'Finding Love' on Reality TV

Today on the subway I was sitting next to K, goofing off in the way we do, even in public, and a man sitting across from us smiled and said, "I've seen you two before, and you always look so happy. What's your secret?" That gave us both pause, to which I could only brush off an answer, jokingly: "It's only been six months...and it's all a façade!" Joking aside, it made us stop and muse about serendipity, human connection and the small ways in which the universe organizes itself to confirm things that feel right (or that we just make things into signs of that rightness by the power of our own will).

These small moments of kismet come in direct opposition to a theme in summer's reality TV, which seems overrun by programs in which people attempt to 'find love' on camera. There are three in particular on this trend that I've been consuming with abject fascination and just a little guilt lately: "Bachelor in Paradise," "Finding Prince Charming," and "Married at First Sight." The first takes former "Bachelor" contestants and puts them on a beach together with enough competition to pair off that the pressure is on to find a mate. "Finding Prince Charming" takes the "Bachelor" concept and mixes it up with all-gay contestants, and "Married at First Sight" does exactly what its title indicates: matching two strangers in a legally binding marriage, at the alter, and seeing what unfolds for six weeks, after which they choose to stay together or divorce.

meet Finding Prince Charming's (mostly basic) "gay Bachelor" and his suitors

These three shows are deeply formulaic in their orchestration of connection, yet their conflicts are vastly different, even though they all involve the almost desperate striving by participants, and some sort of achievement or competition that enforces compliance with the formula. With something so variant and unpredictable as love, why do these shows win us (or me, an ever-sappy consumer of romantic stories) over with their formula? Have we come to believe that the trappings of romance, and the repetitive way its stories play out in media, are legitimate enough to be mistaken for actual connection? Are butterflies enough to go on? The contestants on these shows seem to think so, judging by how often they utter the word 'connection' as the token or proof of something promising, and legitimate.

I actually don't think it's just a matter of enjoying these stories because our hearts have been pumped full of romantic comedies. I am legitimately interested in how we 'perform' love in conjunction with our expectations for it, and reality TV is a perfect medium to explore this phenomenon. Think about it: assuming we all desire romantic human connection, what better way is there than consuming it vicariously, sped up, on TV, as it happens to 'real' people? But we must remember the artifice of the concept of reality TV love, which may or may not have any realness involved, and here's where it gets juicy. You get to see people's emotional baggage affect their behavior, their dispositions create conflict, and their expectations for the future either enhance or sabotage their search for connection (or just fame), all under the pressure of performance. Also, if you're introspective like I am, you may be able to turn the camera's lens on yourself in the process and think of how your own history would inform your performance of love on TV; would you be able to stay authentic or exaggerate yourself as you get sucked up into the 15 minutes of fame? Furthermore, how do you, yourself, perform love in your life?

If I were still well-versed in film theory I might be able to dig up some scholar's argument about the documentary film's inherent alteration of its subject, but broad strokes may suffice here: reality TV either has verisimilitude, or it doesn't at all. My question is, does the performance of love on TV, or even the audience's consumption of that performance, give it some sort of validity if there is even a smidgen of real feelings involved? The love doesn't have to be of the mind-altering, love-of-your-life caliber, but just the enacting of an inkling of chemistry, and the television's documentation of it, perhaps makes it so, because it creates a trope much like how romantic comedies encourage us to buy roses and chocolate for our loved ones. In clearer terms, the love might not last, or withstand real-world circumstances, but in showing us an example of how we could act in our pursuit of love, we end up playing the part in our own lives too -- looking for 'a connection' on OKCupid, listening to the fluttering of our stomachs on a first date, or even dramatizing a conflict "like they do on TV." It's like the Kardashians, who've achieved truly blurred lines between their TV selves and their authentic ones.

