EXTREMISM: People need to understand the boundary between fulfilling their fantasies and being a danger to everyone around them.
By Isabel De La Garza, Senior Writer
Kidnapping is usually something to be avoided. Being bound, gagged, taken from familiar surroundings and kept subject to the whims of a stranger is usually something terrifying and terrible to experience. Not anymore, apparently. A Detroit-based company called Extreme Kiddnapping specializes in professional kidnapping for leisure. Customers actually pay to be kidnapped by the company’s trained “professionals.”
For 500 dollars, a person can experience a four-hour kidnapping thrill experience, or spend thousands on a deluxe abduction. According to company employee Shanel Hill, “It’s more or less a thrill entertainment of a kidnapping scenario,” and people hire the company “because they want to lose control.” The company’s founder, Alan Thick, based the company off of the 1997 film The Game in which a salaryman is referred to a company, called Company Recreation Services (CRS), by his brother who says CRS’s interesting game will change his life.
The movie involves several kidnappings and druggings of the main character, Nicholas, who does not know the game has actually begun because the company tells him his application to participate in the game was rejected. In the end, after falsely losing most of his assets as a part of the game, he nearly kills his brother, Conrad, and Christine, a CRS worker, before throwing himself off the roof of a building. He is saved by CRS after falling through a glass roof onto a giant airbag inside a ballroom with all his closest friends, including Conrad and Christine. Conrad basically explains that the game was initiated in order to get the protagonist to embrace life and Nicholas breaks down in tears before having fun at the party and asks Christine out on a date before her next assignment.
The movie is extremely unrealistic as it features a man who had absolutely no idea what was going on. It is preposterous for anyone to assume that the protagonist would go on to date a woman who had drugged and kidnapped him, not to mention completely lied about who she was, as if the previous events had never even happened. Most people would run away screaming and hate whoever subjected them to that torture, not just forgive them and become closer to them. This movie also shows the flaws of the thrill experience that Extreme Kidnapping seeks to provide: the unknown elements or, in other words, the people unaware of the hoax. Nicholas, unaware of the game, obtains a real gun and nearly shoots Christine before shooting his brother, Conrad.
This problem already surfaced when Extreme Kidnapping’s attempt to kidnap a woman, as part of a birthday celebration, was observed by bystanders, who called 911 after the woman screamed. The couple involved seemed to know the men who eventually tried to kidnap the woman. Police, however, were not informed of the goings on and really thought, like the observers, that it was an actual abduction at gunpoint. All that the event caused was potential harm to the fake abductees, the bystanders, the police and the kidnappers.
Having fun in this case is surely outweighed by the amount of harm that one could be inflicting on anyone and everyone in their surroundings. If one wishes to lose control, other extreme sports such as skydiving and bungee jumping are much better alternatives for the safety of all.