On Modern Love: The Bachelor, Season 21

Abstract: I analyze the popular show The Bachelor (season 21 starring Nick Viall, which aired between January 2nd and March 17th, 2017, for a total of 13 episodes on ABC). I parse out some of The Bachelor’s more striking paradoxes, offer some explanation for those paradoxes in terms of the greater struggle between secularism and Christianity in modern American life, and therefore find in The Bachelor a Claude-glass of our current collective psyche.

1.      On The Creation of a Eden-on-Earth and the Mission of Love

The second-to-last episode of The Bachelor (S.21, E.6) contained a scene so literary it could have been stripped from a Josef Conrad novella. Nick’s exploration of St. Thomas led him on a couples date with Whitney and Danielle O, set for a secluded beachhead on the island’s coast. As the three approached the beachhead via helicopter, a birds-eye shot of their destination revealed a curated, trellised coach set neatly upon the sand. The beach was otherwise empty, providing the perfect romantic setting for Nick to ultimately dump both contestants.

Now, this scene may not sound like much—it involved none of the drama of the rest of the show, if only because it involved none of the rest of the contestants. But there it was: a beautifully decorated set of pillows on a virgin Caribbean beach, the azure water and pristine jungle providing ample palette for this paradise-on-Earth. Here, I choose the term “paradise-on-Earth” very specifically—not only because of the frequency of its use on the show itself, and not only because this scene offered a particularly aesthetic backdrop. Rather, this simple scene disclosed much about the show’s ongoing cultural relevance, especially in terms of its attempt to actualize a real-world romantic “paradise.” What I think this endeavor illustrates is the deep religious influence of the show, taken as a lineage of Christian ideology that subtlety determines and dominates many of the shows themes and encounters. Or: The Bachelor might be the best example in American popular culture where the forces of modern secularism (and the progressive politics of the left) openly confront the forces of a waning Christian theology (and the conservative politics of the neo-right).

The contest between the show’s secularism and latent Catholicism is revealed most in its creation of a universal, supra-natural realm that is untethered from the real world, in the show’s effort to erect a perpetual Eden, a paradise replete with evergreen jungles, white-sand beaches, white-peaked mountains and flower-strewn valleys. The contestants are shuttled from Indonesia to Jamaica, from Montana to St. Thomas, by way of every form of luxurious transport, and experience these frontiers by way of every form of luxurious date. But the show’s engagement with these locals is disappointedly limited, recalling the soft-colonialism of the Jesuits, or the early discourse of “American Universalism” that spearheaded turn-of-the-century imperial efforts viz. the annexation of the Philippines.

The project here is one of an implicit culture colonialism: a curated Western coach on a virgin St. Thomas beach has the air of the “civilizing” colonial programs of the 19th century. But instead of armaments and diseases, the Westerner brings with him the promise of an aestheticized “love” untethered from the burdens of reality: the “civilizing” projects of the 19th and 20th centuries has here been replaced by an attempt of colonial nations to turn their post-colonial allies into projections of their own unrealized cultural fantasies. What is in reality a complex people and nation is reduced to paradisiacal beaches that serve as “vacation” nodes in the Western imagination. If we have failed to bring heaven down to earth amidst the sprawling urban developments of fully-industrialized cityscapes, then perhaps we can offload this Eden-making unto the still-“virgin” tapestry of crystal beaches—the bachelor is not only the promise of a supra-natural realm above our own, but the possibility of that realm actually manifesting someplace, somewhere—just not here.

These scene-changes are thus reduced to a common register and lose their capacity to operate as unique, worldly destinations: they are divested of any of the inimitable cultural arrangements of diverse populations that could offer challenges to the worldviews of both contestants and viewers, and are wiped-clean of their blemished colonial histories and current global anxieties. Here is the myth of a worldy tabula rasa—one that is general enough to flatten all real distinctions, but one that is particular enough to augment the aesthetic differences of any given locale. When Nick moves the women from LA to St. Thomas, the shift feels little more than a minor adjustment to a “perfect,” all-but contiguous backdrop. To this end, the show’s engagement with the outer world has the nature of a crusade to it: what must be paved over, what histories and sufferings ignored—such that this Eden-on-Earth might be grounded on the thematic of “love”?