Any good story has a conflict, too, and in an attempt to spin a story out of 'reality,' reality TV love consumes conflict like wind to a fire for the sake of storytelling. Conflicts go from fabricated to authentic back to fabricated in the pursuit of a story arc; Chris Harrison arrives with a new 'date card' for the player who's just kissed someone else, or the gay bachelor conceals himself as a contestant to get 'true' first impressions of his suitors. I love this finagling of reality to produce conflict, because we watch as artifice has the potential to spur on actual conflict between actual humans. The humans may ham it up on camera, but I believe anger and jealousy are hard to fake.Yet the key difference between your own conflicts and the ones televised on these reality programs is that the camera has the power to change the performance and content of them, as the behavior triggered by the problem becomes more important than the root of it. I would say that most of us value equilibrium over conflict in our relationships, so we try to resolve issues, while reality TV contestants are perhaps emotional masochists in which they mine the circumstances for conflict, hence enhancing it.

It's so easy to get disillusioned, though, about love when we watch too many of these shows, because the formula becomes too prescriptive. The danger of reality TV is that it goes for sweeping gestures, romantic or dramatic, instead of mundane ones that have the potential to be so much more powerful. I, for one, am learning to recognize the small moments that build upon the big stuff in my relationship with K, and trying to silence that desire for broad, symbolic moments that fit so nicely into a crafted, neat story about love. The funny thing is, in recognizing a promise to love the moment for what it is, you are inherently building it into a story you tell yourselves, warts and all.

Inner Beauty in a Postfeminist Television Landscape?

Whether or not you're a fan of the show, you probably have something to say about TLC's What Not To Wear. "Oh, the makeover show?" you ask. Yes, it's the one where they transform women from 'drab' to 'fab' by throwing out their clothes and helping/forcing them to shop for a new wardrobe.

The same thing probably goes for Orange Is The New Black, Netflix's outstanding new drama. "Oh, the one about the women's prison," you say. Well, I have a lot to say about both--especially because despite a divide in genre and form (reality vs. fiction, episodic vs. serial), much of the content overlaps when it comes to women's inner beauty.

What Not To Wear aired its series finale a few weeks ago, and I'll admit, I binge-watched the entire last season leading up to this finale. I guess I found it hard to resist the temptation to watch what hosts Stacy and Clinton call 'fashion disasters' clean up their look.

But I found myself getting more and more uncomfortable with the premise of WNTW as I went along. The setup--where Stacy and Clinton surprise their contestants with intentionally embarrassing hidden camera footage of them in 'bad' outfits--seemed designed to sabotage and humiliate as much as possible so that the episodes can set up for the narrative of transformation we've come to expect from reality TV. Then, they dump the contestants' entire wardrobe in a trash can, but not before ridiculing it, sometimes before a 360-degree mirror.

(Ok, I admit, some of the outfits are pretty weird...Megumi, right, thinks this is a normal outfit and not a costume)

Finally, Stacy and Clinton take the contestant out shopping and POOF! Two days later she's a changed woman. Or is she? It depends on which context we're using to define changed.

During the finale, Clinton says, "it's really not about the clothes." And to some extent, the show does concentrate on bringing out the confidence, strength, and beauty that these women already have but aren't displaying on the outside, perhaps because some personal demons are hidden under or exacerbated by the bad clothes. My problem is that their vision of beauty is so incredibly narrow. I can't count the number of times the hosts have dressed their 'fashion victims' in the same iteration of jeans, blouse and blazer or flower print dress. Yes, they teach the women to dress for their body type, but does everyone have to dress in some combination of Stacy's trademark "color, pattern, texture and shine"?

More irritating still is the proclamation of transformation and success that the clothes will bring (and they often do). It seems that by adhering to a certain standard of femininity and fashion, these 'remade' women will better navigate their careers and personal lives. Whether this change happens because of a legitimately rediscovered confidence or rather just an easier time conforming to class indicators through clothing (and hair and makeup), who knows, but I'm inclined to say the latter. Maybe I'm just bitter because I hate the pressure of looking 'just right' or having a 'personal style' - why can't my personal style be comfy sweaters and no makeup? I mean, it can be, but maybe not if I want to get ahead in the urban, media-saturated landscape where I live my life.

