Look at the Bunny by Dominic Pettman

Author:Dominic Pettman [Pettman, Dominic]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2013-03-28T16:00:00+00:00

(God forbid you fall in love with the wrong person!)

eHarmony’s rival for the role of high-tech Cupid is Match.com, who are forthright enough to state that 20% of people are simply “unmatchable” (a statement which in one fell swoop creates a modern romantic caste system). Their slogan, however, plays on a reassuring endorsement of the voyeuristic impulse: “It’s okay to look.” Indeed, Match.com pay large sums of money to a woman called Trish McDermott, who has the rather surreal job title of Vice President of Romance, and who describes online dating as “falling in love from the inside out,” since you get to know someone first, and then the test of “chemistry” comes later (in France, 2002).

Thus far I have spoken of love and lust in the same breath. For while it is often legitimate to separate these in one’s own mind, the current configuration of the lover’s discourse makes little effort to distinguish between these rather nebulous categories, fusing them within the one signifier of “desire.” For as eHarmony and Match.com will tell you, if things aren’t cooking in the bedroom, then there’s little point in exploring the other 28 dimensions of compatibility. An interesting film which explores the notion of mediated desire, specifically near-future online dating agencies, is Pierre-Paul Renders’ Thomas in Love (2000). The protagonist is an agoraphobe, who cannot leave the house, nor let anyone in, but manages to communicate with people in the outside world by videophone. In this soft-socialist, near-future utopia, Thomas (Benoît Verhaert) is signed up to a dating agency as part of his therapy, and after initial resistance (and a rather botched attempt at cybersex), learns to fall in love with a woman on the other side of the screen. The film is ultimately humanistic because it contrasts the love Thomas finds with a real, albeit troubled, woman, with the temporary sexual relief that he finds with a shape-shifting female avatar. The algorithmic behavior of the latter is no match for the emotional, unpredictable responses of Eva (Aylin Yay), and the promise they represent. The disposable digital minx must come to him, but he –Thomas –must leave his sterilized sanctuary to find true love. No question there is something very reassuring in this moral fable. But one can’t help but think an opportunity has been missed to locate what philosophers call “the human” somewhere less obvious than within a human being (or between unmediated human beings).

As the director notes in an interview included on the DVD, “By organizing for our well-being and comfort we create atrocities, like dating agencies.” Yet as I have just argued, such a view is already seeming very twentieth century, shackled with nostalgia and an inflated opinion of organic interaction. I myself am suspicious of Renders’ statement not for the same reasons as the young social networkers of today, but rather because it presumes that telephones or letters are intrinsically more “human.” (A perspective I’ve spent many years refuting, since –as Plato understood at the birth of writing,

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