The blandness of this ever-paradise illustrates the show’s primary function: how best to realize a late conservative fantasy of “love” draped in contemporary sexual politics—and without the burdens of scarce resources. It does not need to be said that many of the dates Nick goes on would require a sizeable monetary investment to replicate outside the financial resources of the show; not only are these dates therefore well beyond the realm of obtainability for the “average” viewer, but it is precisely this unobtainability that determines their value within the show’s general aesthetic. Everything is unreal—that is, nothing is subject to the traditional limitations of human relationships. It is this unreality that also sets the stage for the central paradox that burden’s the women viz. Nick’s expectations and confused standards: there is an admitted sexual progressivism to the show—Nick’s encounters with Corrinne’s open use of her own body/sexuality is perhaps the series’ “raunchiest” display yet of this form of “promiscuity.” The women are constantly put in situations where bikinis or miniskirts or otherwise revealing attire is not only permitted but encouraged. But just as the show’s display of sexuality seems to take on a tone of liberation, the judgments from other contestants—and the generous use of FCC-inspired blurring (of butt cheeks especially)—undermine any true claim to sexual manumission. The body is something to be flaunted—but then subject to the judgments of one’s peers, the scrutiny of a moralistic public standard, and the rules of the show itself, which permit sexual encounters between contestants on the basis that it is reserved for the “fantasy suite” introduced in the final episodes. Of course, this intimate moment is undermined by the multiplicity of open sexual encounters that preceded and parallel it—but the focus on monogamy as the central objective seems just enough conservatism to counterbalance and therefore permit the reality of pre-marital sex. Instead of adults freely exploring their sexuality, the show creates formalized pockets of intimacy where sexuality is permitted, and otherwise manages a vexed relation to its display of the female form through awkward situations where sexual expectations are never clearly delineated.

Part of the show’s creation of this Eden-as-fantasy is an associated deification ascribed to the women. In the season’s pilot, Nick is explicit in his desire to “empower” the women through their experience on the show. How this empowerment is exactly levied is a little confusing, but there is an underlying tone of female “worship” that seems to lock the women into a status of “beautiful object” rather than a living, corporeal human. Nick’s deification of the women is ultimately their reification: while the women function as objects of Nick’s confused egoistic fantasy, the entire pageant is underwritten by a myth of the “individual-hero”: from the aggregate of aestheticized objects, a single, worthy soul will emerge—but emerge as a trophy rather than a person. Of course, this air of worship is a two-way street: much of the show’s functioning operates on the assumption that the women absolutely adore Nick and will do virtually anything to win his affection. As Nick “worships” the women, so too do they “worship” him, and in the place of profane, “real” human encounters, we see only the interactions of sacred religious icons devoid of recognizable human traits and reduced to mere caricatures of themselves—what we might deem the “Helen effect”.

Another aspect to note is how the supra-natural creation of this false paradise involves the formalization of ritual. In place of the contingent schedules of lived experience, everything in the show is accounted for, planned out, pre-purchased—there is the ritual of the rose-ceremony, the ritual of the cocktail party, the ritual of getting ready for the group date, the ritual of…and the list goes on. The rose-ceremony is of particular note, as it marries this theological concentration on ritual with the deification of the women I noted just above: somewhere between the viewing room in a brothel/Harem and the fetish of a slave auction, the women are asked to “stand totally prostrate” before the gazes of Nick and Chris Harrison. Powerless, full of anxiety, objects only to be scrutinized, contestants are asked to wait for totalizing judgment, as Milton might wait for God—the point of anguish being drawn out as long and theatrically as possible. The rose-ceremony has the irony of both reducing and anointing the pride of the standing contestant: reducing their pride to the status of mere aesthetic object, and anointing their pride through the conferral of a rose (and here, the image of the rose is among the most immediate ornaments drawn directly from the aesthetic reservoirs of religion) and the implied message that they are one step closer to being “the one” and winning eternal salvation. For the losers, the rose-ceremony amounts to little more than ritualized, sublimated snuff.

