contestants’ cheerfulness. The myth surrounding the talisman is another simulacrum, another fiction.

Figure 6.

Figure 6.

Caramoan’s luxuriant and peaceful nature (“Koh Lanta : Le Feu sacré EP6”, part 1, 43:00:00).

This moment of peace in the narrative of the episode is the ultimate evidence that the island depiction varies from one extreme, infernal, to another: wonderful.

In both cases, the setting is unrealistic and requires a certain amount of set up. A few press articles report on the conditions of the island(s) before the shooting of new seasons. For example, Le Monde dedicated an entry⁵⁰ to the depiction of the place where Koh-Lanta was set in 2005, on l’île des Pins, in New Caledonia. The article describes the island as a highly touristic place, very high-tech, etc., and contrasts with the desertic and untouched dimension disclosed by the show. We therefore deduce that the island is cleared of all these infrastructure before the beginning of the shooting. This literary construction suggests the concept of “guilty landscape,” coined by the Dutch artist Armando. He defines a “guilty landscape” as a place that has witnessed horrors and that has been transformed. In “Watching the detectives: Inside the guilty landscapes of Inspector Morse, Baantjer and Wallander,” Stijn Reijnders takes the woods surrounding concentration camps as an example:

The natural beauty was so luxuriant that it seemed impossible that murder and torture could have taken place here. But the woods around the concentration camp had witnessed horrible war crimes, and were, according to Armando, accomplices. They constituted, in other words, a ‘guilty landscape’.⁵¹

This quotation seems applicable to Koh-Lanta, particularly to the sequences I just described. The island is depicted as if it had been restored to its original and desertic state and has indeed witnessed a series of adjustments for the show’s purpose. However, Reijnders’ article examines a detective show and perhaps the concept of “guilty landscape” applies differently when transposed into reality TV. As compared to Baantjer, a show with fictional events set in a real geographical place, the situation is reversed here: the place is simulating reality, but the neo-colonial events are real. Thus, perhaps Koh-Lanta rather performs a form of imaginary guilty landscape, referencing former island fictions and aligning with their fantasies.

Conclusion

Drawing on the concept of “illusion of reality”, I have shown that the series of paradoxes and inaccuracies inherent to the reality TV genre applies to Koh-Lanta. The decision to set the show in a different country and, more specifically, on an island triggers neo-colonial problematics and magnifies these contradictions. On the one hand, Koh-Lanta‘s islands are interchangeable, non-places, on the other, the show takes place outside the West in a so-called tropical place and illuminates the colonial capitalistic extractive tendency. Throughout seasons and episodes, implicit references to Defoe’s novel are numerous. The literary colonial myth does not exhaust and is rather reinforced: the 2023 edition of the show maintains the island in an exotic fashion. Moreover, a certain synchronicity is established between the host and the contestants’ respective speeches around the colonial trope of the talisman and the island remains the figure of Otherness that still must be conquered, over three centuries after Robinson Crusoe‘s publication. The show fully assumes its status as a modern Robinsonade, and is a tribute to the eighteenth-century novel more than a revision. It includes an additional contradiction when it lays an extra level of fiction on the island and on the participants. In the introduction, I have suggested that the confessionals would exoticize the island. Eventually, contestants paradoxically lose their agency while taking part in the fiction when they are asked to perform like characters.

Teheiura Teahui, a Franco-Polynesian participant wrote Aventurier dans l’âme,⁵² a book recounting his adventure in Koh-Lanta and gave to the show the status of hypotext, in its turn. It would be interesting to analyze the depiction of the island in his narrative, the written format echoing early colonial novels. To the same extent, Koh-Lanta inspired a diversity of productions, from games to books for children; its fandom is also very rich and produces many fanfictions, constantly flowing into the circulation of the deserted island myth.

Yet, the latest seasons of Koh-Lanta record the worst audience ratings in the history of the series; viewers have turned away from TV as the popularity of streaming platforms grows. Survivor, on the other hand, has diversified its broadcasting and the former and newer seasons have been available on Netflix since 2020. Cameron Lynn Brown notices that this broad availability of the series allows, for the fandom, to analyze and reinterpret older seasons.⁵³ This work of reinterpretation feeds the intertext between the various seasons and perpetuates this atmosphere of nostalgia around the series. Netflix’s purchase of the island fantasy supports the powerful intertext of Survivor and Koh-Lanta and the difficulty to knock the neo-colonial seductive tropes off their axis.

Author Biography

Marie Bellec is a PhD candidate in French and Francophone Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Her dissertation focuses on the mythologies attached to the North American deserts in contemporary French and Francophone fiction.