On Modern Love and Hyper-Revelation: The Bachelor and The Bachelorette

Abstract: I provide a brief critique of the image of “love” that is at the heart of some of the dominant forms of contemporary and popular media, especially as it has manifested in the hit shows The Bachelor and The Bachelorette.

A certain Heideggerian problem of concealment/unconcealment is ironically foregrounded today by the shows “The Bachelor” and “The Bachelorette.” Amidst the pageantry of absurdity, one of the aspects I find particularly silly is the speed at which some of the contestants announce their love—genuine or not—to the given season’s main attraction, some doing so the night of their first introduction (claiming that they had watched the season’s bachelor/bachelorette on a previous season and had fallen in love via media consumption). But in a culture where NY Times articles are titled things like “Quiz: The 36 Questions That Lead to Love” (Daniel Jones, Jan. 9th, 2015; updated Feb. 13th, 2015), where match.com surveys promise algorithmic compatibility—is this so odd? I would say that it is rather a symptom of a great push today toward hyper-revelation/hyper-revealing; that part of the aggressive speed of the modern age[1] comes an impatience towards the organic processes of romance and relations as well.  This will to hyper-reveal has the air of neoliberalized “big information,” as though so many facts might take the place of experiencing how a prospective partner acts across a range of hospitable and challenging circumstances/events/situations. This is to say: there is a split from the traditional focus on “getting to know someone” to the modern valence/evolution that seeks to get to know someone as quickly and effortlessly as possible—usually by privileging information over experience, an abstract “feeling”[2] over more rational reflection. But is depth of judgment possible among this systemic culture of hyper-revelations? Or: what form of judgment is engendered by this will to unconceal as quickly as possible? Here, further considerations need to apply to the relation between judgment and temporality.[3]

Some further thoughts on the bachelor follow: the role of “the twins” on season 20/Bachelor in Paradise, for instance, illustrate the nature of drama as a type of circulating economic currency, a resource that’s production/extraction requires a delicate and judicious balance of instruments/roles/identities, a performance that be directed but never fully controlled, analogous to embankments and tidal flows. To the point: it seems to me that in order for the type of petty drama the producers want to emerge to actually do so, four distinct characters/character types need to intermingle[4]: 1. The actual drama makers—the Chads, Lias, Olivias, Evans; 2. The drama catalysts—a more subtle and unique office, held by such figures as the twins, whose reputational capacity seems ultimately more stigmatizing than anything else—those who fan the flame, who promote the flow of information-misinformation; who would always rather watch fireworks than the tranquil black; 3. Those who, by dint of their inaction or their active peacemaking, come across as looking far better by means of the drama: Sarah on Bachelor in Paradise or Lauren B. on season 20—these figures either reasonably confront the drama, are the unreasonable victims of perpetration, or refuse to engage the drama entirely, and thus still manage to draw commentary/criticism of it from a distance, explicitly or implicitly; finally, there are 4. Those who, in an often overlooked but vital group, are incidental to the drama and who neither benefit nor incur damage from it: the neutral audience, those destined as “rose-fodder,” never quite in the orbit of the right kind of drama, never quite near the center[5]—and, therefore, totally expendable. One need not push the theoretical envelop very far to see the relevant political translations of each of these categories.

All of this points to a type of latent conservatism that lies dormant in the Bachelor’s structure: the management of this economy is really a management of human suffering. Suffering is perhaps the greatest resource of the show: it is by and through suffering that the “truth” (e.g. “true love”) is unconcealed—suffering is sold as a means to self-realization and happiness, a manner by which love is won and maturity gained. Sexuality is prorogued until the panultimate moment—the intimacy of which is undermined by the multiplicity of encounters and the constant surveillance, both on the level of the audience and the level of the other spying contestants. The show’s self-policing is supplemented by the rampant use of confession, soliloquy and judgmental/reflective asides.[6] Alain de Botton is relevant here, pointing to the movement from contractual love, which dominated up through the 19th century, to “feeling-love”, which has been the great theme of the liberating 20th/21st centuries. A further aspect of the show’s Catholicism is revealed in its creation of a universal, supra-natural realm that is untethered from the real world: the creation of an ever-Eden, a paradise beyond the real world that is full of lush jungles, white-sand beaches, white-peaked mountains and emerald, flower-strewn valleys. The contestants are shuttled from Indonesia to Jamaica—but what is the difference, beyond a minor adjustment to the perfect backdrop? Are there engagements with the local populations, scenes of poverty and coerced, dominated colonial populations? What must be paved over, ignored—that this Eden-on-Earth might be grounded on the thematic of love? Again, the political import of the show’s general market-terraforming is here made palpable.

[1] Paul Virilio and Hartmut Rosa. Nick Land on accelerationism.

[2] See Alain de Botton on modern love/marriage; Seth Mnookin.

[3] Paul Ricoeur’s work on narrative and time provides a strong theoretical model here. See, further, the type of strategic perception, which is characterized at core as time-management, addressed by such works as Richard Neustadt’s Thinking in Time.

[4] I am reminded here of Alex Woloch’s work on the role and use of minor characters. See The One vs. the Many.

[5] See Clifford Geertz and Edward Shils.

[6] Foucault.