The blatant manufacturing of drama in the context of the rose-ceremony is, admittedly, the show’s spectacalization of human relations at its worst. And by “worst,” I mean it is the closest the show comes to prostituting pure emotional gore. But what this importantly discloses is the direct strategizing of the show’s producers around the emotional manipulation of the contestants and the viewing audience. The Bachelor is not a world that focuses on reasoned, clear, equal conversation among mutually-respecting interlocutors committed to finding consensus/growing as individuals, but a world that has sacrificed these Enlightenment virtues in the service of an unabashed pursuit of romance/romanticism, focusing exclusively on feeling and emoting over thinking and evaluating. Just as the contestants can never be too critical of Nick, the viewers can never be too critical of the show itself, lest the house of cards would tumble down: there is a certain degree of “unthinking” that permeates the show’s expectations and acts as the grounds upon which the show is best met as a form of entertainment.

Finally, the way egalitarianism exists within the show’s erected paradise is worth some consideration. Not only does the general equality of exotic locales eliminate their capacity to exist as unique world-sites, but this equality-as-erasure also afflicts the contestants as well, particularly in the manner of their dress at any given time. Beneath Nick, all contestants begin supposedly equal; but this equality is made odd by the obvious attempts to mobilize and synchronize the women at different times. So, while the individual characteristics of the women emerge through experiences and engagements with Nick, this is in despite of, rather than as a result of, the contexts the contestants are asked to move in.

On the one hand, the clothing standards of any date/activity are broad enough to give the impression of individual taste/variation—but upon even superficial scrutiny reveal a narrow channeling of bodies into an aesthetic collective by way of erasing their unique agencies. This loss of agency is further embedded in the processes of ritual: the women wear different dresses to the rose-ceremony, yes, but they all wear dresses; the women wear different combinations of white linen shirts and cropped blue-jean shorts during the beach excursions, yes, but they all wear combinations of white linen shirts and cropped blue-jean shorts. The objectification of the women is thus further entrenched by the superficial heterogeneity of their unique “tastes”: they become, standing at the rose ceremony, a survey of potential trophies, while during the beach excursions they are always filmed running excitedly toward Nick—a bizarre trafficking of human bodies that robs each of the opportunity to approach or navigate any given situation on their own terms. We see less a collection of unique individuals and more a “moveable feast” of aesthetic metaphors, a true “herd” of human bodies that move in uncommon conformity.

Still, having been robbed of the basic conditions to explore their own agencies, all is not lost for contestants. Ultimately, the exoticized, eroticized Eden operates as a salve for the defeated and a trampoline for the elect: all the glitz and glamour is a conciliation to the losing caste, as the winner walks away one step closer to an eternity of “true love” while the loser can declare: “Even though I didn’t win, at least I plundered a little…” The vacation over, either by way of the black SUV out of paradise or election to a new round, contestants move to the next destination, eager evangelists of love proselytizing a new religion to a world in need of reformation. This arbitrary “whittling down” is furnished in a quasi-religious tone: “you need to separate the chaff from the wheat” hangs in the background, and sacrifices much to the twin demigods, Tears and Kleenex.

2.      On Redemption and Martyrdom

The current season of The Bachelor has gone to great lengths to paint Nick’s failure to “find love” in the show’s past as the basis for his redemption, rather than a challenge to the show’s claim to potential success. The narrative this season focuses on convincing America that love can be found even after it has been denied in the past: Nick is fallen, and, through love, will be redeemed. The process of this redemption, however, also points to how the management of the show’s narrative is really a management of not just points of drama, but forms of human suffering. Suffering is perhaps the greatest resource the show has purchase over: it is by and through suffering that the “truth” (e.g. “true love”) is unconcealed—suffering, diffused through the thousand points of drama that constitute the show’s trajectory, is implicitly cast as a means to self-realization and happiness, a means by which love is won and maturity gained. This suffering is not just Nick’s, but of course the women’s as well: the show allocates and distributes Nick’s time and affection as it would any other resource, creating a psychic economy of constant instability and scarcity where any form of nourishment—a private minute with Nick on a group date, the opportunity to go on a one-on-one date—comes as disproportionate, overwhelming relief. The contestants thus exhibit pathologies of need and neuroses of hunger precisely because they have literally been starved of certain resources they have otherwise been promised. But, while many tears are shed along the way, while some 25+ women have to be told they are not “the one,” it is all “worth it” in the end—so long as the diamond ring is given, accepted, and the finale closes with a shot to the hopeful horizon.