Rosalind Gill, feminist critic, points out how the fascination with women's bodies in our current postfeminist media culture makes the body into our singular identifier:

"In today's media, possession of a 'sexy body' is presented as women's key (if not sole) source of identity. The body is presented simultaneously as women's source of power and as always unruly, requiring constant monitoring, surveillance, discipline and remodeling (and consumer spending) in order to conform to ever-narrower judgments of female attractiveness." (1)  

Agreed! So, where does television go from here?

The remedy could be something like Orange Is The New Black (yes, I also binge-watched), which takes the same narrative of transformation/facing demons and puts it in a humanistic and complicated light. I'm not saying OITNB doesn't have its own problems of representation (especially queer, class, and racial ones), but it's a start, because the show exists in a woman's space, mostly devoid of the male gaze (with the exception, of course, of 'Pornstache'). The women come in all sizes and colors in their mono-color jumpsuits, so we get to know them through their personalities and actions, not what they're wearing. If there ever were a show about real female inner beauty, this one's it in my opinion. Talk about Sophia - what a gorgeous character, whereas Pennsatucky is portrayed as an ugly person from the inside-->out.

So, what I'm saying is this: I think this narrative of transformation happens in both shows, but in directly opposite manners. The 'way out' to a better place in WNTW is through exterior fashion, but in OITNB on other hand, it's through self-investigation while the inmates endure their sentences, biding their time on good behavior. Depending on how you look at it, both are uplifting stories, but OITNB is just more realistic, in my opinion, because accepting yourself from the inside is much more complex, difficult and ultimately rewarding than just slapping on some new clothes to feel beautiful.


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1. Quoted in Rosalind Gill, "Postfeminist media culture : Elements of a sensibility," European Journal of Cultural Studies 2007 10: 147.

Melodrama and Performance in The Real L Word

You may remember my admission to a guilty pleasure a while back. Well, today's the day to indulge my newest fascination with trash television: The Real L Word.

To escape some temporary melodrama of my own (involving a suspicious mole on my ear), I started watching Showtime's very melodramatic reality series about a group of lesbian women in Los Angeles. As the title betrays, the show is the 'real-life' version of the fictional precursor The L Word. The girls are both more butch and more glam, if that's possible, than in the fiction, and the drama feels concocted and underwhelming like another namesake, MTV's notoriously bad The Real World. 

Reality drama. For some reason those two words sound oxymoronic when placed next to one another. This got me thinking about how The Real L Word creates its melodrama, because it pulls its stories from people's everyday lives. Just because the show is about lesbians doesn't necessarily mean their lives are inherently more interesting or dramatic, and of course there are those who will argue that a show like this normalizes and banalizes the queer community by focusing on a particularly femme  subset.  But in general, doesn't real life tend not to have nicely composed story arcs and narrative progression? Judging by that deduction, I'd say that reality television must capitalize on and then mold the events of these people's lives into a narrative.

Film theorist Jane Feuer writes that the key to melodrama in television, which we see most heavily in soap operas, is excess: "The concept of melodrama [is that of] creating an excess, whether that excess be defined as a split between the level of narrative and that of mise-en-scene or as a form of 'hysteria.'" In other words, melodramas exaggerate emotions, enhance climaxes, and are generally a bit excessive. 

So how does The Real L Word create melodrama out of a steady yet narratively weak stream of events?

First of all, I think the show's producers did a very good job casting people who know how to perform for the camera. Romi may indeed be a very emotional person, but she also knows how to play it up. Whitney, the most enigmatic and fascinating to watch, always has a rotation of girls in and out of her bed and head, but I wonder how much of the draw is well-oiled star behavior. These girls know how to ham it up for reality tv.

