The politics of youth are then centred upon the politics of spectacle. The dominant discourses on youth suggest that they are anomic types, that it is a case of them choosing to stay outside of society rather than society excluding them – "they" do not and have chosen not to fit in with prevailing norms. But this only serves to provide an easy solution/reason for so-called youth violence and works to justify the culture of surveillance-technology in which we are made to live.

In these films technology functions as an extension of violence and it is a two-way system of surveillance and counter-surveillance that often involves death. Cameras and weapons watch and kill. The camera-eye functions as an instrument of investigation and surveillance. The film text uses these instruments to observe and destroy and by extension, within the film they observe and destroy the protagonists themselves. Technology, the body and death are closely interlinked concepts in these films' narratives and a central core transparent to their imaging is violence.

In order to understand the significance of the presence of technology in these works, we need to address how the technology of surveillance and death has developed in the first place. And how and why systems of technology are bound to the body in the form of projections of repressed fears. Then we can watch these films and investigate the interface between technology and the body and examine the environments in which these violent interactions between the body and technology, as well as "within" the body are played out. Performance, display and voyeurism are the key ways of approaching these issues, as is the inclusion of the socio-political implications that are highlighted in these films.

A major component concerning reality TV addresses the way in which the body is viewed. Since the body knows it is being watched, it translates the fact of being under scrutiny into the pleasure of being watched. This is "hiding in the light". It is a double-edged response. On the one hand it is a declaration of independence of otherness and a refusal of anonymity and subordination. On the other hand it is a confirmation of the fact of powerlessness, a "celebration" of impotence. Knowing that they are living to be seen, the subject displays the body-as-visible, yet maintains a resistance in refusing to be "livisible" – the observer cannot read or decipher the body as seen.

Surveillance is something more complex than a single-system of looks. Indeed the relay of looks is a closed circuit between the camera that looks and the object's awareness of the camera's scrutiny. This awareness can manifest itself through a deliberate display of the body as a site/sight of resistance, or the body can respond by "pretending" not to know it is being surveilled. It can be in one's best interests to feign ignorance. The essential point is that whoever looks has more power than the one looked at. The one who gazes seeks both control and knowledge - to control the object observed by looking at/scrutinizing it is to gain knowledge about and therein power over the observed.

The power of the gaze has properties in common with the power of surveillance. The camera – as technological instrument – has become part of the culture of surveillance. In addition, camera technology including that used in war technology has turned the weapon into a gaze.

The camera is a technological device with death in its sights. This camera technology is the one that also operates as the cinematic mechanism. The camera operates as a supreme surveillier, bringing to the screen narratives of peoples lives that we can watch unseen. We gaze upon the screen and derive pleasure. This gaze is still a weapon. As with the camera as instrument of survelliance and war technology, it still functions as an agent of voyeurism and fetishism, only this time, more explicitly, pleasure in viewing is involved.

Five new contenders are selected by national lottery for series 7 of US television show "The Contenders". Each contestant is visited at home live on television, handed a gun and assigned a cameraman.

This film is Series 7: The Contenders, a scabrous satire on reality television in which fiction just about stays stranger than life by the gristly expedient of having its "cast" slaughter one another. The five randomly selected contestants are obliged to kill in order to secure their freedom: or in the project's scrupulously breathless parlance: "Real people . . . In real danger . . . in a fight for their lives!"

These are the stakes in this acute satire on the present TV networks favourite ratings winner, the "reality TV" game show. Writer-director Dan Minahan's feature debut is disturbingly pertinent; mix all the elements of the genre – the contestant interviews, the breathless narration and manipulative ending – and add weaponry. So the film is presented as a 90-minute summary of the seventh series of a fictionally extreme gameshow.

To finally triumph, Dawn, "The Contender's" pregnant, gun-toting reigning champion must kill four new-comers, including her terminally ill long-lost high-school sweetheart, Jeff. Such a "soapy" dilemma is the staple of reality TV Yet there are still elements that jump out at us with the emotional force of reality. When Jeff's cancer is illustrated with medical textbook diagrams, it feel such a stark anomaly that we suddenly sense Minahan himself bypassing the program's rhetoric, showing us something that the show itself can't begin to comprehend – mortality’s prosaic, unspectacular finality.

Unusually for a TV satire Series 7 doesn't devalue character. The performances – and the editing stress on taut casual reactions – makes for genuine urgency, all the more in that the hyper-nervy fragmented structure means the actors have to build their characters out of crisp, little personality-bites.