If anything, then, Nick’s metamorphosis from the dejected of love to love’s renewed icon constitutes Nick’s self-imposed martyrdom: he suffers for his own sins and moves toward redemption, yes, but more importantly, he seems to suffer for our sins as well. Hence the show’s repeated instantiation of “#BachelorNation” and the sense that Nick is working to prove something not only to us, but for us. There is an ethic of charity nestled in this condition of Nick’s martyrdom: in shouldering the collective “love sins” of a nation and laboring to absolve himself, he in turn absolves a culture. All that he does—all the pain, the second-guessing, the confusion that breaks into ultimate transcendence—all of this, we are told, is really done on behalf of an audience that has itself lost faith in love. The audience is implicitly the “unloven,” the “marginalized of love,” the forlorn and unreciprocated—the type of forgotten souls that are the object of Christ’s campaigns among the poor. Nick’s relation to Chris Harrison underscores this even further: Nick is to Chris what a searching son is to a watchful father. In this sense, the dutiful, prodigal, interchangeable, martyred son holds the position of several religious offices, depending on what the all-father, the god-head-puppet-master that sits behind it all pulling the strings, deploying his own deus ex machinae and feigning ignorance, demands at a given moment.

And as for the Holy Ghost? The Bachelor is a world thoroughly haunted by the specters of previous relationships and, for some of the contestants, by the past more generally. So much attention has been paid to Nick’s anterior failures that one feels this entire season to by a sort-of self-elected exorcism, the renunciation of former demons and the submission to a novel baptism-through-love. But this baptism is itself haunted by the possibility of failure and by an associated artificial guilt: Nick is careful to play up the tears after cutting certain contestants, helping the audience to sympathize with his character at times when he might otherwise seem harsh or cold. The guilt that supposedly haunts Nick’s decision is black-mirrored by the guilt that surrounds the consumption of The Bachelor writ large: that the show is often referred to as a “guilty pleasure” is an innocuous, if not telling, reflection of the type of guilt that circulates within the show. It should be noted that, much like the ecclesiastical doctra its empties and imbibes, the show permanently prorogues the absolution of this guilt.

3.      On Confessions and Concealment

One of the show’s clearest appropriations of Christian practice comes by way of the “confessional” and the presence of inter-contestant judgment facilitated by contexts of surveillance. We see the confessional structure of the show play out in two principle ways: firstly, in the cuts to private interviews with contestants in the midst of action, with “real-time” reflections on what’s currently occurring interspliced with edited footage, such that contestants become their own voiceovers (this is less unique to The Bachelor and has become a staple of the reality TV genre). The second manner is more subtle, but by that token also more pervasive: that is, the ever-persistent externalization of information, the requirement of contestants to constantly be opening windows into their thought processes (however obvious and/or superficial) and disclosing their emotional states through verbal confirmation.

This need to externalize oneself, in turn, might be broken down further as a problem of the speed by which some of the contestants announce their love—genuine or not—to the given season’s main attraction, some even doing so the night of their first introduction. 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, we see here The Bachelor participating in a cultural conversation that it hardly began: there seems today to be a great push toward what I would call “hyper-revelation/hyper-revealing.” With the aggressive speed of modern transactions and interactions 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 dumping so many facts might take the place of experiencing how a prospective partner acts across a range of hospitable and challenging events and situations. This is only to say: The Bachelor represents a split from the traditional focus on “getting to know someone” to a focus on getting to know someone as quickly and effortlessly as possible—usually by privileging information over experience, an abstract and infatuated “feeling” over more rational reflection or consideration over time.

