Reality television is not the end of civilization as we know it: it is civilization as we know it. It is popular culture and its most popular, soap opera come to life.

Expert as Minahan's film is, it prompts the question of what is being parodied in this instance.

The recent installation of TV sets in prisoners' cells rather than just recreation rooms ought to have alerted us . . . From now on, inmates can monitor actuality, can observe televised events – unless we turn this around and point out that, as soon as viewers switch on their sets, it is they, prisoners or otherwise, who are in the field of television, a field in which they are obviously powerless to intervene . . . Surveillance and punishment go hand in hand, Michel Foucault once wrote. In this imaginary multiplication of inmates, what other kind of punishment is there if not envy, the ultimate punishment of advertising? This new situation not only involves imprisonment in the cathode-ray tube, but also in the form, in post-individual urbanisation.
~~ Paul Virilio, The Vision Machine

Virilio has warned, that when the distance and distinctions between mental and visual images collapse, multiple, intensive, co-terminus substitutions of reality begin to war with one another:

From now on everything passes through the image. The image has priority over the thing, the object, and sometimes even the physically – present being. Just as real time, instantaneousness, has priority over space. Therefore the image is invasive and ubiquitous. Its role is not in the domain of art, the military domain or the technical domain, it is to be everywhere, to be reality . . . I believe that there is a war of images . . . And I can tell you my feelings in another way: winning today, whether it's a market or a fight, is merely not losing sight of yourself.
~~ Paul Virilio, interview Block 14, 1988

In short, virtuality destroys reality. Virilio's concern is on the collateral damage done to the "ethos" of reality, the highly vulnerable public space where individuals responsively interact. For Virilio, the interconnectivity of virtual systems is not ushering in a new day for democracy but a new order of "telepresence": high-speed interconnectivity is becoming technically and literally, a substitute for the slower-speed intersubjectivity of traditional political systems. He sees the self as a kind of virtually targeted ground-zero once voided, concentric circles of political fallout spread, leaving in the vitrified rubble all responsibility for the other that forms the prior condition for truly intersubjective ethical, "human" relationship. This forms the centre of Virilio's work.

Battle Royale directed by Kenji Fukasaku, based on Koshun Takami’s popular fiction, is a brutally simple parable of blood and redemption. Every year a class of ninth grade students is selected at random to participate in a televised death match. Despatched unknowingly to an isolated island, upon arrival, the students are given survival equipment, as well as weapons and ammunition. The aim of the game is simple: the students must battle one another to the death. There can be only one victor, and if any student tries to leave the island a bomb set in his/her neck will explode. The students are given three days within which to kill one another.

Battle Royale develops the territory of allegory rather than precisely document real-world youth violence. The teenagers of Class B are ordinary types, representing people we are or might be, and their actions in extraordinary circumstances are supposed to expose the range of human behaviour on the edge of societal chaos.

The film isn't set in the future, but an alternative present, predicated on a Japanese victory in World War II that has created a society to which the Battle Royale contest seems to make sense. The narrative establishes this context with statistics about unemployment and juvenile crime and then delivers two re-enforcing scenes, as narrator Shuya comes home to find his unemployed father has committed suicide and the soon-to-be-killed tearaway Nobu stabs an apparently sympathetic teacher Kitano in the school hallway.Like Series 7: The Contenders and Norman Jewison's Rollerball (1975) the fictional conceit concerns a violent game being at once the safety-valve for endemic violence and a violent response on the part of the government: an act of capital punishment arbitrarily decided upon and subcontracted to its victims by the state: they have to kill and terrify each other.

Over the course of the three days, the body count rises. Some children opt to commit suicide; Kiriyama (a psychopathic volunteer) obtains an automatic weapon and hunts for sport; Mitsuko a domineering female pupil becomes a serial killer, computer-literate Shinji assembles the ingredients for a bomb and tries to attack the game officials; Utsumi takes refuge in a lighthouse with a group of friends but rivalries within the group lead to a massacre.

Though monitored by the game officials, and a "sad-eyed" but brutalised "Beat" Takeshi (who plays former teacher Kitano) the youths are on their own. An especially horrorific aspect of the premise is that the point of Battle Royale is not to entertain a voyeuristic and sadistic audience, but to teach children a lesson/act as a mechanism of law enforcement.The film is about violence and the state; how the state reacts to it, and how it endorses retaliatory violence of its own.

The film could be characterised as a statement about troubled youth, but that misses the point that it is also a movie made to entertain these selfsame adolescents. Battle Royale's notoriety undoubtedly owes much to the way in which it exploits an unsettled contemporary temper. Like A Clockwork Orange and Natural Born Killers its success is much to do with timing.