Secondly, the editing of the show is actually quite crafty for a seemingly trashy reality show (props to Showtime), because it pulls topics into episodes while still maintaining a serialized pull across episodes and seasons. For example, the first season starts each episode with a Q&A of the characters on certain 'lesbian' topics: coming out, femme vs. butch, Dinah Shore, etc. These topics then dictate the loose narrative structure of what we see for that hour, while still incorporating the larger story lines about relationships that form the center of the drama. We wait for the topic to pop up, i.e., who will be coming out on this episode? as a sort of MacGuffin that gives way to bigger themes like trust, betrayal, loyalty, cheating, and so on.  This overarching structure gives the editors the ability to play up the emotional climaxes so needed in a melodrama.

Lastly, music is everywhere. Mostly contemporary, sometimes queer, artists provide the soundtrack, which is tweaked and matched to every little emotion in there. Again, performance and editing go hand in hand when it comes to the music, so that even if we didn't feel own own, direct emotion coming mirroring a scene, the music underscores this emotion and makes us feel it.

I'm not necessarily recommending that you watch this show, but perhaps you can appreciate the way it is crafted to a particular end...

Feminist Guilty Pleasure: The Bachelor

Yes, I am ridiculous. I watch The Bachelor. I carve out a ghastly two hours a week when this show airs, even when exams and a thesis loom.

If you're unfamiliar with it, this reality television show features a hunky, toned-like-a-Ken-doll suitor going through the motions of dating 25 girls in hopes of finding a wife. NB: use the term "wife" loosely. Over 8 weeks (!) he is expected to propose to a fiancée by going on "group dates" and "one-on-one" dates all over the world in clichéd romantic destinations, and at the end of each episode he eliminates one whimpering girl at a "rose ceremony." The premise promises just as many cat fights as woozy romantic hyperboles, and the finale televises the ultimate choice between the two girls left standing. Can the man uphold his end of the bargain and choose one woman to be his (neverlasting) one and only? Which woman will convince herself she loves a man so much after two months that she'll say yes? Their engagement usually lasts just about as long as their 15 minutes of fame. Oh, and there's also The Bachelorette, the same idea but with 25 men and one woman.

Yet, although the show is steeped in inventive/insane delusions and producer-driven artifice--who can say "I love you" first? who has a boyfriend back home?--I watch the show because I am fascinated by the heteronormative gender roles it pronounces. Man: muscled, provider, family man, tough with a heart of gold. Woman: dolled up, husband hungry, destined for motherhood, emotional. Only recently (after about 10 years and over 20 seasons) have we begun to see any semblance of non-traditional paths, like--gasp!--unmarried single moms. In an era of groundbreaking television shows like Girls, The Mindy Project, and New Girl, which explore how varied (and also difficult) current young women's lives are, The Bachelor is stuck in a reality-tv deadzone that keeps gender in a box.

I don't know what it is that creates this changelessness on The Bachelor, but I've ventured some guesses:

• The producers actively cast naive women in their mid-twenties who were weaned on romantic comedies 
• Alcohol, cameras, and the promise of fame combine to lead the women to invent dramatic personalities that are an act 
• The producers peg the women against each other while making it seem like the Bachelor is perfect 
• Tricky editing makes us believe things happened as they didn't 
• Getting wined and dined on the world's most expensive dates will bring anyone to domestic dreamland just for a second 

Maybe I'm the one being naive for searching for some lingering truth in this "reality" show, but I do think there is something toxic but also telling about combining love and competition. It's a basic power struggle magnified twenty-five fold. The bachelor/ette holds the power over the 25 contestants, who jump through hoops to win affections. The girls bond/backstab, the men wrestle/worship, and it all plays out like mating or courtship behavior. You could call the gender performance here instinct or socialization (I prefer the latter), but there is definitely a ritualization of traditional gender roles that all the parties involved repeat. 

Finally, the show magnifies the great fears a lot of single people face: that we'll never fall in love, and that we'll be rejected. In this case, that can happen instantaneously, in a very public way. So, as a result, it's desperation mode. People go on this show searching for attention and hopeless love. I think the contestants who choose to air their dirty laundry on TV (both men and women) have an especially strong exhibitionist side, but then again, we're all on Facebook. 

So, mock me all you want, but the feminist in me isn't ashamed to admit that I am fascinated by this show.