This will-to-disclose, which asks of each contestant to bear their souls entirely, to hide nothing, is matched only by the concealment made possible by the show’s structure. Since the producers have a totally closed, fully-determined universe to play with, they may choose which narratives to highlight and which to essentially erase before the show is ever aired. As a consequence, crucial moments—measured, at times, in hours and days—go by totally unseen, with what might have been a more balanced window into a contestant’s psyche often losing to a scene of overemphasized drama. Much like Eric Auerbach once argued in reference to the structure of the Bible, an incredible amount of the show’s action happens “behind the scenes,” the drama only the “tip of the iceberg” to a deep human underworld of more reasonable exchanges and less dramatic self-questioning. This also helps to understand the role of Chris Harrison’s status as “God” in this closed-universe: because there is no moment of “live” TV, the show is a self-referential system thoroughly punctuated by a type of determinism. Not only have the contestants themselves been selected under specific guidelines, but their interactions are far more corralled and outright determined than is otherwise let on—and this is nothing to say of the judicious editing that bookends this control over the show’s internal action.

The Bachelor, therefore, is deterministic on two levels: firstly, by vaguely hinting toward a Calvinistic sense of predestination—as though the love that emerges was always meant to be, but had to be fought for, found, etc. This sense of “destiny” has the effect of turning the endgame of the show into a moment of jubilation for the winning contestant and a moment of utter apocalypse for the losing party, the elect being accordingly conscripted into heaven or hell. Secondly, The Bachelor’s determinism also unfolds at the level of what the audience is permitted to witness in terms of that controlled experience. Or: control penetrates every level of the show, and I imagine that a great deal of the producer/editor’s efforts lie in manufacturing the show’s false organicism, where everything feels “natural” and a result of the contingencies that arise from the random interactions among contestants.

The way this “natural drama” is manufactured is worth further note: certain spaces need to be filled by certain personality types in order for the drama to hang in equilibrium—one can only imagine what the audition process/personal questionnaire is like for The Bachelor’s potential contestants. The role of “the twins” on Ben’s season 20/Bachelor in Paradise, for instance, illustrate the nature of drama as a type of circulating economic currency, a resource whose production and extraction requires a delicate management of role-identities, a command over performances that may be directed but never fully controlled, analogous to setting up embankments and tidal flows against a barreling river.

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 character-types need to intermingle. First are the actual drama makers—the Lias and Olivias of Ben’s season, the Corinnes and Jasmines of Nick’s. The second group, no less important, are 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 and misinformation alike, who would always rather watch fireworks than the tranquil black. Thirdly, there are those who, by dint of their inaction or their active peacemaking, come across as looking far better as a result of the drama: Sarah on Bachelor in Paradise, Lauren B. on season 20 or Vanessa on season 21 are all exemplars of this category. These figures either reasonably confront the drama, are the unreasonable victims of transgression, 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 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 of things and, therefore, totally expendable.

In many ways, the drama of The Bachelor is dependent on how often these four basic character-types engage one another. What emerges is a competition of a specific genus: not only are the contestants expected to make an effort to win, but this effort has to comport to certain functional and moral requirements. Since the women are each other’s only confidants, each contestant is both set to be a friendly neighbor and a potential enemy. There is a bizarre irony in the way some contestants talk about their desire for Nick to other contestants: it is as though they must, just to maintain decorum, pretend that The Bachelor does not ultimately play out as a zero-sum game. More importantly, the show’s secondary focus on friendship among contestants relates all the drama to a basic moral base. Recalling theories of the “moral economy” expressed by St. Aquinas and dominating the Church-state relations of the Western Medieval period, the show represents an arena of open competition—but competition conducted within certain ethical boundaries and under the jurisdiction of uncodified, self-regulating rules of conduct. Often, the contestants don’t break any explicit or formal rule of the show, but incur drama simply by inviting the ire and judgment of their neighbors through their strategies viz. grabbing and maintaining Nick’s attention. While a contestant is thus still expected to try and “win,” “winning” often correlates to the less obnoxious contestants who eschew lying and manipulation in favor of more tempered and graceful interactions. It is genuinely surprising to find a contestant, each and every season, who is convinced she will win the heart of Mr. Eligible simply by pursuing him with a relentless aggressiveness. This strategy, which categorically fails, works out less because of any judgment of the bachelor himself, and more as a result of the ethical constraints imposed by this implicit moral economy.

