Love is Blind, Love is a Commodity
What Baudrillard's System of Objects has to say about reality tv; why love is a consumer product
In Frank R. Stockton’s short story The Lady, or the Tiger? a morally confounded king uses a game of chance to determine and enforce the fate of justice.
In medieval Europe, kings would sometimes rule by God’s judgement—known as trial by ordeal—and make an accused criminal play some ridiculous game, possibly out of their belief in God’s determination, possibly out of their devotion to the public’s entertainment. Think of the infamous so-called “swimming test” of accused witches. Think of Anton Chigurh’s personal justice system in a coin flip in No Country For Old Men, in which, if you call it correctly you get to keep the lucky coin, but if you call it wrong, he kills you. And he kills you without emotion or will, because the rule of law is encased within that perfect little coin. In The Lady, or the Tiger?, the king’s trial by ordeal is a similar coin toss: the criminal is presented with two doors. Behind one, is a beautiful woman who is fit for a wife for the accused criminal who would be proven innocent by choosing this door. Behind the other, is a gladiatorial and ravenous tiger, who will rip the man from limb to limb, because he is clearly guilty for having picked the wrong door.
The king’s daughter is in love with a boy of relative peasantry, and so the king imprisons him. As the boy awaits his fateful trial, the daughter learns of who the woman is that the young man could be married off to. She learns of which door the tiger and the woman will be placed behind. And because her fate is sealed, and she will lose her darling of this desirous rapture either way, she contemplates on what to tell the boy. Is it better to have him killed off by the tiger, or saved and married off to someone better, happy and palmy, sojourning into blurred horizons of love, without her, without needing her appeals, without thinking of her ever again?
In Netflix’s unbearably dull and insipid reality show, Love is Blind, twenty-six strangers are forced into individual pods, where they take turns in their siloed exile of solitary confinement, and they speed date, running through the rolodex of contestants in a tedious blur of real-life stakes. They never see each other. They talk, then flirt, the libidinal angst charming itself through the clumsy strata of other potential partners. Then, they pick one person they tolerate enough, and propose marriage, spending the rest of the duration of the show actually hanging out with one another, getting drunk together, meeting the other contestants they could have ended up with. They spend time living together, jockeying their way through the vicissitude of another reality television show, perhaps actually trying to make their love work, perhaps trying to commit to the show in order to keep their 15 minutes of fame lasting just a little longer. If they make it to the end, the finale is a coruscating assemblage of these rather drab and cringe weddings, with curtained backdrops and walls of fake shrubs and ivies, and crying real tears of love’s great triumph.
The latest season of six tallied 6.3 million views in the first five days of its release, a frantic orgiastic mass of people huddled in front of their larger screens, invested in the fate of these strangers. They’ll occasionally stare down at their smaller screens, maybe live-texting their friends, individually or in the group chat, talking about the pivotal moments in real time, formulating hardened opinions about certain contestants, formulating slurs to pin against them, formulating impassioned desires for their fates. You can even plug in and listen to the accompanying Love is Blind podcast, amassing the necessary gossip built like a fortress around this show.
Now, this brings us attentively, and rather unavoidably, to Baudrillard.
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