Reality Squared: On Reality TV and Left Politics by Tom Syverson

Author:Tom Syverson [Syverson, Tom]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781789045819
Google: X_mXzQEACAAJ
Publisher: Zero Books
Published: 2021-04-15T23:27:57.063359+00:00

Chapter 6

Having it Both Ways on The Bachelor

Baudrillard’s writings on the Gulf War consider whether the concept of conflict can survive the advent of assured victory. If one side has already won, in what sense were the parties ever at war? We encounter a similar paradox of the hyperreal when watching The Bachelor. Can love really blossom if the fairy-tale ending is written in advance? Can we simulate romance too? The emotional pull of The Bachelor emerges from its excruciating struggle to generate, and thereby rescue, romantic love in the face of its formal erasure. This process replicates the fundamental problematic of romance in capitalism and patriarchy: how to find love within a system that has already rendered it impossible.

On air since 2002, The Bachelor remains one of the longest-running reality shows on television. After stagnating for a few years, at some point around 2013 the show experienced an unlikely resurgence in popularity.54 Since then, its popularity has only grown among the key 18-to-34 demographic.55 And as a piece in Vogue points out, the show is now just as popular among millennial feminists as one would expect it to be among rural Christian housewives.56

Viewed in this context, one of the first things one must notice about The Bachelor is that it shouldn’t be as popular as it is today, when pop culture is more preoccupied than ever with progressive prerogatives. Of the various forms of monoculture, The Bachelor is unquestionably one of our most conservative cultural institutions, occupying an awkward “trad” position within a context of mandatory, scalable wokeness. The Bachelor can be seen as the leading propaganda apparatus of cultural patriarchy, wherein and whereby family values reign supreme and the mythology of natural monogamy is handed down from season to season. It’s a world of matrimonial determinism, heteronormativity, and regressive gender patterns. From episode to episode, a premium is placed on Victorian standards of feminine elegance, and it’s perhaps the one place on television that chivalry isn’t dead. A private microcosm of virtue, The Bachelor is our last simulacrum of courtly love.

The show is organized by a strict moral code. They even have a name for it. In adjudicating authenticity, Bachelor Nation alludes gravely to “the Right Reasons.” On The Bachelor, the Right Reasons provide a means of moral approval and exclusion, rendering other those not beholden to its strictures. What are these Right Reasons? Mainly, it’s of crucial importance that you’re on the show for love, true love, and the right kind of love. And as in patriarchy, the only permissible love is the sort of love that results in wedding vows and babies.

If someone isn’t there for the Right Reasons, they’re cast out like a leper. The show’s fan culture rejects any possibility that someone might justifiably be in it for fame, fun, or a fling. The Bachelor is a game that’s no game at all; it’s a performed metaphor for the hallowed process of becoming loved, of fulfilling one’s romantic destiny. More concretely, it’s a cultural institution meant to honor the nuclear family as an indispensable social institution.

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