This moral economy is further predicated on the pervasiveness of surveillance: eyes and cameras are everywhere, turning every conceivable form of privacy into an opportunity for publicity. It is this surveillance-function that recalls the Puritanism of the early Massachusetts Bay Colony—each contestant becomes both a node of judgment and a carrier of the show’s unwritten laws. This surveillance is further performed at the level of viewing audience: just as contestants self-police one another, the entire show is buttressed by the “self-policing” of the economics of American television networks, viewer ratings and commercial sponsors.

In short, the hyper-communication of the contestant’s confessional, the rampant use of on-screen but off-action soliloquy, is undermined by the hyper-editing of the show’s structure and the hollowed function of surveillance: we are fooled into a sense of total disclosure, when in fact the most vital experiences are edited, censored, or cut entirely.

4.      On The Myth of Love

Like the myth of religion on the world stage, which has slowly given way to a growing modern secularism, the myth of the show cannot help but come to undermine and undo itself. What I mean is that there is simply too great of a divergence between the “myth” the show sets up as a harbinger of love and the reality it actually produces—the same type of rejection and refoundation of reality accomplished in the mind of a devout parishioner. One need only point to the “success rate” of the show as a whole: of the 20 previous seasons, 12 men have proposed on-air, with only 2 couples, including Ben and Lauren of season 20, still together, producing a success rate of 10% (interestingly, this number is significantly less than The Bachelorrete’s success rate of 42%, with 5 out of 12 potential couples still together).[1]  Current estimates place the American divorce rate somewhere between 40-50%; if we assume, based on this, that 50% of couples therefore make it, a potential bachelor applying to the show ought to recognize that, when compared to a non-bachelor contestant, they cut their chances of building a successful marriage by 80% by participating. For a show that claims to depict the “reality” of successful matchmaking, it depicts neither reality, nor successful matchmaking. To this end, the pursuit of ulterior incentives comes to the fore as a legitimate question regarding motivations to join the show’s caste—if only because remaining outside the show actually portends a much higher chance of finding love, and if we are to take the claims of contestants’ desire to find love seriously, then why they ended up on the show in the first place is something of a mystery.

For how long can a show that claims the opposite of what it actually is sustain itself? The Bachelor is an interesting artefact of our contemporary history, if only because it extends itself so powerfully into the family of “fake news” and finds a home so comfortably in our post-Trump political climate. Of course, The Bachelor preceded Trump by over a decade—I only mean to claim that The Bachelor discloses its most theological aspects, and its most Trumpean influences, on the front of unreality. It is a show that claims to be “real” but cannot measure itself by any standard reality produces; we are an audience that accepts this and watches on regardless. Is it any surprise that the Big Lie of the old religions and monarchies of L’Ancien Regime have given to the smaller, infinite lies of democratic politics? To this end, the contemporary phenomenon of fake news pouring out of Macedonia and The Bachelor’s popularity conspire on a shared front: both illustrate the swan song of a religious worldview losing, finally, to a secularism that has transformed reality into anything but reality, and has transferred the capacity to lie from the happy, enlightened few to the despotism of the media and the masses. What greater theme accounts more for The Bachelor’s continued success than the advent of a brave new pathology, a novel desire to create and live by myths of our own individual making? What more is The Bachelor other than a fantasy, a lie—only one made profitable, palatable, even pleasant?

[1] http://risenews.net/2016/09/so-how-many-of-the-bachelor-couples-are-actually-still-together/